Why ‘The Great Gatsby’ Video Game Hoax Is Brilliant. Plus, Other Novels That Should Be Games

Terrible news, everyone!  No; wait.  Strike that — reverse it.  We bring you wonderful news, everyone!  Yes, for perhaps the first time ever in this column space, we have something positive to say.  For although a 3-D movie version of ‘The Great Gatsby’ may or may not be in the works (fingers crossed that it’s not), it turns out that we can still enjoy F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel in simple 2-D form, as well.  No, not by reading it in a printed book, ya idjit!  Jeez.  Printed books are so-ooooo two thousand and late.   No, we need something with that future boom boom boom; that future boom boom boom. …But y’know, in a retro sort of sense.

And so, wonderful news:  ‘The Great Gatsby’ has now been realized as a retro-style 2-D platforming video game, which, frankly, is the best motherfucking thing that has ever happened, and we’re being serious here.

Yes, according to this website, some anonymous person found a single copy of a Japanese game entitled “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari” at a garage sale for fifty cents, with no other identifying info provided.  We’re going to go with this as being a complete and utter hoax, based on the following theories:

1)  78% of stuff like this on the internet is a hoax.

2)  For a Japanese game, the instructions seem to be suspiciously…  completely in English.

3)  It’s a hoax.

But still, hoax or no, someone went to the trouble of creating a Nintendo version of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ only 15 years too late for it to appear on the NES, and only 70 years too late to comfort F. Scott Fitzgerald as he died alone of alcoholism, believing himself to be a forgotten, pathetic failure.  Sweet!

But, um, depressing background source or not, the game itself rocks and you can play it right here.  In standard video game style, the game itself has little to do with the book itself, although you do play as protagonist Nick Carraway, and you jump around and kill flappers, butlers, and giant crabs by throwing your standard felt hat at them, all of which makes very little sense — and all of which is awesome.  Occasionally, you can upgrade to a more powerful golden hat, in a reference  to ‘Gatsby’s’ epigraph, which we present right here:

_____

…All of which is kind of great.  That the video game is a hoax, that is.  Because even the above epigraph that inspired the game is a hoax.  “Thomas Parke D’Invilliers” isn’t a real person — he’s a character from Fitzgerald’s novel, ‘This Side of Paradise.’ So, lacking a proper “authentic” poem to start off his book, F. Scott Fitzgerald simply made one up, using his own fictional character as the fake author.  In the same way, the anonymous creator of the ‘Gatsby’ video game is simply fulfilling a need.  A Nintendo version of ‘The Great Gatsby’ should exist, and if it doesn’t, well, then a fake story might be necessary in order to supply one.

Jay Gatsby– cad and millionaire — would approve.  After all, “Jay Gatsby” wasn’t his real name, and he got his millions illegally, by selling bootleg alcohol.  No, Jay Gatsby’s real name was “James Gatz,” and he was originally just a broke nobody from North Dakota.  Here’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, speaking about James Gatz:

I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time…   His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.

For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed….  But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.  The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor….  For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

And James Gatz willed himself to became a millionaire in order to win the love of a girl that he didn’t really deserve at all:

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own.  He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.  So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.  Then he kissed her.  At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.  …He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously — eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.

F. Scott Fitzgerald could relate.  It order to convince his very posh wife to marry him, he had to become a famous novelist first.  So he frantically wrote his first book, ‘This Side of Paradise,’ at age twenty-one, got famous, and got the girl.  Things went downhill from there, but hey — he had successfully reinvented himself, using only words and fantasy…  just like James Gatz.

It’s all about creation from nothing, just as the Dutch sailors at the end of the book built a vision of America from nothing, out of empty rolling hills; a “fresh green breast of the new world.”  Fitzgerald considers all of America to be a hoax, in a sense; a story made of dream-stuff.  And so we think he would approve of this video game, and we hereby proclaim ‘The Great Gatsby — NES Version’ to be a work of genius, and we remind you that you can play it for free here.  Plus, uh,  it’s really fun to kill flappers by throwing boomerang hats at them.   (Even though I keep dying at the end of the second goddamn level.)

And now…

…Bonus Section — Other Literary Novels That Would Make Great Video Games:

Ulysses! — Sega Master System Version.   The plot: Just like in ‘Super Mario 3,’ in this version of James Joyce’s modern classic you must fight through sixteen ever-changing levels with distinct themes:  Dream World, Beach World, Tower World, Medical World, Library World, Mermaid World, etc.  Power-ups: Grab bottles of Guinness for Extra Strength.  Final Boss Battle: Either the ghost of Stephen’s mother, or the nightmare that is history itself.

White Noise! — Commodore 64 Version.  The plot: Similar to ‘Robotron:  2048,’ in this game you must keep your post-modern nuclear family alive against the relentless onslaught of “The Airborne Toxic Event.”  Power-ups: Eat Dylar to ward off that nagging, pesky fear of death.  Final Boss Battle: The relentless “white noise” of modern consumerism, which includes video games themselves, which is kind of a neat twist, right?

Infinite Jest! — Atari 2600 Version. Just like in ‘Space Invaders,’ your little widget shoots laser beams, fighting off infinite rows of…  endless scholarly footnotes.  Power-ups: Um, the ability to keep playing the game without dying of boredom?  Or something?  Final Boss Battle: Jeez, man, I dunno.  I gave up on really long hard books after ‘Ulysses,’ but man, ‘Infinite Jest’ has a lot of footnotes, eh?  Anyway, is the book any good?

Umm, and I was going to make a ‘Corrections’ video game joke where the final bad guy is Oprah, but screw it with the obscure jokes.  Anyway, submit your own literary game ideas in the comments, and someone get to work on making all these games, stat!