With Dooly Bravo Land, nearly every commercial NES game has been archived (Patreon)

Thanks to a very generous donor from Korea, we were recently given the very, very exciting opportunity to digitally archive Dooly Bravo Land, a 1992 game for the Nintendo Entertainment System released exclusively in Korea. You can learn a little more about the game itself in our blog post here:

https://gamehistory.org/dooly-bravo-land/ 

I like to get a little more personal with our Patreon posts here, so I wanted to share with you a little bit about how meaningful this is for me personally.

I first got into video game preservation, by my estimates, in 1999. I had recently discovered the magic of software emulation and, being the curious sort of person who loved something so much that they wanted to dig into every possible crevice and learn about every excruciating detail about the thing they loved (aka a 17-year-old with a hobby), I dug deep into finding out where these ROM images actually came from. I became a member of the "emulation community" pretty quickly, and found myself fascinated by "The NES Dumping Project," and more specifically, its list of undumped NES games. The oldest version I could find is from 2001, which I've PasteBIN'd here:

http://pastebin.com/hmtPGXih 

In many ways, those early days of helping to "dump" the lost NES games is what shaped me into the person I am today. They are, fundamentally, the roots of this entire organization. I credit my rampant teenage piracy of cartridge games for not only my budding interest in video game history and its collector community, but my career in the video game industry itself.

Anyway. Last year I discovered that there were still a few stragglers left in the international NES library that hadn't yet been digitally documented. A handful of them were from Korea, so I teamed up with Sam Derboo of Hardcore Gaming 101 to get some of these rare cartridges on loan. With the archiving of Dooly, we've accomplished three incredible things:

- All of the original Korean games for the NES have now been archived (we also secured Magic Kid Googoo, a VERY interesting game, which I put out there before VGHF went public)

- All of the development output from Daou Infosys has now been archived

- Of all of the original games for the NES that were sold during its lifetime, all but one are now available digitally

I should give that some quantifiers: there are many pieces of software released unofficially for the system that are still floating out there, but if we're talking about original games that were actually sold to people (as opposed to things like educational software or virtual karaoke), the only one lefts that I know of is Super Gun, a vertical shooter by NTDEC.  Which, dang it, I will find.