Before Donkey Kong made Nintendo a household name in arcades, the company was already experimenting with coin-operated entertainment. Most players have never heard of that earlier chapter, and there's a simple reason: almost nothing from it survived.
Callan "74XX" Brown, a Canadian arcade repairman and YouTuber, just changed that. After winning an unusual eBay auction in July 2025, he spent months reconstructing Nintendo's 1974 Wild Gunman, the company's very first arcade game. The result is what Brown himself describes as “maybe the only playable Wild Gunman '74 in North America, maybe the world.”
What Wild Gunman actually was
Wild Gunman wasn't a video game in the modern sense. No pixels, no sprites. The 1974 cabinet used two simultaneous 16mm film reel projectors to display a live-action light gun western. Shoot at the right moment and the projector would switch reels to a winning outcome. Miss, and you got the losing state. The whole thing was engineered by Gunpei Yokoi, the same designer who would later give the world the Game Boy.
Yokoi specifically requested that film manufacturer Fuji use Tetoron, a polyester blend tougher than standard film stock. Even so, he estimated the reels would start degrading after roughly 1,000 play sessions. For a coin-op machine that needed to turn a profit over years, that was a real problem. The video game boom and the arrival of Laserdisc technology made the cabinet's long-term viability even more doubtful.
No working cabinet is known to have survived anywhere in the world. Until now.
The eBay auction that started everything
Brown was browsing the arcade parts category on eBay when he spotted a listing that didn't make sense: a set of Nintendo-branded film reels. The quality of the control stickers convinced him these were the real thing, not reproductions. He placed a winning bid.
To actually watch what he had bought, Brown tracked down a classroom 16mm projector from a nearby Ontario town. The screening that followed was almost certainly the first time those reels had been projected in roughly 40 years.
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Surviving Wild Gunman footage is extraordinarily rare. In 2021, gaming historian Kate Willlaert noted that the clearest footage of the game wasn't in any arcade, but in an underground experimental short film and an obscure 1981 comedy called Gas. That same year, a separate collector found two of the four original film reels.Building the cabinet from scratch
With the footage digitized to preserve the fragile originals from further wear, Brown got to work on the cabinet itself. He reverse-engineered Nintendo's patents and used open-source software to build a modernized replica that projects scans of the original film stock rather than running the physical reels.
The key here is that the reels themselves are now protected. By moving to digital projection, Brown ensures the surviving footage won't degrade further through repeated playback. The cabinet looks and plays like the 1974 original, but the irreplaceable film is spared.
Brown has said he plans to bring the cabinet to local conventions, with Ontario PinFest mentioned as one of the planned stops. For anyone in the region, that's a legitimate piece of gaming history you can actually interact with.
Why this matters beyond Nintendo nostalgia
Here's the thing: most gaming history preservation happens in archives, museums, and private collections where the public never sees it. Brown's project is different. He built something you can stand in front of and play, which is exactly how Wild Gunman was meant to be experienced in 1974.
The games that came before Donkey Kong are easy to overlook, but they tell a real story about how Nintendo figured out what it was. Wild Gunman sits right at the start of that story, and for the first time in decades, someone can actually play it.
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