Canadian arcade enthusiast Callan Brown has built what may be the only playable version of Nintendo's first arcade game, Wild Gunman, from 1974. Brown won an eBay auction for rare film reels essential to the electro-mechanical shooter. Using modern technology, he created a replica cabinet to preserve the original parts.
Nintendo's Wild Gunman, released in 1974, marked the company's entry into arcade games but relied on two 16mm film projectors and a light gun rather than video displays. Designed by Gunpei Yokoi, the game used durable Tetoron film expected to last about 1,000 plays. No working cabinets were known to exist until Brown's project, as surviving reels are extremely scarce—fewer than a handful have surfaced publicly, including two found by a collector in 2021 and footage in obscure films noted by historian Kate Willært that year. Brown spotted Nintendo-branded film reels in an eBay arcade parts auction in July 2025. “One day in July 2025, as I was browsing the arcade parts category on eBay I came across an auction that didn’t make a lot of sense to me,” Brown said in his video. He won the bid, acquired a classroom projector, and screened the reels for likely the first time in 40 years before digitizing them. To reconstruct the cabinet, Brown reverse-engineered patents and employed open-source software for video projections that spare the fragile originals from wear. The result is a modernized replica capturing the game's alternating projector mechanics for shootouts in a western theme. Brown plans to display his creation at local events like Ontario PinFest. “Thank you for joining me on my journey to make what might be the only playable Wild Gunman ‘74 in North America, maybe the world,” he said.
