Larry, What Are You Doing in My Nintendo?

An eyebrow-raising eBay listing opens the door to a wonderfully peculiar corner of gaming: familiar characters turning up on machines where nobody expected to find them.

There are several things you might expect to discover while browsing old Nintendo games. A battered copy of Super Mario Bros. A cartridge with somebody’s childhood name written across it. Perhaps a cardboard box whose survival is being treated as a significant archaeological event. A Leisure Suit Larry adventure is rather further down the list. Yet there it is: a seller offering a sealed NES game under Larry’s name for 3,300 Canadian dollars, with the reassuring option to make an offer. That was the asking price when checked on 14 September 2026, not a confirmed sale. The distinction matters. Anyone can put a large number next to a box; persuading somebody else to pay it is the difficult part.

The price, however, is only the first curiosity. The more interesting question is what gaming’s famously unsuccessful seducer is doing on a Nintendo Entertainment System in the first place. This is not a forgotten Nintendo release that accidentally escaped from a warehouse. It is a much later, independently developed adaptation, and its story leads to an entire collection of games that appear to have caught the wrong bus.

Larry gets his hands on a controller

The name on the box is Larry and the Long Look for a Luscious Lover, which sounds less like a video game and more like something discovered behind the counter of a particularly disreputable video rental shop. Released in 2014, it was developed by Kevin Hanley, the programmer behind KHAN Games, and distributed through retroUSB. Underneath that magnificent mouthful of a title is an NES adaptation of Sierra’s original 1987 Leisure Suit Larry adventure.

Getting Larry onto the console meant more than changing the label. The original adventure relied on typed commands, which presented an obvious problem for a controller without a keyboard. Hanley’s version instead gives the player a context-sensitive action button for things such as opening doors, talking and picking up objects, while another button uses the selected inventory item. Some details changed along the way: Lefty’s bar became Tusky’s, and the casino’s blackjack was replaced with roulette. Larry had crossed platforms, but he had not suddenly developed better priorities.

The packaging understands the joke. Its pin-up artwork could pass for a pulp paperback, while a gold badge announces an “Official Seal of Quality”. Look closely and the badge contains an actual seal, the animal. It is a visual gag rather than evidence that somebody at Nintendo enthusiastically approved Larry’s evening plans.

Contemporary coverage priced the standard boxed release at US$50, including a blue cartridge, manual and protective sleeve. The developer’s catalogue now marks it as sold out. That gives the modern listing some context, but it does not turn a seller’s ambitious price into an established valuation. What makes the object interesting is already there without the financial theatre: somebody took a very unlikely computer adventure and made it work as a physical NES game.

E.T. phones the wrong console

Hanley’s taste for unexpected conversions did not stop at Larry. His catalogue also includes a 2014 NES version of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, recreating the Atari 2600 game on Nintendo hardware. Yes, that E.T.: the one associated with unwanted cartridges buried in a New Mexico landfill, some of which were excavated in 2014. Whatever your opinion of the original, deliberately rebuilding it for another machine demonstrates a level of commitment rarely encountered outside marriage and model railways.

There was an especially mischievous connection between the two releases. A contemporary account records that the boxed Larry game included a mail-in order form for the NES E.T. cartridge. Obtaining the second curiosity therefore meant opening the first, presenting sealed-game collectors with an unusually specific personal crisis. Imagine carefully preserving your purchase, only to discover that the paperwork for another desirable oddity is trapped inside. Somewhere between the shrink-wrap and the order form, the hobby begins to resemble an adventure-game puzzle of its own.

Master Chief discovers the Atari

At first glance, Halo 2600 sounds like a joke made by someone who has spent too long looking at old cartridge labels. It is real, and the person behind it makes the story better. Ed Fries, a former Microsoft games executive involved in the original Xbox’s launch, created this miniature take on Halo in 2010. One of the people who helped bring Microsoft into console gaming subsequently decided that Master Chief should try something considerably less powerful.

Fries fitted the game into just 4 kilobytes, with 64 screens to explore, enemies to fight and weapons and shields to collect. This is not the original first-person shooter running miraculously on an Atari. It is a demake: a simpler reinterpretation designed around older hardware. The cinematic presentation gives way to a tiny Master Chief moving through an overhead world. Think of it as sending a blockbuster action hero back through time and discovering that his entire costume allowance now consists of a handful of pixels.

The project began after Fries read Racing the Beam, a book about programming the Atari 2600. He initially experimented with making a little Master Chief move around, rather than setting out to complete a game. From there, things escalated. Eventually, Halo 2600 entered the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection. This is useful information for anyone whose household has questioned the cultural merit of another Atari cartridge: there is now a museum precedent, although it may not settle the argument about cupboard space.

Mario moves into a Commodore

Some unlikely conversions are funny because the game is too modern for the machine. Others feel like somebody correcting an old grievance. In April 2019, a developer known as ZeroPaige released Super Mario Bros. 64, the result of seven years spent bringing Nintendo’s 1985 platform game to the Commodore 64. The “64” here means Commodore, not Nintendo’s later three-dimensional Mario adventure. This is the original mushroom-and-pipes business, arriving on a computer whose owners could reasonably have appreciated it several decades earlier.

The ambition went well beyond making something vaguely Mario-shaped. The release included the Japanese/American and European versions, support for different C64 models and options for accelerated hardware. It could run on a stock machine, although the developer warned of slowdowns and compatibility issues associated with its scrolling technique. Those qualifications make the achievement more interesting, not less: this was an actual conversion working within awkward limits, rather than a modern computer wearing a nostalgic disguise.

Then came the less surprising part. Nintendo issued takedown notices against distribution of the unofficial port, with the Commodore Computer Club among those reporting a notice. Seven years of development had produced a remarkable technical achievement, but admiration and permission remained two different things. Mario had finally visited the Commodore neighbourhood; the paperwork did not welcome him quite so warmly.

Portal, now with considerably less computer

Vince Weaver’s Apple II version of Portal has one of the most relatable beginnings in hobby programming: he intended to do something small, and then it got out of hand. Unveiled in January 2017, his Applesoft BASIC interpretation of Valve’s puzzle game grew from an attempt to recreate its ending credits. The Apple II’s high-resolution graphics offered suitable orange and blue colours, and apparently that was sufficient encouragement to keep going.

The result is a simplified fan-made reinterpretation, not Valve’s original three-dimensional game somehow squeezed intact into an elderly Apple. It changes aspects of the rules, including allowing portals to be placed anywhere, while retaining the central pleasure of getting from one place to another by thoroughly abusing the usual arrangements of space. Source code and a disk image were provided with the project. There is something delightful about the scale of the undertaking: most people notice that two colours match and choose a cushion. Weaver made an Apple II game.

Wolfenstein finds religion

Not every strange gaming transformation was a hobby project made years after the hardware’s retirement. Sometimes an actual company looked at an existing game and arrived at a decision that still takes a moment to process. In 1994, Wisdom Tree released Super 3D Noah’s Ark for the Super Nintendo, using technology licensed from Wolfenstein 3D. The Nazi-fighting shooter had become an adventure in which Noah wandered his ark, firing food at troublesome animals to make them fall asleep.

The underlying idea is recognisably that of a first-person shooter, except your urgent tactical problem is now an uncooperative goat. There are corridors to navigate, supplies to manage and creatures to pacify. The change of theme is so extraordinary that it almost distracts from the hardware: the original SNES release was not licensed by Nintendo, and its cartridge required an officially licensed game to be plugged into the top so it could get past the console’s security check. Noah, having successfully built an ark, still needed another cartridge to get through the door.

Its development history supplies a final twist. The company had previously pursued a game based on Hellraiser, acquiring the film rights and licensing the Wolfenstein engine. After that project was abandoned, the technology found a home in Super 3D Noah’s Ark. Moving from a horror film about infernal torment to feeding animals on a biblical boat is a substantial change of direction, even by the standards of a difficult production meeting.

The pleasure of finding something that shouldn’t be there

These curiosities are more entertaining than another straightforward re-release because each raises the same irresistible question: why would somebody do that? Sometimes the answer is a technical challenge. Sometimes it is affection for an old machine, an abandoned business plan or a programmer discovering that a supposedly small experiment has consumed rather more of the calendar than expected.

They also reward looking beyond the label. Larry’s NES outing is a later independent adaptation, not a lost original-era Nintendo release. Halo 2600 is a reimagining rather than a miniature copy of the Xbox game. Noah’s adventure was a commercial product with licensed technology, despite lacking Nintendo’s blessing. Their differences are part of the appeal. There is no need to make their histories more improbable than they already are.

As for the expensive Larry listing, the box is certainly a conversation starter. Whether it deserves that asking price is a separate discussion, preferably conducted after taking a breath and remembering that an offer is not a sale. Larry spent years trying to make himself irresistible. At least somebody now thinks the packaging has managed it.

Follow the Games Down the Rabbit Hole:

Game	Link
Larry and the Long Look for a Luscious Lover	KHAN Games’ developer catalogue
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial	KHAN Games’ developer catalogue
Halo 2600	Ed Fries’ source-code release on AtariAge
Super Mario Bros. 64	ZeroPaige’s original release announcemen
Portal	Vince Weaver’s project page
Super 3-D Noah’s Ark	Wisdom Tree’s official game page