Total RecallTotal Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends. Of all the games ever made for the Famicom/NES, few are as rare as those produced for Konami’s QTa adapter, a special accessory that allowed Nintendo’s consoles to play cartridges made as part of a partnership between the publisher and Japanese media giant NHK.
Only a handful of games were made, including an educational series made for schoolkids, and another was for employees of an oil company. The idea was that learning could be dressed up as fun by creating a very elaborate video game setting.
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The QTa games are rare because you need both a game and an adaptor to use them, and both (the adaptor especially) are pretty hard to come by, seeing as they were never made commercially available to the public.
These games were so rare that last week you could see almost nothing about them online. No videos, no walkthroughs, not even scans of their manuals. Now, though, we’ve got not just all of that, but playable copies of many of the games as well, thanks to the efforts of Russian Geek, who with help from his Patreon subscribers was able to purchase and import both an adapter for the games and one the cartridges—an entry in the Space School series—itself.
He details his discovery (and the process involved in getting it playable on emulators) in this video below, while also giving us a look at the game in action (it’s in Russian, but you can enable proper English subtitles).
What’s especially cool is that Russian Geek’s purchase of an adapter allowed some other entries in the Space School series which had been previously dumped but were never playable to now be compatible with emulators as well.
If you just want to see video footage of Space School in action—along with its very good soundtrack—here’s a video Frank Cifaldi put together: