Colonizing Africa: The Video Game

The other day I was researching the Berlin Conference for a post I am writing.  A couple of hyperlinks later, I ended up on the page of Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer who helped King Leopold II take control of the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo and rape capital of the world) and inspiration for the lead character in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  And this led me to an incredible discovery: among the thousands of games released for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, there is one very rare and little known game called “Stanley: The Search for Livingstone.”  Here is the description:

Stanley and the Search for Dr. Livingston (after “David Livingstone“) is a relatively obscure NES game that appeared in one of the first 50 issues of Nintendo Power magazine. It takes place in the “deepest and darkest” part of Africa in 1871. The player, as reporter Henry Morton Stanley (after Sir Stanley, 1841-1904), is exploring the last of the mysterious jungle regions for European colonization when his professor, Dr. Livingston (patterned after Dr. David Livingstone, with an ending “e”), gets kidnapped by some African tribesmen. Now, the player must explore one of the last uncharted parts of Africa to save his mentor and end an era of exploring Africa.

If anyone has this game or knows where to get it, please contact me immediately.

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