What If Video Games Came on VHS? One Modder Is Finding Out

I've always had a soft spot for strange physical media (like my recent obsession with unique physical PSP games), particularly the sort of thing that makes you wonder why anybody thought it was a good idea in the first place. There's something fascinating about the unusual ways companies tried to deliver entertainment before everything became a download, and even more fascinating when somebody decides to revisit one of those ideas decades later. Which brings me to a question I hadn't really considered until recently: what if video games came on VHS tapes?

Not like a recording of somebody playing a game, but an actual interactive experience, with a controller, game data and everything else you'd expect. It's the sort of wonderfully impractical idea that sounds like it belongs somewhere in the late 1980s. As it turns out, somebody has been trying to make it work in 2026, and the results are rather interesting.

The creator is a hardware enthusiast known as Throaty Mumbo, who recently demonstrated an experimental VHS-based gaming system called GCVHS. He's managed to get versions of Doom and Super Mario Bros. working with videotape, alongside other experiments inspired by the early days of interactive video.

There's an important catch to all of this, though. The games aren't running directly from a VHS tape in quite the way you imagine. But that distinction is actually part of what makes the project so damn fascinating.

Back when VHS gaming was a real thing

Before we get to the new hardware, there's a wonderfully obscure piece of gaming history behind this whole experiment.

In 1987, Worlds of Wonder released the ‘Action Max’, a home gaming system that used ordinary VHS tapes and a light gun. You connected it to your television and VCR, loaded one of its specially produced tapes, and attempted to shoot targets appearing within the prerecorded footage.

It sounds rather exciting on paper. The problem was that the tape couldn't actually respond to what you were doing. Whether you hit every target or missed every single one, the recording carried on exactly as before. Your inputs could affect your score, but they couldn't alter the action unfolding on screen. It was less a traditional video game and more an interactive shooting gallery built around a home movie.

Throaty Mumbo's experience with the original Action Max left him wondering whether the underlying idea could be taken further. What if the tape wasn't simply providing a predetermined sequence of images? What if it could also carry the information needed for something genuinely interactive? And so began GCVHS!

So, is Doom really running on a VHS tape?

The hardware behind GCVHS is a rather unusual combination of old and new technology. At its heart is a real VHS player, connected to a DE1-SoC FPGA development board and an RP2350-based microcontroller.

The FPGA board receives and processes the video signal coming from the VCR, while the microcontroller executes game code and handles player input.

Now, before somebody points out that this is cheating because there's a Raspberry Pi involved, there's an important distinction worth making. The RP2350 isn't a conventional Raspberry Pi computer secretly running an emulator and pretending the tape is doing all the work. It's a microcontroller used as part of a custom-built gaming system. More importantly, the VHS tape itself contains game data.

Throaty Mumbo's approach encodes executable data alongside multiple video streams into a composite video signal, which can then be recorded onto an ordinary tape. When played back, the hardware decodes that information, runs the game code and presents the appropriate video. The recording also carries timing information that could allow the hardware to seek forwards or backwards through the tape using an infrared blaster, although the project is still very much experimental. That doesn't mean the original Doom engine has somehow been squeezed into a VHS cassette and made to run as a conventional first-person shooter.

Instead, the Doom demonstration is something closer to an on-rails, full-motion-video game. Prerecorded sequences provide the action, with eight video streams running simultaneously on the tape. Your timed controller inputs determine which of those streams the system displays, creating the illusion of branching gameplay without the tape itself needing to jump between scenes. It's a different experience from wandering freely around a level, but it does demonstrate something the Action Max couldn't do: your input actually influences what happens.

The Super Mario Bros. experiment takes a different approach. Rather than making the entire experience out of branching prerecorded scenes, the system uses imagery stored on the tape as a backdrop for gameplay generated by the external hardware.

Neither demonstration is a straightforward port of the original game to VHS, and I think it's important to make that clear. But they're also considerably more involved than simply playing a video and pretending it's a game.

Making the impractical interesting again

There's an obvious question hanging over the whole project: why bother? Even the cheapest modern handheld can emulate systems vastly more sophisticated than the Action Max. There's no practical advantage to using a mechanical tape format with limited storage access, imperfect video quality and the occasional need to physically wind the recording to another position, but I think judging something like GCVHS by its practicality rather misses the point.

What makes this interesting to me isn't the prospect of abandoning modern consoles in favour of a VCR. It's the attempt to revisit a peculiar dead end in gaming history and imagine what might have happened if somebody had taken the concept a little further.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were full of experiments involving interactive video, optical discs and new ways of combining filmed footage with traditional gameplay. Most disappeared as more capable consoles and computers arrived, but they remain fascinating little reminders of an industry that was still figuring out what games could be.

GCVHS feels like an extension of that curiosity. It borrows modern electronics to overcome some of the limitations of the original technology, while deliberately retaining the physical format that made the whole idea so awkward in the first place.

The project remains experimental, and its GitHub repository is still a work in progress rather than a complete, ready-to-build release. But the demonstration alone is well worth watching.

I particularly like that it doesn't try to pretend VHS was secretly a better gaming medium than you might remember. It wasn't. But with enough ingenuity, patience and a willingness to pursue a thoroughly impractical idea, even an old videotape can become something surprising again.

And in a world where almost every game arrives as another icon in a digital library, I find the idea of loading up a battered VHS cassette to play a strange version of Doom rather wonderful.

You can (and really should!) watch the full demonstration on YouTube. After all, this little article of mine wouldn't exist without the far more impressive work behind it, and Throaty Mumbo deserves the attention for bringing such a wonderfully strange idea to life: