Eatin' Steatin': The forgotten classic
OWEN EARL 26 October 2026
Playin’
Hungry Hungry Cowboy!
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I’m sure I’m not the only one who grew up playing Eatin’ Steatin’ as a kid.
My dad grew up in rural Michigan, and on Sundays he would take the bus into town where they had an arcade. He was a fan of Robot-Tron 2084, Puck Man (and Senorita Puck Man), but there was one game that always held a special place in his heart: Eatin’ Steatin’.
In Travis County there was the famous big-eyed fish, and in the summer tourists would come from all over Michigan and even Canada looking for the fish. During tourist seasons my dad would work as someone who removed eyeballs from very big fish to put into the eye sockets of smaller fish to sell to Canadian tourists.
He would ask for his paycheck in quarters so he could run down to the arcade and play Eatin’ Steatin’.
When I was around 9, the Nintendo Wii came out. Of course, this was a classic console for many, with unique titles like FIFA World Cup South Africa or Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball, but for my dad there was a particular appeal to this new console: it was the first console to release a port of Eatin’ Steatin’.
I probably clocked around 23,000 hours playing this game. To me it was an all-time classic, and a good way to connect to my old man.
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Of course, the Wii came out 20 years ago now, and after 10+ years our Wii finally died. Then, after several moves and downsizing, we donated or otherwise lost our collection of Wii games. I sort of forgot about Eatin’ Steatin’, but for the first time in many years I was eating, and I mentioned the game to my good friend (I’m not sure what to call him because we were kissing a lot in March but now he’s seeing Jessica and he hasn’t stopped hanging out with me even though I feel like if he’s so serious about Jessica maybe he should IDK) and he had never heard of it? I thought everyone grew up playing Eatin’ Steatin’. I pulled up YouTube and apparently this was not as well-known as I had previously believed.
The ROM is not available to play in MAME, nor were any ROMs available to play in the Dolphin Wii emulator. Without the disc or a working Wii, this game was not possible to play.
But I had Eatin’ fever at this point and I would not stop before I could play the game! After much sleuthing (I may have hired a private investigator), I was able to track down one of the developers for the Wii port. We emailed back and forth, and here’s what he had to say:
Owen,
Attached is a development build of the game for wii. We had source code for archade version so it was a fairly faithful reimplementation, but we never got the offical approval of nentiendo. I don’t think we ever got the approval of the developer for archade either. Something must have been seriously broken about your wii because if I recall correctly it was unsigned and shouldn’t have worked? Geoff gave up on the project after we had already committed to 10K wall mark deleveries but it was a total scam. Maybe it was a trucha exploit? You must of had an old wii man.
Feel free to do whatever you want with it. I dount there’s an diot on earth that isn’t you or you dad who’d want to play this. or even know what it is.
Don’t contact me again,
******
I censored his name because he asked me to.
Anyway, I have a working Wii ROM now. It runs on the Dolphin Wii emulator. Right now, the only way to play is to download Dolphin. I think it’s in some ways the best way to play because you can use the Wii Remote which really adds to the experience. I’m trying to use ChatGPT to convert it to something a little bit easier to play. Maybe there will be updates here soon.
In the meantime, stay hungry!
