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description=Blog about the Famicom, retro video games, retro Japan, and 80s stuff in general.;

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llector the holy grails are entirely defined by people in those hobbies and not by the cultural relevance or recognizability of the items themselves one collecting hobby which partially bucks this trend though is comic books the holy grail of that hobby is action comics 1 the first ever comic to feature superman if you aren t a comic collector you might not know the details of this specific comic but you likely recognize superman and know why he is famous the value of this comic which is insanely expensive there are only about 100 copies of it in existence is probably driven both by the fact that it is highly sought after by collectors and because superman is such a famous pop culture icon with the general public so retro game collecting has taken an odd turn away from a rare obscurity that hardcore collectors go after air raid towards an extremely famous but common game that everyone knows smb this turn seems to be without precedent in other collecting hobbies or at least the ones i m familiar with how much do systems matter this is something unique to our hobby and doesn t have exact parallels in other collecting hobbies the video games we collect were tied to consoles on which they could be played these had limited lifespans and thus limited opportunities to have an impact on all of us atari was of course the biggest console maker of all in the late 70s and early 80s and had a massive impact on the early development of the industry and the popular understanding of home gaming but it lost most of that significance with the 1983 video game crash hanging on for a few years mostly as an also ran in the console wars of the third generation of consoles onward before fading mostly into oblivion today its basically just a name and logo that gets slapped on flashbacks and other products by companies that have nothing to do with the original atari wanna stay at an atari hotel somebody just bought the right to slap the name on those because of course they did in other words it is no longer significant and over time memories of its heyday are fading nobody under 40 today remembers a world in which an atari was a must have item for kids this probably precludes any game from that console like air raid no matter how rare from every aspiring to be the holy grail of the broader retro game collecting hobby nintendo on the other hand has continuity it became the dominant console maker in the 1980s and while it hasn t won the console war in each subsequent generation it has never failed to be considered one of the top three makers that continuity gives the nes a huge advantage since the characters and even the games themselves are constantly being kept in the eye of current gamers on new platforms like the switch so it makes sense that the holy grail of the retro game collecting hobby would be a nintendo one rather than an atari or colecovision or whatever game how do we define rarity smb for the nes is obviously not a rare game as pretty much every game collector has been quick to point out every time a story about a copy of it selling for insane has appeared its value lies entirely on the basis that the specific 660 000 copy is the highest graded sealed hangtab version of the game in existence so its a one of a kind copy of a 40 million of a kind game if this seems arbitrary its because it is note that you need to use four adjectives to describe it in a way that defines its value its the highest graded sealed hangtab version i have a copy of smb that my three year old daughter accidentally dropped in our toilet don t ask it is the only copy of smb that has ever been dropped in my toilet known to exist and i have established countermeasures to ensure that no further copies of smb will ever be dropped into my toilet again guaranteed population one of one give me 660 000 for it please see its so easy to turn a common thing into a rare thing depending on how one defines its rarity the fact that our hobby s new holy grail has its rarity defined like this makes our hobby weird in all the above examples from other hobbies the holy grail was valuable not just because it was the highest graded version of a common thing but because the thing itself was really rare this fact can still be explained with reference to those hobbies though this concept of highest graded version of a common thing being valuable comes from them after all the crucial difference is that it developed decades after those hobbies emerged and had already defined what their holy grails were retro game collecting in contrast is relatively new and is still going through this process of establishing what constitutes its holy grail in the shadow of current trends in those hobbies which have now established themselves in ours so shit we re now stuck with something as uninspiring as an unbroken layer of plastic wrapping being the main thing that defines our holy grail should we be concerned about the millionaires another difference related to the timing of our hobby s development is that the global economy today is a lot more dominated by a rentier class of millionaire ass holes than it was when the baseball card and comic book collecting hobbies were taking off in the 70s and 80s these people view collectibles as an asset class and a good place to park their money so entrepreneurs are busily at work creating narratives about various games like smb which fit the expectations of those millionaires this leads to nauseatingly awful prose like that found in this passage that grossed 660 000 for heritage auctions which successfully convinced some millionaires that shrink wrap is the most important thing in the history of video games i mean yeah hey i got no problem with heritage auctions doing what they gotta do to shake that money tree more power to them but i m not sure the rest of the hobby should follow that rabbit down the hole because it really makes no sense except when viewed as an effort to attribute value to a relatively mundane thing and convince millionaires that this is something they should care about crucially they have to convince not just one millionaire but several of them since they need a few to bid against each other and yup it wasn t that hard to do actually this should really be a good rule of thumb for anyone buying video games or anything really in the hope they will one day be worth something if the thing has the potential to be described to a bunch of millionaires in a way that will make them want to compete with each other for it its probably a good buy i m still working on a convincing storyline for my toilet copy of smb that i hope will fund my retirement its not all about the shrink wrap though its also about the cultural significance the millionaires are really looking to invest in expensive mario stuff and so the hobby has spit this out as an offering to them every cultural icon has to have something valuable they can collect associated with it mario posed a problem since most of his best known games were such smash hits that they aren t rare so they ve settled on this contrived rarity to satiate that demand to conclude these are just a few of my thoughts about the big sale of smb and a comparison with air raid which i noticed nobody was really talking about so i thought i would add this to the online conversation i m not really convinced that copy of smb is destined to be our hobby s holy grail forever on the one hand it now has a first mover advantage since it grabbed headlines with that insane sale on the other hand you could have said the same for air raid a decade ago and its basically fallen to the wayside in our conversation since then to me the distinguishing features of this copy of smb are just way too thin to allow it to maintain that position with the holy grails of other hobbies one look at the item tells any collector what it is without having to rely on a bunch of detailed explanation to distinguish it from millions of things that look exactly the same its the highest graded copy of the version with the hangtab which still has its shrink wrap intact yawn posted by sean at 12 45 pm 9 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels air raid super mario bros thursday april 22 2021 lot lot silver member stickers are now insanely expensive a really interesting and very rare thing sold on yahoo auctions a couple of days ago a copy of lot lot without the game but this was more notable for the sticker it contained a lot lot silver members sticker back in the day tokuma soft had a little contest with both this game and exed exes if you finished the game with a certain score a password would flash on the screen if you wrote that password onto a postcard and sent it to them they would send you one of the above members stickers oroti at famicom no neta wrote a really great post about this a couple of years ago which has a treasure trove of contemporary promotional literature related to it basically there were several ranks of member stickers you could receive depending on your score and the number of these they would give out were limited in the following way silver members 500 000 points 2 000 stickers gold members 2 000 000 points 500 stickers plantinum members 5 000 000 points 200 stickers royal members 10 stickers with two divisions for 9 000 000 points and 10 000 000 points so these are pretty rare but the silver sticker ones are significantly more common than the others what makes the auction so interesting therefore is that while the silver stickers are common its really rare to find them in their original condition with the envelope and everything like that most of them today are to be found stuck on the carts so when i saw that appear on yahoo auctions i started following it wondering if i might be able to snag it on the cheap uh nope it ended for 251 000 yen about 2 500 us yikes and that is the price for the easiest to find of these stickers i can t imagine what a platinum or royal one would sell for i regret that i did not add one of these to my collection a few years ago when i had the chance i actually remember passing on an exed exes silver members sticker for about 15 000 yen a few years ago because i didn t think it was worth it d oh posted by sean at 10 02 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels lot lot silver member stickers wednesday april 21 2021 famicom games and inter generational justice my kids have built up a pretty decent sized collection of famicom games over the course of the past year i mean just look at all these suckers and they also have a little pile of super famicom games too this got me thinking about my own nes collection when i was a kid my parents gave me an nes action set for christmas when i was 13 it was great and my late sister and i spent an insane amount of time playing it for about a 3 4 years period during the entirety of that period i was able to accumulate a collection of drum roll six games that was it nes games didn t grow on trees they cost like 30 40 bucks each in 1980s dollars at that six games was actually a decent collection back then i don t think any of my friends had more than ten games either theoretically there may have existed the odd rich kid out there whose parents could shower them with video games at will regardless of the cost but i never knew any of them they must have existed though my kids today have the functional equivalent of one of those hypothetical rich 1980s dads who can shower them with nintendo games without having to worry about the cost not because he s rich i ain t but because these famicom games on average cost me about 200 300 yen each about what a bag of chips costs so they ve got this massive collection that would have been accessible to only the children of the wealthy elite of 1980s bubble era japan i quite like this it makes me feel like a big shot i can actually give my kids a famicom game for a relatively minor accomplishment in the same way my parents might have given me a quarter for the same 35 years ago you might envy them for that but i also worry that this might be the only type of advantage their generation has over mine the ravages of climate change pandemics exploding economic inequality erosion of democratic norms whatever the hell ai is going to do to all of us and all the other bad stuff sweeping the planet is all going to be crap that they ll have to deal with as adults to a certain extent its also crap i have to deal with as an adult but it ll likely be way worse for their generation its a pretty lousy deal if all you get in exchange for that is famicom games aplenty as children and i wish i could give them something more but for now it ll have to do posted by sean at 12 20 pm 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest tuesday april 20 2021 100 yen shop famicoms beginner s guide i was on twitter the other day when i saw this post by ruireichannel had written about building a diy famicom out of petit blocks which are these super cheap block sets you can buy at daiso japan s biggest 100 yen store chain 100 yen about 1 these are a big thing for twitter users in japan i discovered after going through the プチブロック petit block hashtag rabbit hole on there i thought it looked pretty cool so i took up the challenge first step stop at a 100 yen shop and peruse their selection of petit blocks the one in our area it turns out has a lot of them its pretty impressive that these only cost 100 yen each they are basically rip offs of nanoblocks which are an almost identical toy line but sell for about 8 or 9 times that i have to say that the quality of the petit blocks is a bit lesser but not 8 or 9 times less and for making famicoms from scratch they do nicely unfortunately they didn t have the exact set that he used which might have been sold out so i just grabbed a couple that looked like they had lots of red and white pieces to see what i could cobble together one was a race car the other a birthday cake so i cracked it open and after about half an hour of fiddling around voila its not perfect i had to improvise a bit since the pieces and colors i had available were somewhat limited but i think its basically recognizable as a famicom i think this is going to be version 1 and i ll try to build a second model at larger scale to get a more detail in i might try buying some grey sets to build an av famicom too so i could give it to my kids who have no idea what the red and white original famicom looks like but love their av famicom posted by sean at 9 40 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest older posts home subscribe to posts atom about famicomblog this began as a blog about the famicom and my experience trying to collect all 1051 of the famicom games officially released between 1983 and 1994 it has since morphed into more of a blog about old japanese video game stuff and other retro treasure...