Famicomblog

I celebrate a small milestone recently with the acquisition of my 500th Famicom cart. I am now just short of half-way there (526 carts will mark the official halfway point).

Out of curiosity I piled up all my carts, including duplicates, in our extra room. It ended up looking like a bit like a fort wall, so I called it Fort Famicom.

Doing this reminded me of the logistical nightmare that this collection has become. I have no really effective way of sorting them and they just tend to pile up here and there. I segregate the doubles and put them on one shelf, and then I have another shelf for all the games I really like which is easy to get to, but other than that nothing. With over 500 carts (plus 200-300 duplicates) it is now officially "unmanageable." I feel like Lloyd Bridges in "Airplane" whenever I deal with them: "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue".

Anyway, Fort Famicom looked kind of cool.
Related Posts:
- Wall of Famicom
- The Aesthetics of the Famicom Cart
- The Collection
- Famicom Cart Storage: My Long Nightmare is Finally Over

I took a little ride out to "Hard Off" today. Hard Off is a nationwide chain of used goods stores that sell books, clothes, electronics and of course old video games.

In my experience there are two types of shops that sell used Famicom games. There is one type of shop where they know exactly what everything is worth and they charge exactly that much, no exceptions. You can go through a massive rack of games and you will not find a single discrepancy. If they have 20 copies of "Super Mario Brothers" and one of them is priced at 1,000 yen, you can be absolutely certain that the other 19 will also be priced at 1,000 yen.

In the other type of shop, the people running the shop exercise very little control or supervision over what prices get put on things. There is no apparent system to it and the prices seem to be decided by whichever member of their staff happened to be on duty when the stuff came in. So if they've got 20 copies of Super Mario Brothers and you find one copy for 1,000 yen you know that if you just keep looking through their racks you'll probably find one priced for 500.

Far and away I like the second kind of shop better and Hard Off is one such shop. To be sure, some of their stuff is ridiculously overpriced, but at the same time you can sometimes find insane bargains simply because the right person had the price sticker gun when the game you wanted came in. So I like to go there once a month or so to see what they have.

On looking through their pile of Famicom games today, I knew that "employee number 3" (I number them) must have handled their latest pricing activity because all the new games they had gotten in since my last visit were way overpriced. "Oh, Employee Number 3, who on earth do you think would be willing to pay 525 yen for F1-Race?" I though to myself as I walked away somewhat bemused.

I decided to check out their game hardware section too as I had gotten some good deals there on the past, including my Vaus Controller. They had a big pile of Famicom consoles on sale for 525 yen each, which is a pretty good deal. I didn't need another Famicom (I have 3 already) but this one - horrendously dirty and yellow - caught my eye:
I believe this Famicom had spent the majority of the past 27 years on the surface of Mars.

Anyway, it wasn't the dirt and yellow that caught my eye. "My god, could it be?" I thought to myself, "Yes, a square button Famicom in the middle of a junk pile!! Employee Number 3, I take it all back, you are cool in my books!"

Yes, I had found a square button Famicom - the rarest Famicom out there and every collector's dream. For those of you who don't know, the very fist Famicom released had square buttons. The square ones, which were very prone to wearing out quickly, proved problematic and so when Nintendo recalled the Famicom to fix something else they replaced them and subsequent versions all had the standard round buttons.

So I was pretty excited when I saw that for a mere 525 yen I could score a square button Famicom. My excitement was quickly dashed however when I got a closer look at the player 1 controller:
Yup, a missing "A" button. Guess that is why they recalled them.

That, combined with the general filthy condition of the unit made me have second thoughts, but then I decided "screw it, I'll regret it if I don't get it" and bought the thing.

I plugged the thing in right away and, not surprisingly, it didn't work at all. Undeterred, I cracked it open and about 12 pounds worth of dust fell out - which may have been part of the problem:
I also took apart the controllers and switched this tragedy from the player 1 to the player 2 controller:
Just breaks my heart.

Anyway, after about an hour of cleaning I had the whole thing looking pretty good, except for the really yellow upper half of the outer casing. I had a non-functioning round button Famicom that had a really nice white casing so I decided to switch them (Edit - the new one isn't quite the same as the Square button Famicom doesn't have the "FF" Famicom Family logo on it. Thanks to DSX in the comments for bringing this to my attention). It gave me the chance to compare the guts of the square and round button Famicoms, they are actually quite a bit different:
The Square one is on the left, it is much less logically wired than the round button one on the right and a real pain in the ass to take apart and put together for that reason. I guess these are among the other things they changed after the recall. (Edit - This isn't quite correct. The one on the right is actually a post 1989 revision. Pre-1989 Famicoms, including round button ones, had similar wiring to the original square button Famicom. Thanks again to DSX in the comments for pointing this out).

Anyway, after getting them put back together my new square button Famicom looked pretty good:
Ah, look at 'em buttons:
I then plugged 'er in to enjoy some good old "Spartan X" and was greeted with a solid green screen. Curse. I won't bore you with the details but about half an hour of cursing and doing everything humanly imaginable to try to get the damned thing to show something other than green screen produced no results so I gave up. As things currently stand, my square button is nothing but a paperweight.

I did get a glitter of hope though. After putting the ugly yellow case onto my broken old round-button Famicom I decided to plug that one in too just for the hell of it. I had bought that one about a year ago and spent a huge amount of time trying to get it to work, but every time the image on the screen was too distorted to play. When I flipped the switch this time though, it worked perfectly!

So the lesson is: if you ever get a Famicom that doesn't work, instead of trying to fix it just try to make it worse by stripping it of parts for another system. That, apparently, works like a charm!

And oh yeah, if anyone has any spare square Famicom controller buttons laying around let me know!

Postscript - October 7, 2011

I sold the old square button Famicom in this post last month to jpx72 in Slovakia, where it now resides. You can see pics of it in its new home here.

Related Posts:
- Mega Bargain of the Day: Another Square Button Famicom
- Famicom Console Wars

I went back for a couple of more 800 yen shopping sprees at Omocha Soko this week. I have more or less completely picked over the entirety of their Famicom and Gameboy selection, which now consists of stacks upon stacks of Mahjong and Moero Pro Yakyuu, which they seem to have hundreds of copies each of which nobody will ever buy.

At any rate I got quite a good haul. For a total of 2400 yen (about 25ドル) I got all of this:
About 75 games in total. Not bad when you consider that I only paid about half the price that any single one of these games would have cost new back in the day. With these latest additions my Famicom collection is now up to 467 different carts - I'm almost halfway there!

I got a couple of CIB games in today's lot - Wario No Mori and Uchusen Cosmo Carrier. Generally I don't usually bother with CIB games because they cost more and take up more storage space (and its a pain in the ass to try keeping the boxes in good condition). But these ones I really like. Unlike games on pretty much every console since, most of the Famicom games came in cardboard boxes, which I think look a lot better than plastic. It also means that they are a lot rarer, as most people just threw them out.

The Uchusen Cosmo Carrier box is just really cool:
The artwork has a look that reminds me a lot of the sci-fi themed comics, games and toys I used to love as a kid in the 1980s.

I also like the fact that it is set in the futuristic world of 1999, where we are fighting space wars on the moon or something. It always amuses me to remember how I thought the 21st century would be like when I was a kid. A lot of the cool sci-fi movies from the 80s got it wrong. Like Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, in which the villain (Khan) was a tyrant who ruled half of Earth with an iron fist before being sent into deep space in the year.....1996?

Also I remember liking the movie 2010 starring Roy Scheider which came out in 1984. It was the sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and basically involved a follow up mission to Jupiter to find out what went wrong. Here it is, 2010 now and we can't even afford to send people to the moon anymore.

I walked into Omocha-Soko, one of my local game shops, today just to see if they had any new Famicom stuff. While I was browsing in the retro-game area I noticed a stack of small shopping baskets next to the racks of Famicom games.

I almost ignored them completely but the sign above it had the word Houdai (放題） in big letters so I took a look. Houdai is a word you see at all-you-can-eat restaurants and basically means "as much as you can".

When I took a closer look, the sign said that, for the low price of 800 yen (about 8$) you could get as many retro-games as you could cram into one of those little baskets. This included their entire selection of pre-N64/Sega Saturn/Playstation stuff, which is massive. The only exception was the stuff they had in glass cases where they keep the better games that retail for 1,000 yen or more, but still - how cool is that?

I had to make some strategic decisions. I decided to avoid the Super Famicom and Playstation games because they are bigger and I could therefore fit fewer of them into the limited space the basket had available. Gameboy games were definitely on shopping list - if I had wanted I probably could have fit half their stock into one of the baskets. Unfortunately somebody else had probably already thought of that as their Gameboy selection was pretty picked-over by the time I got to it, but nonetheless I found 8 games that looked interesting so into the cart they went.

After that I decided to go for the N64 and Famicom games, which are roughly the same size and could easily be stacked together. The Gameboy games could then be shoved into the little crevices on the sides of the basket.

The Famicom game racks had been heavily cherry-picked by the time I got to them, including by myself in the past. So I decided to just look for whatever games I didn't have and which looked kind of cool and just shove them in the basket. I found 14 altogether that fit this bill. I rounded off the basket with a couple of N64 games that I thought looked pretty good.

All in all I got a little over 8,000 yen worth of games (according to their sticker prices) for 800 yen including tax. Not a bad deal. Its a lot better this way than buying them in lots too because I could actually pick out the games as opposed to taking a big lot which is half made up of doubles.

I've been noticing in the past few years that some insanely high prices are being paid for some of the rarer retro video games. These would include the "Gentle Physics and Science of Hazardous Materials" for the Famicom going for about 4,ドルooo or Nintendo World Championship Gold Edition going for 20,000ドル. All this money being blown on games that have absolutely no playing value raises the question of whether or not retro games are really worth that much.

As a general rule I don't spend any serious money on retro games. My basic standard is that if a game costs more money than I am willing to completely lose then I don't buy it. Right now that hovers at a maximum of about 15ドル a game, which is what I figure a couple of hours of entertainment is worth.

That said, I certainly acknowledge that there is also a collector value above and beyond the play value which could drive reasonable people to pay much more than that for an old game. As with any market, the basic laws of supply and demand will determine the price people are willing to pay for them. In the long run though is it useful to look at these things as an investment?

For a parallel, I look to the baseball card market that flourished about 20 years ago. When I was a kid in the 1980s/ early 90s I amassed a gigantic collection of baseball cards under the assumption that by 2010 they would be worth a fortune. All through the 1980s the prices of baseball cards just went up and up so at that time this seemed a reasonable proposition.

To give you some idea of how well that plan worked out for me, when my parents moved recently I was told to get rid of all my old stuff in their basement, including my card collection. The only quick and effective way I could find to dispose of them was to pile about 30,000 of them into the back of a truck and drop them off at the local Salvation Army. They simply had no value.

Of course, those were all mass-produced cards from the late 80s/early 90s for which there exists no market because the manufacturers were turning out, by one estimate, approximately 81 billion cards per year at that time. The older, harder to find cards retained their value, right?

Well, actually, no. With the exception of a handful (literally) of exceptionally rare ones, like the 1909 T-206 Honus Wagner, pretty much all the old cards have lost value too. One example is this baby:
This is the 1968 Topps Nolan Ryan rookie card. It wasn't overproduced and there probably aren't that many copies of them out there in top condition. If there was a card in 1991 that seemed like a safe investment, this was it. At its peak in the early 1990s this card was listed at 1200ドル in Beckett's, the main card price guide. Since then, Nolan Ryan retired, got inducted into the baseball hall of fame on his first try, and pretty much avoided all the scandals that rocked baseball after his departure.

Despite this, the last time I checked a Beckett's this card was listed at 500,ドル meaning a loss of 700ドル. But from an investment point of view the drop in value has been way greater because of the time value of money. If in 1991 you had 1200ドル to invest you could have either a) bought the Nolan Ryan rookie card; or b) invested in some sort of stable, diversified financial instrument that delivered a conservative return of 5% per year.

If you opted for a) you would now have a baseball card worth 500ドル. If you opted for b) you would have an investment worth over 3,000ドル. So really it would be more accurate to say you lost 2500ドル by putting your money into the Nolan Ryan rookie card - a card that, it should be said, has held its value better than most others.

Anyway, enough about baseball cards, what does this have to do with retro game collecting?

For one, its worth noting that what I said about the baseball card market applies to a lot of other collectible markets that went through similar bubbles - like stamps and comic books. In those too, over the long run an extremely small number of the most sought after examples have gone up in value (like Action Comics #1 with Superman's first appearance) while the value of pretty much everything else collapsed after the initial rush of people pouring money into the market dried up. The only reason I can think of for the continued rise of the price of the really rare "icons" of the baseball card, comic and stamp worlds is that there enough multi-millionaires out there looking for trophies to keep the values of those pumped up. The key lesson: unless you have millions of dollars lying around with which to purchase one of those insanely rare items, don't invest in collectibles markets.

Retro video games, it should be noted, have some key differences from these other collectibles. The first is that video games have intrinsic value: they actually do something. Baseball cards and stamps are just worthless pieces of cardboard and paper that serve no purpose other than to look pretty. Comic books have a bit more to offer as they can actually be read, but they are still pretty limited. So a retro game will probably never become truly "worthless" in the way that, say, my 1989 Topps Alvin Davis is worthless. The advent of much more convenient downloadable forms of these games puts a definite limit on what intrinsic value the games have (ie less than whatever the manufacturers charge for the downloadable version), but they should still have some value.

Another thing that separates retro video games is that, at least with game cartridges, nobody is making them anymore. The handwriting is on the wall for disc-based games too, in a few years probably all games will only be released via downloadable files, which are fundamentally un-collectible. This avoids the big hammer that destroyed the baseball card market: the fact that every year massive heaps of new cards were being dumped into the market. This just further and further dilluted the value of all cards as the limited amount of money collectors were willing to spend got divided into smaller and smaller chunks between a relentlessly expanding supply of sets.

With cartridge games, however, whats out there is all that there is. When you take into account the fact that what games are in existence are still being used and getting worn out, broken, having grape soda spilled on them, etc the supply of retro games in physical form is actually getting smaller and smaller.

At the same time it should be noted that while the supply side isn't growing, this doesn't necessarily translate into increased demand. On the one hand, there are a lot of 30-somethings like myself who grew up with these games (or at least spent a lot of time looking longingly through storefront windows at them) and, now that we are adults with money of our own, will willingly shell out some bucks to get those old games. On the other hand, the fact that these same games can be downloaded with little or no effort means that the number of people specifically looking to obtain a physical copy of their favorite game will be limited.

So I think the collect-ability of a lot of games will in the long run be determined by how desirable it will be to actually own a physical copy of the game. I think Famicom games are actually on pretty safe ground there: the carts actually look cool. They come in a variety of colors and cartridge designs. Plus the Famicom is a marquee console in video game history which had an impact around the world.

I compare that to the Super-Famicom, which I don't think there will be much of a market for in the years ahead. To be certain there are a lot of great Super-Famicom games, but the actual physical carts themselves are pretty damned boring and ugly:
Plus they are a pain in the ass to store (they don't stack easily) and are a lot bulkier than Famicom carts (which makes them more expensive to ship). Also the Super-Famicom wasn't a revolutionary system like the Famicom, it was basically just a Famicom with better graphics. The Nintendo 64 with its 3D gameplay was the next big step after the Famicom in gaming evolution. This is probably one of the reasons why most retro game shops in Japan have massive stacks of Super-Famicom games going for as little as 10 yen each while their Famicom selections tend to be smaller and higher-priced.

So I think the market for Famicom games is probably going to be OK - in the sense that people will still buy and trade them in the future - though I don't think anybody is ever going to get rich off of them. This is a pretty healthy place for a collectible market to be - cheap enough so that people with limited budgets who do it solely for fun can still afford to buy most of the stuff out there.

Been busy the past month so I haven't been posting much, but I thought I'd put some pics of my hardware set ups.

Basically I have two famicoms: the old-school one and an AV famicom. I keep the old-school one in the kitchen hooked up to our spare TV:
The yellow box originally contained some sweets but it turned out to be the perfect size and shape for holding famicom games.

Upstairs is the AV Famicom:
I prefer the look of the old school, but the reception with the AV famicom is a million times better so I use this one more.

I've got it hooked up to our main TV along with a Super Famicom, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 2:
The Famicom gets played about as much as the other 3 put together.

In other news I added a few games to the collection this week. Its up to 420 total now:
Balloon Fight and Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari are pretty damned good games. The Ramen-man one on(lower left corner) on the other hand doesn't look to promising after firing it up yesterday. I picked these up at Hard-Off in the junk bin.

I've been meaning to put up a few pictures of some of the shops I frequent to purchase Famicom games. I stopped at a couple today and took some shots.

This first one is called Omocha Souko (which roughly means "Toy Warehouse") and is one of those general used toy/comic/CD/video game/musical instrument/clothes stores that have sprung up everywhere in the past decade or so. Those are also pretty much my favorite kind of store so I like this development.

This is probably the store I frequent the most. Its regular prices are about the same as everywhere else but every once in a while it will just dump a huge pile of Famicom (or other game) stuff on sale in the "junk" bins for insanely cheap prices. I've gotten a lot of my stuff this way. They didn't have much Famicom stuff in their junk piles today, though they did have a few Sega Dreamcast consoles for 300 yen (about 3ドル) each.

Its kind of a cool store with this Showa-retro decor. This is the entrance:
I actually got this picture from their website, here:

http://www.maxim-japan.com/work/direct/honten.html

This is their racks of Famicom and Super Famicom games:
They've got a pretty good selection. I wanted to take some pictures of their big Famicom display where they keep the stacks of consoles, but it is near the cash register and has a big "no photographs" sign next to it so unfortunately I couldn't get any.

Another shop nearby is this one:
I'm not sure how they don't get sued for this flagrant violation of this James Bond-related trademark, but somehow they seem to get by. Strangely they don't have any James Bond stuff for sale in the shop.

They've got a pretty decent Famicom selection here too, though they don't generally put Famicom stuff in their junk bins like Omocha Souko does so I haven't bought as many games here. This is, however, the place where I bought the very first Famicom game in my collection - Clu Clu Land.