Renewed interest in vintage Japanese video games is drawing buyers to the country\u2019s\u00a0online markets and retro gaming shops. While enthusiasts have collected old titles for years, even casual gamers are now snapping up cartridges and CDs, as well as gaming machines that they haven\u2019t played since childhood.<\/p>\n
Although retro gaming is considered a tiny fraction of the $109 billion global industry, it\u2019s an attractive niche market. Last year\u2019s re-release of Nintendo Co.\u2019s first NES\/Famicom console sold out quickly, and the same is happening for this year\u2019s follow-up, the classic version of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Given Nintendo\u2019s dominance of the home video game market in the 80s, it\u2019s no surprise then that much of the buying and selling is happening in Japan.<\/p>\n
\u201cRetro games take me back to my childhood,\u201d said Davide Convertino from Italy, on his fourth trip to Japan to pick up older titles. \u201cRetro gaming is an art. It\u2019s simple but stimulating, you never get bored of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Convertino was shopping at Super Potato,\u00a0a store in Akihabara, Tokyo\u2019s electronics district. Games and machines from decades past are packed into three floors. There are Neo Geo and Sega Genesis consoles, and multicolored GameBoys and Nintendo 64 controllers hanging neatly along racks. In one glass display case is the holy grail of Famicom titles: the Kinnikuman Muscle Tag Match gold version, estimated to be worth 2,000,000 yen ($18,200).<\/p>\n
\u201cAkihabara has always been a gaijin hotspot, but the number of tourists in the last four, five years have been especially high,\u201d\u00a0said Yuhei Kitabayashi, Super Potato\u2019s\u00a0manager. \u201cNow, we\u2019re making half our revenue from tourists.\u201d<\/p>\n
Online sales are also booming, because not everyone can make the pilgrimage to Akihabara.\u00a0Drew Steimel, who runs DKOldies, a Pennsylvania-based retro game trader, says that he sold almost $3 million worth of vintage games online last year, compared with just a few hundred dollars on EBay when he first started out. \u201cWe have been selling retro games for over 13 years and have seen the market grow every year,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The online market remains heavily reliant on retro video games from Japan and neighboring countries, with more than half of titles on EBay coming from Asia, based on a search online. Often, games sold via online marketplaces fetch higher prices: a copy of Mario Party 2 offered at 490 yen\u00a0at Super Potato was listed at 3,000 to 10,000 yen on Yahoo! Auctions and EBay.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we first started, our biggest customer was the 30-year-old looking to buy back their past,\u201d Steimel said. \u201cThere are now new competitors like Nintendo itself releasing the NES Classic and SNES classic systems, but this is only making the market bigger than before. We have seen growth in all of our target age groups, especially the 20-year-olds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even Sega Sammy Holdings Inc., once a major rival to Nintendo before Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. even considered making consoles, is seeking to capitalize on the retro boom. It released this week Sonic Mania, a revival game made in collaboration with the game\u2019s most enthusiastic fans, including programmers and artists.<\/p>\n
For some shoppers, however, nothing beats browsing the aisles of a store like Super Potato, where tourists wearing anime T-shirts make their way through the maze of shelves. On the fifth floor, there\u2019s even a retro arcade where people can play vintage games. Salarymen with rolled-up shirtsleeves are hunched over big screens, amid the cacophony of 8-bit soundtracks. Cigarette smoke is thick in the air, as they sip on glass Coca Cola\u00a0bottles.<\/p>\n
For factory worker Shigeki Nakamura, visiting retro stores and browsing shelves of dusty games is stress relief. He was searching through the store for first-generation PlayStation titles, especially ones he may have once owned and played. \u201cI feel like a kid again,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Renewed interest in vintage Japanese video games is drawing buyers to the country\u2019s\u00a0online markets and retro gaming shops.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":224862,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[32260,1351,45378],"class_list":["post-224858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","tag-gaming","tag-japan","tag-retro-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224858"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224858"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224864,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224858\/revisions\/224864"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}