Farewell, my Conker buyin'
The retro gaming' collector's bubble has definitely gone global. Prices on classic games around Tokyo have gone way up since the last time I was here, back in Sept. 2015. I'm seeing retro titles that have doubled in price, some that have even tripled. So much for Japan as a last bastion for cheap, interesting, classic gaming finds...!
Of all the outlandish price explosions I've seen in the brief time I've been in Japan, though, none compares to the skyrocketing costs of game music CDs. It makes me feel a lot better about the relatively small amount of money I've sunk into game vinyl over the past year. Check out these CDs, which you wouldn't think would be particularly spendy:
The yen-to-dollar exchange rate currently stands at 112:1, meaning that Donkey Kong Country 2 CD is selling for slightly more than $1400. No, I didn't forget a decimal point. That is fourteen-hundred American dollars. These four CDs here are the costliest game music collections I saw today at the Nakano Broadway mall (which contains about half a dozen shops that sell retrogames and related goods), and they all have one thing in common: They're all for Rare-developed games. Given the correlation between scarcity and price on collector's goods, you have wonder if perhaps someone misunderstood these "Rare CDs" as "rare CDs" and priced them accordingly. Or it could just be that someone really likes David Wise. A lot. I mean, yeah, he's great, but...
Anyway, the completely bonkers pricing on vintage games in my old cart-pilfering haunts means this is going to be a marvelously inexpensive trip to Japan. Most interesting games have priced themselves beyond the limits of what I consider reasonable, at least here in Tokyo.
