qualitydisc
Member
Some of the most famous retro game shops in Akihabara are looking pretty bare lately. Chris Kohler and DCharlie have been tweeting a lot about it in the past few days, calling it "The Great Super Potato Famine of 2016."
Here are some photos
This is by no means a new phenomenon. Foreigners have been buying up stuff since the retro game market started heating up a few years ago. But I have never seen it this pronounced.
A post on http://pcengine.jp/ says "The number of foreigners who have been buying up PC Engine software suddenly got much worse in 2015." Also the release of the RetroFreak clone console (which plays Hu Cards) has revived interest in the PC Engine platform in particular.
I am by no means innocent of this. I lived in Japan in 2011-2013 and when it was time to go home, I mailed about 45 big boxes back to the States, most of which were retro games.
Random tangent: If you know anything about Japanese art history, I see some parallels to the popularity of woodblock prints in the early 20th century. They were cheap to make, and foreigners (especially the French) were crazy about them, and as a result, there was a huge exodus of prints out of the country to Europe and America.
EDIT: Chris Kohler wrote an article about this back in September, about which there is a thread here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1114087
Here are some photos
This is by no means a new phenomenon. Foreigners have been buying up stuff since the retro game market started heating up a few years ago. But I have never seen it this pronounced.
A post on http://pcengine.jp/ says "The number of foreigners who have been buying up PC Engine software suddenly got much worse in 2015." Also the release of the RetroFreak clone console (which plays Hu Cards) has revived interest in the PC Engine platform in particular.
I am by no means innocent of this. I lived in Japan in 2011-2013 and when it was time to go home, I mailed about 45 big boxes back to the States, most of which were retro games.
Random tangent: If you know anything about Japanese art history, I see some parallels to the popularity of woodblock prints in the early 20th century. They were cheap to make, and foreigners (especially the French) were crazy about them, and as a result, there was a huge exodus of prints out of the country to Europe and America.
EDIT: Chris Kohler wrote an article about this back in September, about which there is a thread here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1114087