by David Teraoka
My childhood spans four console generations and hundreds of unfinished RPGs and FPS and RTSes. My childhood invented the Wavebird(how fucking cool is that name). My screens had the brightest, fuzziest scanlines which would melt your HD 1080p-watching eyeballs. The absolute dogshit RPG Maker games made about depression that are a shadow of MY CHILDHOOD, a mere 16 years ago.
Your childhood is worth a lot less than my childhood.
I’ve spent mine. It’s gone. I’ve sold it all. I never had a sense of ownership; As I got older, the glow at the bottom of a pit that is technological advancement stole my engagement. I traded the N64 for a Sega Dreamcast, which was then traded in for a GameCube, and subsequently traded for a Nintendo Wii. With every GameStop interaction, I took a fraction of what I paid at retail, and only dust remains.
A sealed copy of Mario 1 on the NES sold for 2.8 million dollars. If you had acquired a new copy of Mario from the store in 1987 and spent $100 USD and put it in a plastic box untouched, you would be able to make a return on that investment by a factor of “you will never need to work a day in your life” This is the path out of financial hardships that so many millennials seek. The market is furious with wannabe AVGNs digging through their closets and watching eBay sold listings. It’s nothing but an artificial goal meant to encourage temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
We are seeing an unprecedented amount of commodification this year. Gibson is selling shares in guitars. You can buy a single shred of fabric from a collectible sneaker. NFTs have people paying millions of dollars for some really hideous JPEGs. Pokemon cards can now be considered intergenerational wealth. This has anyone with the perception of value grasping at straws; people are really out here trying to manipulate the aftermarket for less than $300.
The WATA video game market manipulation scandal continues to unfold. The founders are selling their own video games with zero disclosure; they have admitted the company’s modus operandi is price increases, not the noble pursuit of history and preservation. This is a fool’s idea of history and the fetishization of purposeless objects. Any game within these plastic slabs contributes to a historical canon that evolves, but not the slabs themselves. These objects only bring us joy through the thought and effort invested into them. That nostalgia gains power when we let someone sell it to us. After all, where else can we feel personal value within the soulless commodity market?
it may be necessary to find the person who buys this and kill them
You can’t inject a barrel of oil into your GameCube to create gain. A fragile mini-disk holding the data for Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door will cost you at least twice the retail price. The GameCube, a machine that is practically unbreakable, might cost you about the same unless you’ve got Modern Hardware, which runs around $300 dollars on Entok if there’s even a Gamecube available with the HDMI adapter. Everything else is dubious in authenticity; Replica Gamecube controllers today are in high enough demand for Smash Brothers Melee that they are reproduced professionally. Nobody gives a shit about the accessories.
But instead of paying $20, $30, for something physical, why not let a corporation sell you the ROMs for the same price? Nintendo is addicted to artificial scarcity. There is no other way to enjoy video games according to the Nintendo Corporation of Japan. We’ve seen the reputation it’s given them and the ruined projects left in their wake. An emulation site recently lost a dramatic legal battle, concluding with Nintendo forcing the owner to destroy all files containing these games and winning a $50/month injunction against the owner so they can cover $10 million dollars in reparations. Businesses still leap at the chance to sell you something you already own.
Nintendo will not let you play their games if you cannot purchase them. The distribution of un-purchasable video games is a crime so severe, it would put you in debtor’s prison for the entirety of your life, jail time notwithstanding.
Instead of punishment, we should slab these historians and preservationists who understand value. We should put them on the pedestal we have reserved for the plastic. There are tons of games that are lost to time. The merit of a game like LSD Dream Simulator for the PS1, released 23 years ago, might have been left in obscurity if it required purchase of what is now a $270 loose CD.
My altar will be built to pray to the Internet Archive, where there are unlimited copies and backups and copies of those backups. My hope is these remain shareable throughout the web-o-sphere. To argue against preservation is to argue against history and innovation. Without these copies, we would lose the phenomenal romhacking/translating/modding projects that spit in the face of IP law to iterate on the work. Holding a game on a CD, a cartridge, or Blu-ray cannot compete on a theoretical level.
Beware the False Prophets; LimitedRun, Special Reserve Games, Strictly Limited Games, and Super Rare Games, and any manufacturer that willfully engages in artificial scarcity. These people are preservationists motivated by profit. Founder of LimitedRun’s Douglas Bogart’s recent essay in Lock-On details the meticulous navigating of corporate licenses required to get something even as insignificant as a mediocre beat-em up re-released.
And what revelry there was. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is available to purchase on digital storefronts for $14.99. But the collector’s edition, which includes several extremely important tchotchkes with multiple variants, cost up to $250 USD. The listings on eBay go higher. But at least since this is their most anticipated release, it won’t have the quality control issues, or significant upsells on packaging, or “collectible cards”, or poor customer service in case of returns, or supply delays like the rest of their products!
Is this what preservation looks like? Is this accessibility? Trading and reselling these short-run products for hundreds of dollars that do not benefit the developers or artists. I’d like to think I understand the limitations of manufacturing; that it’s impossible to keep these games in an
unlimited capacity. Unfettered capitalism must seek growth in profit and scale. There will always be profit in scarcity.
And as I sit here with my cartridges and disks and Wavebirds I can only come to one narrow conclusion. Fuck it. Funge all of the tokens you can.
If there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, then we are free to participate in it at the same time we criticize it. The guilty party is the entire structure I have presented, not the people in it. Video games have historically been entwined with the advancement of technology and paid for by corporations. Those who invested early gave us the art we enjoy today and we can celebrate it. But the private businesses profiting off the preservation and sometimes degradation of these games should not go unnoticed.
Buying a collectors edition and supporting independent artists’ art like a Celeste Special Edition or a copy of the book from Return of the Obra Dinn can be a celebration of skill, representation, and endurance. Those who commodify these things do not care for this to happen; anything can have value once people start purchasing it. The cyclical relationship between producers, resellers, scalpers, and investors masquerading as collectors may never be undone.
In the end, I try not to support it. I’m working in the free market. I live in it. I spend my money within communities filled with other collectors that feel immaturely morally superior for reselling things at a negligibly smaller profit margin. I trade amongst the many other commodity holders within a network fostered through personal, yet virtual, connections. I make the closest friends I’ve had in years. I leap at the chance to purchase unlicensed reproductions sold on Etsy. I steal all my content that I cannot acquire otherwise. And I will thank the Devil every goddamn day.