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- In my futile quest to track down a copy of Secret of Mana locally, I phoned the electronics department of the Montgomery Ward store in the town mall, and the employee burst out laughing when I told him the name of the game. I'm not sure why a title like "Secret of Mana" would send someone who worked in electronics over the edge, as there was no shortage of more implausible titles in more mainstream games. Maybe he was just covering the department for the day, though.
I had previously tried to find a copy of Mana in the local pawn shops, which Montana, being a state with legalized gambling, had in droves. RPGs were just too rare and too coveted by their owners ever to find their way into hock, though. I did, however, succeed with this tack for Phantasy Star III, which was little-loved even in its day.
(I backed off once I read reviews and learned that the game didn't really follow from PS2 storywise or in spirit, but before PS3's release, I was really het up to get the sequel to one of my favorite games. The prospect of PS3's retail price drove my father nuts, though, from more of a comparison than an objective standpoint: "You could get a whole software program for that!")
- Back when zines were still a viable platform, I subscribed to this zine that offered a smallish but extremely eclectic smattering of used videogames & systems, complete with black-and-white photos of the merchandise taken by the owner and smearily Xeroxed. This is how I got my copy of the original Phantasy Star, which was at the time a scarce & hot property. (The owner was devoted to the Atari era and didn't truck much with RPGs, complaining in one issue that he didn't want to "offer up his life" to a title that took dozens of hours to beat.) I actually sold my copy of PS3 to the magazine, but I regretted it (why?) and bought the game back when the person who purchased it traded it back in.
- A few of my RPGs were bought at this tiny independent game store that was in, effectively, a tiny two- or three-room yellow clapboard house, set off by itself on the deserted side of a road that ran past the town shopping center. I remember the shop primarily for my purchase of Phantasy Star IV, which was retailing for $100 at the time; the owner told me over the phone that he was selling it for his wholesale price, $80, because he didn't want to see anyone paying Sega's ridiculous retail price for the game. I haven't a clue whether $80 really was his wholesale for PS4, but he was certainly the least expensive option, and I was grateful to get the game for that.
- The shop didn't last that long past the point at the turn of the 16-/32-bit era where gaming got a bit more mainstream and titles that were considered "specialty" before became more widely available. I remember being struck by how unusual it was that I was able to get a hold of a copy of Chrono Trigger at Target. (It had even been advertised in the store's weekly circular, huge photo and everything.)
- I got my first arranged game soundtrack (Celtic Moon for FF4, I believe) through Diehard GameFan's in-house ads at the back of their magazine. At the time (early 32-bit era), GameFan was one of the very few places you could get import games and merchandise, and they really gouged you for the privilege. They sold the Son May pirated versions of soundtracks for $60, which was a complete ripoff, but I was so glad to get soundtracks and arranged versions of SNES RPG music that I didn't care even when I learned the truth later. They were an early window to Japan, and their ad spreads were fascinating reads.
- There was a point where I was obsessed with buying all things Final Fantasy IV (well, Final Fantasy II then). In the SNES days, this amounted, basically, to strategy guides: I would even buy generalized multi-title system-wide SNES guides from, say, Compute! magazine if they had a chapter on FFIV. I just wanted to read other people talking about a game I loved, which was a rarity in the pre-/ur-Internet days.
Anyhow, I think I've told this story before, but for some reason, my local video/bookstore occasionally carried copies of the UK gaming magazine Super Play, through which, in a roundabout way, I discovered the existence of Dawn, an artbook collecting Yoshitaka Amano's work on FF4. (Super Play wrote about a RPG zine that I ordered; they, in turn, mentioned the book in passing, I believe.) This book became a huge holy grail for me; the idea of an artbook from Japan dedicated to a videogame was a new and alien concept that went leagues above and beyond the books connected with FF4 I had at the time. I somehow found out (I think I contacted the zine's publisher) that the book could be bought from the U.K. comic shop Forbidden Planet, so I looked up Forbidden Planet's contact information from an ad in Super Play, requested a catalog from the place, waited for it to be delivered from Britain to the U.S., then placed an order for Dawn, and then waited for that to make its way across the Atlantic. I don't recall what I paid for the book in total, though I recall it being less than one would expect for a transaction that involved three continents. Dawn isn't really remarkable - you've seen all the FF4 art it has online (it's not like there are character sketches or anything), and I hardly look at the dang thing today. I think it was my first import game book, and it's memorable these days more for the lengths I took to hunt it down.
- Experiences in not purchasing games: my SNES copy of Final Fantasy III was sent to me by a penpal with whom I had exchanged the sum total of one letter at the time.
- The above penpal had eventually also sent me a copy of a VHS tape he'd made of a few of the anime sequences to Lunar: The Silver Star and all of the sequences in Eternal Blue. His enthusiasm was my gateway to the series, but I bought my copies second-hand; they didn't come with the manuals. I ordered replacements directly from Working Designs, but a couple months went by without them arriving. Now, I was on AOL at the time, and I had happened upon AOL's Lunar...forum? bulletin board? whatever the term was in those days, which was very occasionally frequented by...Victor Ireland. Victor had been silent for a while when conversation turned to a couple posters who were also experiencing delivery delays for merchandise they'd ordered from Working Designs. I mentioned my manuals in passing, then forgot about it - until a week later, when they promptly arrived. Of course, it could have been just serendipitous timing on the part of the USPS, but I remember the eerie feeling when I realized that my idle online chatter (posted under a variant of my real name) was actually being read by and getting back to somebody.
.
I had previously tried to find a copy of Mana in the local pawn shops, which Montana, being a state with legalized gambling, had in droves. RPGs were just too rare and too coveted by their owners ever to find their way into hock, though. I did, however, succeed with this tack for Phantasy Star III, which was little-loved even in its day.
(I backed off once I read reviews and learned that the game didn't really follow from PS2 storywise or in spirit, but before PS3's release, I was really het up to get the sequel to one of my favorite games. The prospect of PS3's retail price drove my father nuts, though, from more of a comparison than an objective standpoint: "You could get a whole software program for that!")
- Back when zines were still a viable platform, I subscribed to this zine that offered a smallish but extremely eclectic smattering of used videogames & systems, complete with black-and-white photos of the merchandise taken by the owner and smearily Xeroxed. This is how I got my copy of the original Phantasy Star, which was at the time a scarce & hot property. (The owner was devoted to the Atari era and didn't truck much with RPGs, complaining in one issue that he didn't want to "offer up his life" to a title that took dozens of hours to beat.) I actually sold my copy of PS3 to the magazine, but I regretted it (why?) and bought the game back when the person who purchased it traded it back in.
- A few of my RPGs were bought at this tiny independent game store that was in, effectively, a tiny two- or three-room yellow clapboard house, set off by itself on the deserted side of a road that ran past the town shopping center. I remember the shop primarily for my purchase of Phantasy Star IV, which was retailing for $100 at the time; the owner told me over the phone that he was selling it for his wholesale price, $80, because he didn't want to see anyone paying Sega's ridiculous retail price for the game. I haven't a clue whether $80 really was his wholesale for PS4, but he was certainly the least expensive option, and I was grateful to get the game for that.
- The shop didn't last that long past the point at the turn of the 16-/32-bit era where gaming got a bit more mainstream and titles that were considered "specialty" before became more widely available. I remember being struck by how unusual it was that I was able to get a hold of a copy of Chrono Trigger at Target. (It had even been advertised in the store's weekly circular, huge photo and everything.)
- I got my first arranged game soundtrack (Celtic Moon for FF4, I believe) through Diehard GameFan's in-house ads at the back of their magazine. At the time (early 32-bit era), GameFan was one of the very few places you could get import games and merchandise, and they really gouged you for the privilege. They sold the Son May pirated versions of soundtracks for $60, which was a complete ripoff, but I was so glad to get soundtracks and arranged versions of SNES RPG music that I didn't care even when I learned the truth later. They were an early window to Japan, and their ad spreads were fascinating reads.
- There was a point where I was obsessed with buying all things Final Fantasy IV (well, Final Fantasy II then). In the SNES days, this amounted, basically, to strategy guides: I would even buy generalized multi-title system-wide SNES guides from, say, Compute! magazine if they had a chapter on FFIV. I just wanted to read other people talking about a game I loved, which was a rarity in the pre-/ur-Internet days.
Anyhow, I think I've told this story before, but for some reason, my local video/bookstore occasionally carried copies of the UK gaming magazine Super Play, through which, in a roundabout way, I discovered the existence of Dawn, an artbook collecting Yoshitaka Amano's work on FF4. (Super Play wrote about a RPG zine that I ordered; they, in turn, mentioned the book in passing, I believe.) This book became a huge holy grail for me; the idea of an artbook from Japan dedicated to a videogame was a new and alien concept that went leagues above and beyond the books connected with FF4 I had at the time. I somehow found out (I think I contacted the zine's publisher) that the book could be bought from the U.K. comic shop Forbidden Planet, so I looked up Forbidden Planet's contact information from an ad in Super Play, requested a catalog from the place, waited for it to be delivered from Britain to the U.S., then placed an order for Dawn, and then waited for that to make its way across the Atlantic. I don't recall what I paid for the book in total, though I recall it being less than one would expect for a transaction that involved three continents. Dawn isn't really remarkable - you've seen all the FF4 art it has online (it's not like there are character sketches or anything), and I hardly look at the dang thing today. I think it was my first import game book, and it's memorable these days more for the lengths I took to hunt it down.
- Experiences in not purchasing games: my SNES copy of Final Fantasy III was sent to me by a penpal with whom I had exchanged the sum total of one letter at the time.
- The above penpal had eventually also sent me a copy of a VHS tape he'd made of a few of the anime sequences to Lunar: The Silver Star and all of the sequences in Eternal Blue. His enthusiasm was my gateway to the series, but I bought my copies second-hand; they didn't come with the manuals. I ordered replacements directly from Working Designs, but a couple months went by without them arriving. Now, I was on AOL at the time, and I had happened upon AOL's Lunar...forum? bulletin board? whatever the term was in those days, which was very occasionally frequented by...Victor Ireland. Victor had been silent for a while when conversation turned to a couple posters who were also experiencing delivery delays for merchandise they'd ordered from Working Designs. I mentioned my manuals in passing, then forgot about it - until a week later, when they promptly arrived. Of course, it could have been just serendipitous timing on the part of the USPS, but I remember the eerie feeling when I realized that my idle online chatter (posted under a variant of my real name) was actually being read by and getting back to somebody.
.
