I never expected my thoughts on Super Potato’s prices to get this much attention. I’ve been a retro game collector for around 20 years. Around 2005, I became interested in arcade games and started collecting arcade boards. That was when I discovered MVS, and I also started collecting Neo Geo AES around the same time.
I still remember it clearly. My first AES game was SVC (this photo was taken in 2005), and it cost exactly 15,000 yen. I was genuinely shocked when I saw that price. It felt surprising that a game that had already been out for years could still sell for that much, but at the same time it also felt expensive and intimidating. Back then, demand wasn’t high enough for auctions to be a major factor, so most games had fixed prices and often sat on shelves for a long time without selling.
I spent years enjoying and collecting retro games that way. But eventually, people in Korea started realizing there was money to be made from it. More and more people began buying retro games cheaply and reselling them for profit. I think this started around 2012. People realized that the old retro games sitting in their homes actually had value, so they started checking second-hand market prices and listing them for increasingly higher amounts.
The funny thing was that when someone put a game up for sale at a certain price, other people would actually comment that it was “too cheap.” Prices gradually started rising beyond the actual value of the games themselves and became increasingly unreasonable.
Around that same time, foreign buyers had already started sweeping through Japan, and prices in physical stores began reaching several times what collectors were paying among themselves. Korea’s market became distorted because of resellers, and Japan probably went through a similar situation due to overseas demand.
But even taking all of that into account, the prices I saw at Super Potato this time honestly felt like prices that were basically saying, “Please don’t buy this.”
It’s unfortunate to see retro gaming culture change this way, but there have also been positives. More people can now connect, share stories, and relate through a common love of games. My own SNS channel only exists because there were people out there who shared that same passion for retro gaming.
We can’t go back to the way things used to be, but I hope everyone can continue enjoying the hobby in their own way.