I am a gamer, I love playing videogames. I own a PS4, a gaming PC and a Nintendo Switch console. When I arrived in Japan, I discovered quite a few retro gaming stores. Each one hosted countless retro games from old consoles and ones that date back to the early days of PC computers.
In Japan I found myself hanging around in retrogaming game stores for hours. It’s one of my favorite things I enjoyed doing alongside visiting the Japanese comics book stores.
My Favorite Retrogaming Store
My favorite retro gaming store was Super Potato (スーパーポテト), a Japanese video game store which is known for its collection of retrogames. It’s is known as Japan’s #1 retro gaming store. There are stores in Akihabara, Nagoya, Ikebukuro and five stores in Osaka, including Nipponbashi, Namba, Taisho, Showacho and Suminoe.
Those retrogaming stores have games for many gaming platforms, including Family Computer, Dreamcast, Game Boy, Nintendo 64, PC Engine, Gamer Gear, Sega Saturn, Mega Driver, Neogeo, Gameboy Advance, WonderSawn, Game Cube, and many other retro consoles and modern consoles as well.
However, the main reason you want to go there is to browse through and even play old classic videogames from as early as the 1st generations of video game consoles and personal computers.
A Museum of Videogames
For me, getting into one of these retro game stores is like being in a museum dedicated to the history of videogames. The first thing that I felt is oh boy how can I miss so many games. I wonder how many of those games I would be excited to play if I’ve tried them. We can only taste so far with the available free time we have.
Once you step into the store you are in a new world, a beautiful world of video games. You feel disconnected from the outside world. You hear retro-style 8bit sounds. It brought back so many childhood memories. I can’t imagine how it is like for the younger generation getting to know the history of gaming. It’s probably an exciting experience. Many people were born at that time and probably already at their late 40s. It’s a place where no matter what your age is if you love videogames, you’ll enjoy it.
Where is Sega Wonderboy?
The first early consoles that I had when I was a child were Commodore 64, Atari 2600, Master System and other gaming consoles that I forgot their names.
One of my favorite games was Wonderboy. I asked the seller the see if there is one released by Sega for Master System. I played Wonder Boy on that console, including the original “Wonder Boy in Monster Land”, “Wonder Boy The Mega Cartridge”, and “Wonder Boy III The Dragon’s Trap”. I was able to find that one, but it has a different package compared to the one that was released in the west.
I saw so many other classic games like Taito’s Space Invaders, Golden Axe, and many others retro games that I’ve played on early PCs on my CGA, EGA and VGA monitors (LOL, CGA).
My First Console Ever (I think)
In that store, I’ve discovered my first ever gaming console, which is the Nintendo Game & Watch. To be more precise, ‘Turtle Bridge’ Game & Watch. I remember that being the first one. On Super Potato it costs 32800 Japanese Yen. I don’t remember if I have it somewhere. Most of us just through old things away.
That console only played a specific game. So for each game, you had to buy new hardware. The reason I know it’s my first is because it was released between 1980 and 1991. I had the ‘Wide Screen’ if I am not mistaken, which was released between 1981-1982. At that time I was 5-6 years old.
At that time I might have had the Commodore 64 which was released 37 years ago (as of the time of writing) in August 1982. LOL, it has 20 KB, funny when you think about it. It ran on a Mos 1.023 MHz (NTSC) processor.
BTW, I asked the seller whether the shop has Commodore 64 games, but they didn’t. He told me that it counts as a Personal Computer (PC), not a gaming console. I’ve heard that The Commodore 64 is going to come back in a modern form. That would be so interesting. I’m sure there are emulators there that run those games, but I haven’t tried finding one.
Heaven for Gamers
Japan is a heaven for gamers, in a way that it offers gamers an option to dive into the past of video games of the Internet. You can even find books for many games. Gamers can look and see for themselves first hand how those games and consoles looked like. They can even buy classic gaming consoles and games for it.
There are many gamers who are only playing retro games. If you are one of those and you are in Japan, you might use that opportunity to buy games for your classic console while you are there.
As I mentioned, those Japanese retro gaming stores is a great experience. It’s like you entered a time machine and got to see how it was like playing games back then, even 40 years from now. Yes, time flies very fast, and the older we get, the more nostalgic things become.
Even if you are in your 20s, you’ll probably get excited seeing games and consoles from the time when you were a kid. I can’t wait to get back to those stores and spend more time discovering classic games and even play some. You just can’t get enough of it and not in your lifetime you’ll be able to go over all of those games and try them out. What you can do is dive your nose into them like a history book and give yourself the pleasure to play some of them.
Retro gaming is here to stay and I highly recommend, if you haven’t done so, to visit a retro gaming store in Japan. Thanks for reading.