A Game Made Its Way Back to Its Home

[fcgamer]

About a week ago I purchased a set of Famicom games online.  There were a few games I wanted in the set for my personal collection, and I figured I would resell the rest, or trade them.  Well today the games arrived in the mail.

Everything looked good, as I was testing it.  I then discovered one of the carts had a label on the back with an address on it, from the store where it was purchased.  The store happened to be in the same district / town where I currently live.  Now, I know where the game stores are (well were...the main one moved out of business about 6 months ago) in my town, and I've cleaned them out.  I checked the address on Google Maps and it turns out that the one game in the lot I purchased was originally bought from the former game shop literally 30 seconds from my apartment!  That's something really cool, when I checked that game store out they only had one or two Famicom games left, and mostly modern stuff, before closing up and a tea shop taking over.  For me, it feels great that a Famicom game made its way back home, basically to where it started out originally in its adventure. 

[Zycrow]

I like it when games have stickers or labels showing what store they came from. I think it adds a bit of personal history to the game that's missing in a spotless copy. I have several NES games from my childhood that we purchased from our local rental shop when they were selling all their NES stuff - they're still in the plastic clamshell boxes with the rental shop's label and "one day rental" stickers applied. The shop is long-gone, so it's all the more precious to me.

But to your story, I had a similar experience back in high school. I was living in Mobile, Alabama, about 1,500 miles away from where I grew up in Maine. When I was a kid, my family would often visit a rental shop in Wiscasset called Sounds Easy Video (a small chain, now gone). They had several game systems set up so you could demo the games before renting them. While waiting for my parents I would go through and try lots of different SNES games.

So fast-forward to high school in Alabama. For a number of years my best friend had been seeking out a rare SNES game called EVO: The Search for Eden. We'd go to all the local game stores and flea markets looking for this game. Finally, one day, he found it at an EB Games (back when they carried old-school stuff). When he showed it to me, I noticed it had a silver rental store security sticker on the back.

As you've probably guessed, the sticker had the name and address of the same Sounds Easy Video - again, 1,500 miles away - that I frequented as a kid. So it's possible that I saw that same copy of the game in that shop in those days, though I don't remember playing it.

[Nightstar699]

I also think it's cool, adds a little bit of extra historic novelty to your game. Especially in the case of it being a sticker to a store that no longer exists.