Destructoid’s guide to collecting for Famicom
The Nintendo Family Computer (more commonly known as the Famicom) launched in 1983 in Japan, a full two years before its Western analog, the NES, debuted in North America. This was right as the video game market underwent a temporary implosion in other parts of the world and was strangely the best time possible for Nintendo to break into the home market.
Collecting for a Japanese console can cause some hesitation for an Anglophone. The fear is that the best games will remain in their native language, and you’ll be left with piles of RPGs where you can’t even navigate the menus. That can certainly be a problem as you get into later generations of consoles, but with the Famicom, there are a lot of great games that don’t require much reading comprehension.
To make things more tantalizing, the Famicom is a relatively cheap console to collect for. While the price of NES games have been climbing to upsetting levels over the past few years, the Japanese collector’s market hasn’t really moved much. Most titles in the system’s library don’t exceed $50, and many of them have a higher price tag because they’re regional variations of expensive NES titles.
Because of its accessibility and affordability, the Famicom has remained my favorite console to import for, so I’m going to share some of that knowledge with you.
The Famicom is a lot more than just the Japanese NES. While you can get nearly identical versions of popular titles like Super Mario Bros. and the Legend of Zelda on both platforms, the Famicom offers a whole world beyond that. If you love the NES but feel you’ve plumbed the depths of its library for all the gems it has to offer, then the Famicom is where you should go next.
When I started out with the Famicom, I mostly
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