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    Default Hardest game to get when it was brand new?

    Most games could be bought by simply going to a department store, electronics store, etc. But what about games that either were pulled from shelves right away, or maybe only a few stores carried them? Or maybe they were only available via mail order?

    The first that comes to mind is the Panesian NES games. How would you have gotten these? Sex shops? Mail order? I cant see Target selling those games.

    Stadium Events, I dont remember the full story behind, I just know there was some kind of licensing dispute.

    TurboGrafx16 I had never seen in stores as a kid. To this day, Ive never seen one for sale in person. I bought mine off pricecharting.com

    Urban Yeti could only be bought via mail order from what I am gathering. Wonder how many other games were like that?

    Super Noahs Ark 3D? What store would have even carried that?

    Basically what this boils down to is rarity I suppose but its not just artificial rarity in the way of people just tossing the game or hoarding it, making available copies hard to come by, but games that were destined to be obscure from the start

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    I want to say the Panesian games were at rental shops that carried adult movies. It's the only place I saw them and I swore I read or heard something back then confirming that thought.

    I could never find TG-16 titles locally. I had to go mail order out of magazines.

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    Any of the last releases for the Sega CD and the Saturn. Not many of them were made and most stores (at least around here) sold whatever they received as preorders. The few stores that actually put any on the floor jacked up their prices and sold them on the day that they put them out.
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    Quote Originally Posted by gbpxl View Post

    Super Noahs Ark 3D? What store would have even carried that?
    Some Christian bookstores carried the Wisdom Tree games. (I suspect that is how most of Wisdom Tree's sales were made.)
    Last edited by Natty Bumppo; 08-19-2019 at 10:06 PM.
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    They're certainly not THE hardest, but the hardest ones for me personally were Harvest Moon for SNES and Valkyrie Profile for PS1. My mom had a heck of a time trying to locate a copy of the former, checking many stores, and I myself struggled to find a copy of the latter. Granted, we weren't trying to get either of these on the actual day of release. Harvest Moon very well could've already been out for a couple months or more, and with Valkyrie Profile, I remember it was about four months past the release date. I called up stores that carried games one by one out of the phone book looking for Valkyrie Profile, and none had any copies except for an independent game store that had one single copy. So I snatched that up immediately.

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    I can't remember having a hard time finding certain games when I was younger. Likely because it was my mother going and buying them. I do remember seeing TurboGrafx 16 stuff in Lechmere back in the day. I remember playing a store demo of Keith Courage there a long time ago. I think KB Toys used to carry TG 16 too, but I could be wrong.

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    Short of certain mail-order computer titles for 1980s computers, I'd think the rarest Atari 2600 games have to take the cake on this one. Extra Terrestrials, Gamma Attack, Red Sea Crossing, Air Raid -- all would have been impossible to find unless you knew the right person, lived in the right geographic area, or happened to get a knock at your door.

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    Getting Super Mario 2 and then 3, Zelda II, Metroid, when they were just released, was mighty tough. Sold out all over the place. As for these obscure titles everyone is mentioning, I wouldn't have even heard about them.
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    Quote Originally Posted by goldenband View Post
    Short of certain mail-order computer titles for 1980s computers, I'd think the rarest Atari 2600 games have to take the cake on this one. Extra Terrestrials, Gamma Attack, Red Sea Crossing, Air Raid -- all would have been impossible to find unless you knew the right person, lived in the right geographic area, or happened to get a knock at your door.
    So why were those games hard to find?

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    I had a heck of a time getting a copy of SEGA AGES for the Saturn when it released. I'm not sure why, because Saturn games were never scarce in my neck of the woods. Even Panzer Dragoon Saga wasn't hard to get where I lived. There were plenty of copies at our Toys 'R' Us.

    With SEGA AGES though, it was several weeks (possibly months) after the release date until I tracked down a copy from Electronics Boutique, IIRC.

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