I have a bunch of these! Here are two I can think of right now:
Magic Knight Rayearth:
This was maybe only 5 years ago. I was at a game store in Culver City with some friends, which has kind of variable quality in terms of what’s in there. They have their valuable games behind glass as most do, but they also have racks in the center of the store. On one rack there was Magic Knight Rayearth, just sitting out in the open with no price tag. The manual had the stickers still in it and everything. So I bought it up to the counter and asked, “so… how much is this?”
And the cashier went “let me just look that up for you,” and I was like “well, here we go” assuming I was about to get a big ebay sticker price. And then she says “that’ll be 15 dollars.”
I tried to hide my feelings. The game was about $200 even then. “Yeah, I’ll get this but I’ll keep looking around,” I said. Anyway, I bought it, and all my friends were wide eyed with horror. @Personasama was there and can confirm. After we got outside he was like “HOW MUCH DID YOU GET THAT FOR” and when I told him he started hitting me with the plush he bought (or maybe he already had the plush, I forget, either way he smacked me with it heh). Took it home and played it straight through and had a great time!!
Buster Bros:
The story is in this thread
but basically there was an old store called Games Plus, that I never saw or went to. But I knew of it because my favorite childhood game store, Knights Video Games in Fremont, CA, bought some of their stock when they went under. I got a LOT of import games (and especially turbo grafx/PCE games) that had Games Plus stickers on them, as well as a few american games like… magical chase (for $6). A bunch of my games have Games Plus stickers and it just sort of became part of my game life.
Anyhoo, 20 years later I was browsing a shop in Concord, CA, and I saw this copy of Buster Bros:
Games plus returns again!!! I’m probably not keeping it because like… turns out I already had a clean one. But some part of me wants to keep it for the memories, and just because of the oddity of finding games from the same defunct company in two different unrelated game stores 20 years apart?
@cera I get the sense you’re probably too young to have gone to Games Plus while it existed, but it WAS in San Jose, so I wonder!!