Somewhere I have the SNES cart for chrono trigger with the price label of $10, if its not faded.

I bought it in the mid-90s. You have to remember that before Final Fantasy 7, RPGs in America were NOT popular. People always cite the poor marketing of Earthbound as the reason it failed. I always say it’s because it released in 1995, at a higher price than most SNES games, at a time when RPG popularity was at an all time low. If it had released in 1997, and at a standard price, it may have done gangbusters.

Even Super Mario RPG wasn’t a hit at first, but then picked up sales as the months went on.

The guy selling Chrono Trigger at a games/music/video resale shop said “I’m surprised you’re buying this game. You sure you don’t want to play it a bit first? Save you the hassle of returning it later”. He meant well, but I actually did mean to buy it.

I also bought earthbound, with book, for $10 from the same place. It always smelled like weed in there. Mostly because the employees would smoke weed, pick out cds they wanted to hear over the stores speaker system, and then play video games stoned out of their minds.

Then they got bought out, and now it’s a corporate run store. Same resale model, but SUUUUPER corporate. You cannot fimd deals, and they give you gamestop prices for your trade-ins.

They didn’t even used to have reciepts. They would just stamp the price sticker with a stamp that they adjusted the date on. And they weren’t super strict on dates either. If your sticker said you bought it 19 days ago instead of 14 days ago, they’d usually be like “aw man, it’s cool.” As long as it wasn’t some bullshit like 3 months. Basically as long as you weren’t trying to game the system.

One time I went to a grocery store that sells closeouts. One of todays items was a huge stack of game boy games. $5 each, but it was the same game. So I buy one, and I take it there. I explain the situation. I say “hey, will I get the same price in resale each copy?” He says yes. So I traded in my copy for $15. Then took that money, bought 2 more copys (tax), traded those in for $30, took that money, bought 5 more copies, traded those in, and then went and bought 2 more copies traded those in, and bought a brand new game boy advance from them. I took $6 and essentially turned it into a brand new GBA which had only been released a few months prior.

I miss that store. It technically still exists, but I miss the spirit of what that store used to be.