I burned most of my lunch break today driving to three stores hunting for a NES Classic Edition, and I came up empty every single time. Target had a sign at the electronics counter that just said "check back Thursday," which is store-speak for "we have no idea." Best Buy didn't even bother with a sign. The guy at GameStop laughed at me a little, not unkindly, but still.
Nintendo put this thing out on November 11th at $59.99 and it has not been available anywhere near retail price since roughly November 11th at 9:05am. Thirty games built into a tiny plastic box shaped like the original console, HDMI out, two controller ports with those short little cords that are going to annoy everyone sitting more than four feet from their TV. I dont even care about the cord length complaints, honestly, Ill sit close. Im also fairly sure my TV has never been that far from the couch in my life.
What gets me is the eBay listings. Im looking at completed sales right now and theyre closing anywhere from $150 to just under $300, for a unit that cost sixty bucks to buy and probably four dollars to manufacture. Thats not a knock on the people reselling them, capitalism gonna capitalism, but it does mean anyone who actually wants to plug in and play Mega Man 2 for nostalgia's sake instead of flipping it for rent money is mostly out of luck until sometime next year.
Nintendo has said, in the vaguest corporate language possible, that theyre "working to increase supply," which is the same thing every company says when it badly misjudged how much people wanted a product. And I get why they misjudged it. Who could have known that a cheap, well-made throwback to childhood, released right as everyone's Black Friday brain kicks in, would sell out instantly? Apparently not the people who decided initial shipments would be in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands.
Theres a version of this story where I get annoyed about scalper bots and third-party resellers, and sure, thats part of it. But mostly Im just annoyed at myself for not preordering something that, in hindsight, was obviously going to be the toy-store equivalent of a Tickle Me Elmo. I had eleven days of warning and I spent them assuming Id just wander into a store closer to the holidays and grab one. Rookie move on my part.
Meanwhile this is also the week the early Black Friday ad leaks started circulating, so the NES Classic panic is getting swallowed into a bigger wave of doorbuster hype. $250-off TV deals, $99 Chromebooks, the usual stampede-adjacent nonsense. The PS4 Pro launched a couple weeks back too, on November 10th, and between that and this the shelf space at my local Best Buy for anything console-shaped is basically a battlefield right now.
If you actually want one of these things without paying scalper tax, the advice going around forums right now is to check smaller regional stores early on a weekday morning rather than the big chains on a weekend, since the big chains get cleaned out by resellers with alerts set up faster than any human can react. I tried a weekday lunch break, which apparently still wasnt early enough. Next time Im setting an alarm.
None of this is really about the NES Classic itself, which by every account is a genuinely well-made little device with a surprisingly good game selection (Ninja Gaiden and Punch-Out are both on there, tucked in among stuff like Kirby's Adventure and Super C). Its more about how bad companies still are at predicting demand for anything that hits a nostalgia nerve directly. We saw the same thing with retro reissue toys years back. You'd think by 2016 someone in a supply chain meeting would raise their hand and say "hey, what if we made a lot more of these," but here we are again.
Anyway. If anyone local sees one sitting on a shelf somewhere, text me.