Oh, the Magical Chase at Radio Shack ... did they have to special order it for you? Or was it there on the shelf? Radio Shack was one of TZD's longest running retailers. I could still walk into a Shack here in Roanoke as late as 2005 and they would be able to order Turbo games for me. Steve at one point did confirm for me, it was him they were ordering from.
lol, they wouldn't special order a game for $5.
It was in a clearance bin along with Cotton and a Duo Tap and a Duo Pad or two that I bought for the same price. Before that visit to the store, I had been mail ordering Duo games like DEII, Madden and Lords from them for $20 each for about a year. Radio Shack in Canada was not affiliated with the American company. They licensed the name and carried a lot of the same things though.
They definitely never dealt with TZD, since they refused to sell to Canadians. When they eventually gave us the privelage of dealing with them, they wanted something ridiculous like $30 shipping per game. Whatever it was, it made the games much more (double?) expensive than anywhere else online. I don't remember if I actually went through with a transaction with TZD in the last year or so, but I at least contacted them to find that they were finally charging reasonable prices to sell to Canadians.
Radio Shack in both Canada and the U.S. was definitely one of the longest running
NEC and TTi retailers. I doubt that Radio Shacks in the U.S. kept selling Turbo games for TZD through the 32-bit generation. They definitely stopped in Canada when TTi went under.
Read my post again. I'm not talking about the number of copies that were in stores (Games To Go was a second hand store c.1995-98). I'm talking about why there are most likely fewer copies of MC in existence than any other Turbochip.
Yeah, but none of that is unique to Magical Chase.
I believe that there may be as few copies of Magical Chase in existence as any TurboChip, but I've still seen it around as often as other games and for a long time, much more than games like Darkwing Duck. Plus I've yet to find games like Darkwing Duck, Ghost Manor and Hero Tonma, in the wild, but I did find Magical Chase bitd. There may even be fewer copies of MC than any other TurboChip game, but it can't be a big difference, unless only a few hundred were made and for some reason they're always for sale.
What makes you think it is a third party release?
OK, it was a no-name Quest game released by TTI. It's still the second-to-last Turbochip, it's not Bonk 3, and there's the bulldozed stock report. Whether or not you believe it, these are the only things we have to go on aside from personal accounts of how many times each of us have happened to see individual games. If anyone can present a plausible theory for why Darkwing Duck or Hero Tonma are rarer, I'm all ears.
I only skimmed the posts for a while, but I didn't see anything in that story claiming that they singled out Magical Chase for destruction.
I don't doubt that many people are sitting on copies of Magical Chase though, like TZD did. Many "investment" minded people were hoarding games like MC back when it was only hard to find, but hadn't skyrocketed artificially.
I was always under the impression that Steve got his hands on everything. There was no bulldozing specifically because of him (TZD).
It seems unlikely that a startup company could afford all of TTI's unused stock. See the link above.
BTW, is Steve's record store still around? I thought that went under too.
Does it seem likely that once they gave up on trying to sell the stock at the prices the few takers could only afford to buy so much of, that instead of calling them up and saying "just take the rest", they instead spent money on destroying everything? If they were looking to lose money, why not just destroy everything in the first place?
Making theories about why Magical Chase could technically be the rarest of all doesn't prove anything unfortunately. If we could magically find out how many copies of any game currently exist and it turned out that MC was way lower than the rest, then these kinds of theories would offer possible explanations. But we don't even know how rare any game really is. All that we do know is that there are a lot of people with an interest in keeping MC inflated and are actively working towards feeding every aspect of the hype. At this point, with the game being held hostage by buttery 133t collectors, it's the same difference.
