Finding old cartridge owners

Prompted by receiving some Famicom items, something came to my mind which I put on Twitter today:


I get these things all the time -- NES or Famicom carts that have kids' names written on them (often full names). Like the Rockman 3 cart Zycrow sent me has 佐々文木のり (SASAKI Fuminori) written on it, and I have some NES carts with miscellaneous North American kids' names on them as well.

It makes me wonder about the origins and the history -- how did the cart end up in their hands? Did they buy it? Trade for it? What those kids' lives were like then? Do they even remember writing their names on the cartridges (wouldn't be surprised if parents did this for obvious reasons)?

It'd be interesting to track those people down and just ask them general questions, like 10 minutes of their time, that sorta thing. I imagine the stories and details vary immensely, but I also bet there are some interesting stories (using myself as an example, although I never wrote my names on cartridges (magazines yes, carts no), I used to have a copy of Dragonfire for the Atari 2600 but lost it in a bet at school with a friend of mine -- I just wish I could remember what the bet was about, because whatever it was, it was enough to make me *never* make bets on anything ever again :P).

I think most Japanese people would just react with confusion and alarm. They'd think you were stalking their childhood selves. (Read Dickens' Great Expectations for an idea of what that must feel like.)

For example...

http://www.chrismcovell.com/secret/week ... puter.html

The girl pictured on this book's cover e-mailed me last year asking her to remove the pictures of her & her brother, even though it was a widely-distributed published book from 1989(!). I blurred her & her brother's faces and removed all mention of their names, which were also printed in the same book(!)

Arrrgh. Handwriting and stickers on game cartridges is a pet peeve of mine. I mean, how hard is it to keep track of which carts belong to you? Did those kids' friends have a habit of borrowing multiple copies of the same game from different people and then mixing them up?

Anyway, just MHO.

Why not put your name on a cartridge you own? Why should you be concerned about some collector who is going to own it in 20 years? Which of you paid full price for the cartridge?

Of course it was perfectly in their right to do whatever they wanted with the games they or their parents had bought. I just don't see the point in ruining the appearance of something you've bought just because you can.

It's more important to some people to be able to get the game back after lending it than to make sure the casing looks pretty.

I'm not saying it's what I'd do, but it seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Did you lend games much as a kid? It's not always easy sorting it out and getting them back! Kids are very unreliable.

I only had a few NES games as a kid, so I was usually the lendee
But I tried to take as good care of the games I loaned as I did of my own, and I certainly made sure to return them. When I sold my original NES and games back in the late '90s I still had all the boxes and dust sleeves for them (and the manuals too IIRC), and of course I hadn't marked them in any way The PCB in my SMB3 cart was a bit loose, but that was another kid's fault.

Here's something that may have prompted Japanese kids to write their names on their cartridges:

While browsing bootgod's NES Cart Database, I've noticed that the back label on Irem Famicom cartridges seems to always have a NAME blank for you to write your name in.

If you were a kid who got an Irem cartridge and saw that NAME blank, maybe you'd think that was a good idea and put your name on all of your other cartridges too.

Whenever I buy a used game with a name Sharpied on it, I usually try to leave it intact.

My brother said he was at a used game shop once, and found a bunch of games that used to belong to a kid he went to school with. I remember he'd always bring the extra awesome NES games over to our house, like Mega Men and Kirby's Adventure.