Although years had passed since I moved out of my childhood home and started living abroad, I’ve never managed to bring all my entire collection with me, and everything left behind are now buried deep inside one of the storage rooms.
During my latest visit back home last week I managed to retrieve 3 important items from that buried collection and brought them back with me. Here’s one of them:
Back in 1997, players who bought Nintendo 64 in Japan can enter a lottery, in which 10000 winners were drawn and received mail-in kits for them to pack and mail in their Gen I games so that they can receive their prize - an event Pikachu with the move Surf.
What you see in the photo is a (used) mail-in kit which includes the box, letter of congratulations, mail-in instructions and return letter (received with the returned games). The only thing missing is the ID label that must be attached to the game when mailing in.
Maybe I should also try to get a flyer of that campaign to make this set even more complete. lol
oh my god!!! this is one of the coolest things i’ve seen in this forum. if you’ve got a AP i’m sure you have a way to backup that save? battery hot-swaps exist but still, pls don’t leave it to the mercy of a 30yo battery
Also found a random copy of Crystal lying around, sealed but in a pretty bad condition so definitely not gonna grade it. This is not one of the 3 important items though…
The second important item is a pair of Traditional Chinese guide books for Crystal version published by Taiwanese publisher Ching Win.
The guides are localized copies of the Japanese Nintendo Official Guide originally published by Shogakukan. Ching Win is authorized by Shogakukan to localize their works - including comic magazines such as CoroCoro and guide books like these - to Traditional Chinese and publish them in Taiwan. The original Japanese copies had both story walkthrough and Pokédex printed in the same book, but Ching Win decided to publish them separately, which allows players to purchase whichever fits their needs.
What’s so special about these guide books is that before late 2000s, copyright infringements are very common in Asia (outside Japan), so before Ching Win could finish the lengthy review and authorization process with Shogakukan, illegal publishers had already sold thousands of pirated copies of the guides, and very few players had the patience to wait for Ching Win’s “official” copy.
(This photo shows the pirated copy. Note that there is another company called “群英社” who got the rights to release Pokémon TV episodes in Taiwan - this illegal publisher just happened to share the same Chinese name with that company and wasn’t authorized to release any Pokémon media.)
So in the end, sales of Ching Win’s official copy was abysmal, and Ching Win stopped printing them soon after release. Not until years later did most collectors found out about this copy and started looking for one, but it’s already too late and the copies had become extremely hard to find.
