Capcom to re-release $100 'Street Fighter II' SNES cartridges

https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/31/street-fighter-ii-snes-cartridge-re-release/

Capcom remains on the cutting edge once again as why push the genre forward when people literally want Street Fighter II (and Mega Man 2).

Good. Finally we can have red cartridges along side our copies of DOOM SNES! They should have gone with blue, but I guess red is cheaper due to an abundance of iron. Odd they'd go with the original rather than one of the upgrades.... but they another year those upgrades may happen leading the way to Super Street Fighter II!

Cool move by Capcom, but I have a couple of questions.

Why a cartridge shipped in a paper box, made out of plastic and a primitive by today's standards chip must cost 100$ (especially when it is just a re-release of a well known SNES game, that already had plenty of copies in the market)?

And let's say I was a SNES owner, which apparently I am not. Why shouldn't I prefer a boxed version from Ebay, instead of this one (it would be at least half the money in cost)?

Is this just about the red cartridge, because that's the only logical reason I see and truth be told, red cartridges were kinda rarer, with Doom having such a release iirc. Or should it be thought of as a kind move by the company?

Just wait until nintendo re-releases the SNES for 1,100$. ;-)

3 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Just wait until nintendo re-releases the SNES for 1,100$. ;-)

By the way, if they do the same mistake with the SNES mini, where they won't have enough units available in the market, we might see such an overpriced SNES. I remember the NES costing around 500 euros at one point where they wouldn't make more of these (I could be wrong, because in my country we didn't have that many people that wanted a NES mini and that kind of crisis was never seen at a larger scale).

29 minutes ago, ShotgunDemolition said:

Cool move by Capcom, but I have a couple of questions.

Why a cartridge shipped in a paper box, made out of plastic and a primitive by today's standards chip must cost 100$ (especially when it is just a re-release of a well known SNES game, that already had plenty of copies in the market)?

And let's say I was a SNES owner, which apparently I am not. Why shouldn't I prefer a boxed version from Ebay, instead of this one (it would be at least half the money in cost)?

 

Is this just about the red cartridge, because that's the only logical reason I see and truth be told, red cartridges were kinda rarer, with Doom having such a release iirc. Or should it be thought of as a kind move by the company?

A small number of the cartridges will be of the glow in the dark variety.  

8 minutes ago, Ajora said:

A small number of the cartridges will be of the glow in the dark variety.  

That I haven't hear again about a SNES game. And from what I get, the cartridges will be collector items mostly (besides, if someone wanted to play the game in a SNES, he could have bought it already online). I guess the fact that it will be a playable cartridge made in 2017 is mostly a gimmick. But still, I am kinda disappointed by the price.

To be fair, SFA2 had this graphic decompressor chip that was another CPU in itself...

And even then, the game had loading times. Loading times, on a cartridge!

edit: Just remembered that The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mania (SNES) also had loading times. Again, I believe they were for decompressing graphics, because that game was pretty.

That would be awesome if Nintendo would go back and re-release their old consoles but with updated hardware that can still run the old cartridges with improved performance if the game allows. To hell with new consoles, it's time for the gaming industry to turn around and return to the roots.

Like the idea, hate the price tag. You can grab a cart in good nick easy on ebay or at a flea market for about 10 bucks.

Why not do this with a game that doesn't already have thousands of carts readily available? Also why in the mother of ass did they use the 1930s version with like 3 characters??

Good idea, bizarrely executed..

When is id re-releasing floppy discs with Doom 1 and 2? 

Pretty neat that Capcom is doing this but pointless for me since I still have my working copies of Streetfighter 2 Turbo & Super Street Fighter 2 for the SNES :P 

I am more nostalgic for the Genesis version of SFII:SCE.

22 minutes ago, Avoozl said:

I am more nostalgic for the Genesis version of SFII:SCE.

Good heavens, the sound quality in that port is dreadful. 

16 hours ago, Philnemba said:

Pretty neat that Capcom is doing this but pointless for me since I still have my working copies of Streetfighter 2 Turbo & Super Street Fighter 2 for the SNES :P 

But is your copy red or glows in the dark? ; )

Eh. Cool idea, but not worth a 3-digit price tag.

On 8/31/2017 at 3:59 PM, ShotgunDemolition said:

Cool move by Capcom, but I have a couple of questions.

Why a cartridge shipped in a paper box, made out of plastic and a primitive by today's standards chip must cost 100$ (especially when it is just a re-release of a well known SNES game, that already had plenty of copies in the market)?

Because of a number of reasons:

1. Cartridges use much more material and have many more parts than the optical discs modern games come on, if they're packaged for retail at all. Cost of manufacture for cartridges was one of the reasons the N64 lost most of Nintendo's third-party developers to the PlayStation. Even an SD card costs vastly less to produce than a cartridge.

2. The "primitive" chips aren't the sort of thing you can just put an order for ten million of from any random company. The design isn't current, nobody uses it, and you're going to have to pay out the ass for the chips because they're being specially made just for your project and you have no economies of scale. The cartridge casing and PCB are also likely custom jobs that cost a lot more money than they would have in the '90s. This drives up prices even further.

3. These newly made SNES carts are being made for hardcore fighting game and SNES fans who will be willing to pay a lot of money for a collector's item.

Frankly I'm surprised it doesn't cost more than $100. Low-volume production of old technology is expensive as hell. If someone tried to manufacture a new 486-clone FreeDOS retro machine, the cost per unit of newly made 486 processors would probably be absolutely outrageous and sink the project immediately.

Has anyone elucidated on what sort of cart this is? I wouldn't be surprised if it had some "modern" off the shelf low power chips inside on a custom PCB and in general had a very different configuration from an old school SNES cart. 

15 minutes ago, Woolie Wool said:

1. Cartridges use much more material and have many more parts than the optical discs modern games come on, if they're packaged for retail at all. Cost of manufacture for cartridges was one of the reasons the N64 lost most of Nintendo's third-party developers to the PlayStation. Even an SD card costs vastly less to produce than a cartridge.

Yes, I remember that part of game history. Plus cartridges had limited space compared to discs, so bye bye third party developers.

15 minutes ago, Woolie Wool said:

2. The "primitive" chips aren't the sort of thing you can just put an order for ten million of from any random company. The design isn't current, nobody uses it, and you're going to have to pay out the ass for the chips because they're being specially made just for your project and you have no economies of scale. The cartridge casing and PCB are also likely custom jobs that cost a lot more money than they would have in the '90s. This drives up prices even further.

Ok there, I get that the chips will need machines that produce them, schematics and stuff, which might end up being costly for the company, but why wouldn't the casing be cheap? It is plastic, so can't it be made with a mold? It is not like they said they are going to be handcrafted or anything.

And how am I sure that they are actually building the chips, instead of grabbing them from other already existing cartridges? There is a risk here.

15 minutes ago, Woolie Wool said:

3. These newly made SNES carts are being made for hardcore fighting game and SNES fans who will be willing to pay a lot of money for a collector's item.

But why should this be acceptable? Sure the cartridges have some costs to be made, but I've generally seen collectors paying insane amounts of money for any game related collector's editions, whether they contain statues, action figures, artbooks, soundtracks, whatever. And those contents may be way cheaper to make than the price the consumer pays for the collector's edition (yes there must a window for profit, but not an extreme one).

21 minutes ago, Woolie Wool said:

If someone tried to manufacture a new 486-clone FreeDOS retro machine, the cost per unit of newly made 486 processors would probably be absolutely outrageous and sink the project immediately.

Totally agree on that. I have seen some Voodoo cards fetch crazy prices online and let's not talk about newly prebuilt systems being sold...

Quote

Ok there, I get that the chips will need machines that produce them, schematics and stuff, which might end up being costly for the company, but why wouldn't the casing be cheap? It is plastic, so can't it be made with a mold? It is not like they said they are going to be handcrafted or anything.

And how am I sure that they are actually building the chips, instead of grabbing them from other already existing cartridges? There is a risk here.

 

Yes, plastic cartridge casings can be made with a machines, but machines are not free, and neither is the time of qualified machine operators nor the molds for the product in question. With SNES carts back in the day, Nintendo would have contracts for millions upon millions upon millions of SNES cartridges, and the cost of the capital required to manufacture the cartridges was split among every single one of them, making it much smaller to the end user. Small volume production doesn't work that way. You're not only paying for the data on the cartridge, the materials used to make it, and the packaging it comes in, you're paying for the tools and the wages of the machinists, and the fewer the manufacturer produce, the more per unit this costs.

 

As for the chips, I don't know. They could actually be modern chips according to Linguica, but they could also be replicas of the original chips made to the same specifications, but newly made by a different manufacturer. Replicating an old chip is very expensive, and Nintendo's original chips were likely off-the-shelf EEPROMs ordered in massive quantities when they were still current, while new replicas would be made to order specifically for this product. They would not cannibalize old carts for their chips; not only is that horrendously wasteful, destructive, and inefficient, but consumers aren't going to tolerate 25-year-old, failure-prone electronics in a product sold as new, and that's assuming the old EEPROMs can even be safely removed from their sockets in the first place.[/quote]

 

Quote

But why should this be acceptable? Sure the cartridges have some costs to be made, but I've generally seen collectors paying insane amounts of money for any game related collector's editions, whether they contain statues, action figures, artbooks, soundtracks, whatever. And those contents may be way cheaper to make than the price the consumer pays for the collector's edition (yes there must a window for profit, but not an extreme one).

Because that's how capitalism works. You price your product to whatever compromise between revenue per unit and units sold will get you the most gross revenue (rule #1 of business: make money). If your audience is hardcore fanboys, then you can push pretty hard because they are willing to spend a lot of money and more cost-conscious mainstream consumers aren't going to buy your product anyway.

E: Is there a text-only version of the edit box anymore? I fucked up the quotes and I have no idea how to fix it with the new software without deleting the whole post and starting over.

Ah ok, now I get it. I hadn't noticed before how the price of the product is affected by the quantity produced.

26 minutes ago, Woolie Wool said:

E: Is there a text-only version of the edit box anymore? I fucked up the quotes and I have no idea how to fix it with the new software without deleting the whole post and starting over.

I personally use only the mouse for quoting. I underline the words that I want to quote and it pops up the "Quote this" box. The new software makes life a whole lot easier. 

Milk the cow as much as you can. Its cool yes, but 100$? I dont know man... idk

On 9/2/2017 at 3:45 PM, Linguica said:

Has anyone elucidated on what sort of cart this is? I wouldn't be surprised if it had some "modern" off the shelf low power chips inside on a custom PCB and in general had a very different configuration from an old school SNES cart. 

"iam8bit is manufacturing its cartridges on an authentic SNES ROM chip that includes the original game code"

"large 16-megabit, 5-volt memory chips which the original Street Fighter II cartridge uses are no longer readily available in today's market. Due to the progression of technology over the years, the majority of large memories have reduced to ~3 volts or less."

"iam8bit is inserting voltage level translators into its cartridges "to prevent excessive wear and risk of damage," Gibson said. But the voltage difference also forced iam8bit to include a scary-sounding warning on its sales page, telling buyers that "use of this reproduction game cartridge... on the SNES gaming hardware may cause the SNES console to overheat or catch fire."

"This is one of those cases—where the idea that we'd be producing a cartridge designed to plug into a vintage console whose operational status is unknown to us—started to make our lawyers twitch."

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/are-video-game-cartridges-the-new-vinyl-records/

Sorry for the late post, but this this article was only published yesterday and I thought it cleared up quite a lot of stuff. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Do we consider this when enumerating the colored SNES carts? :P  The Doom Wiki currently mentions Doom on SNES as being one of the only two red-colored carts for the system. But this long-after-market limited edition officially sanctioned not-original-parts-but-really-authentic-looking stuff is confusing in terms of where you gotta place it in the grand vintage scheme.

I don't think a gimmick cart 20 years after the system died "counts". It's a reproduction cart, it just happens that companies have realized that maybe they can profit off selling their own reproduction carts.

On ‎8‎/‎31‎/‎2017 at 5:41 PM, Red said:

When is id re-releasing floppy discs with Doom 1 and 2? 

They're gonna be shareware, it will cost 100 dollars to register.

No PAL edition?

I'm probably in the minority of an already small demographic here, but I've bought a few reasonably new (post 2006 anyway) cartridges for various old consoles, mainly NES, Famicom, Genesis and Super Nintendo. None of them were licensed and I'm pretty sure all of them were simple glob-tops which are still being produced in rather large quantities in China (bizarrely), but even with that said the build quality often feels nearly authentic on them and they are dirt cheap by comparison - I shelled out a measly $30 just last month for a Pokemon Yellow NES cart and that was with the middle man's markup. Granted it doesn't feel quite as high quality as a legitimate 1985 NES cartridge, but it's so close that I'm actually happy it was produced using cheaper methods since it means myself and many others can actually afford it. It certainly feels tenfold better than the dime-a-dozen famicom multicarts that are made of plastic thinner than a piece of scotch tape.

I get why they're not doing that, this is for hardcore collectors who can spot something being 'off' a mile away and they want them to feel as legit as possible and unfortunately the only way to get that result is to use obscure parts that raises the price tag to $100. A shame, but it at least makes sense. What totally doesn't make sense to me is using the most primitive and basic version of SFII that exists on SNES.. They could have used The New Challengers or even just SFII Turbo, why use the version with the least characters, least special moves, least combos, least... Everything? That's like the equivalent re-releasing some big Classic Doom Collectors Edition which only has shareware vanilla E1 running at 320x200 capped at 35fps. I mean it's still a great game at it's core obviously, but talk about a bare-bones version of the "true" experience.. I say this as a total Street Fighter fanboy who just doesn't get what the thought process was.

4 hours ago, Doomkid said:

I'm probably in the minority of an already small demographic here, but I've bought a few reasonably new (post 2006 anyway) cartridges for various old consoles, mainly NES, Famicom, Genesis and Super Nintendo. None of them were licensed and I'm pretty sure all of them were simple glob-tops which are still being produced in rather large quantities in China (bizarrely), but even with that said the build quality often feels nearly authentic on them and they are dirt cheap by comparison - I shelled out a measly $30 just last month for a Pokemon Yellow NES cart and that was with the middle man's markup. Granted it doesn't feel quite as high quality as a legitimate 1985 NES cartridge, but it's so close that I'm actually happy it was produced using cheaper methods since it means myself and many others can actually afford it. It certainly feels tenfold better than the dime-a-dozen famicom multicarts that are made of plastic thinner than a piece of scotch tape.

 

I get why they're not doing that, this is for hardcore collectors who can spot something being 'off' a mile away and they want them to feel as legit as possible and unfortunately the only way to get that result is to use obscure parts that raises the price tag to $100. A shame, but it at least makes sense. What totally doesn't make sense to me is using the most primitive and basic version of SFII that exists on SNES.. They could have used The New Challengers or even just SFII Turbo, why use the version with the least characters, least special moves, least combos, least... Everything? That's like the equivalent re-releasing some big Classic Doom Collectors Edition which only has shareware vanilla E1 running at 320x200 capped at 35fps. I mean it's still a great game at it's core obviously, but talk about a bare-bones version of the "true" experience.. I say this as a total Street Fighter fanboy who just doesn't get what the thought process was.

Well, personally, I think vanilla SF2 for the SNES has better artwork than its turbo counterpart. And as someone who legit attempted to order one of these (and failed), I would rather it be the original. I still have my SNES, but I never would have played it, even without the fire hazard warning. If I want to play Street Fighter 2, then there's absolutely no reason for me to play the original when Hyper Fighting and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo already exist. I own the Capcom Classics Collection, so I've got that covered. As several people have already pointed out, this is a collector's item. I don't see any reason in buying this as a way of getting to play Street Fighter 2. There are better versions of Street Fighter 2 and better means of playing it.