The people demanding an official English release of Mother 3, and furious that Nintendo took so long with Earthbound VC release, are the exact same people who had already pirated them and did not/will not buy them.
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Originally Posted by SGT RJ
Kinda getting irritated with this forced scarcity thing Nintendo seems to be doing with some of their items.
I don't remember older consoles like the NES or the Nintendo 64 being rare, although I wasn't ever getting one as a kid so maybe this has been a thing for their entire existence. I do remember how hard it was to get a Wii that one Christmas - I was lucky enough to snag one during a ten minute window on Amazon for list price when people were paying three to four times that on eBay - but I thought that was just an underestimation of anticipated demand. Eventually Wiis were easy enough to find.
N64 and Tickle Me Elmo were sold out everywhere and all the rage in the autumn of 1996. Even bad N64 games like Wayne Gretzky 3D Hockey were in artificial demand and often could be seen on shelves for $80-$100.
I bought a Wii in the summer of 2008 (it had come out close to a year before that) and it was non-trivial to find, had to do the Amazon text message alert thing.
So no, this isn't quite as new as you're suggesting.