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Five Minutes with Super Tomato
Video games are such a huge industry that it’s sometimes easy to forget the little guy – but with chain stores like GAME and HMV entering financial difficulties, and industry figures such as Keza MacDonald predicting the death of game stores on the high street, the little guy might well be the last one standing. I spoke to the ownership of Super Tomato, an independent games retailer in Cardiff, about the future of retro gaming, the archivability of the medium, and what the market’s like for independent retailers.
MOCD: If you were to describe the store to somebody who’d never encountered it before, how would you pitch it to them?
ST: At Super Tomato we take iconic pop culture items – retro videogames, manga, classic eighties toys, imported Japanese collectibles, which become the preserve of large online retailers like Amazon and eBay and put them back on the high street. We are a bright, tactile environment where browsing (and reliving warm dormant childhood memories) is positively encouraged! We are the Haus of SEGA.
MOCD: What sort of products do you carry?
ST: Amongst the more unique items we’ve had through our doors are Panasonic Q Gamecube consoles, the Nintendo 64DD and Super Famicom Satellaview peripherals, a Sega Mega CD dev kit, various versions of the original Nintendo Famicom and a myriad of other exotic museum pieces. We stock several hundred titles for each retro format at prices starting from 99p, and carry several thousand manga titles, many of which are long since out of print.
MOCD: Could you briefly outline the store’s history?
ST: Super Tomato began as a comic and bookstore (with a then very modest number of videogames) importing items from a friend in Japan almost four years ago. Quickly, we realised that the greatest demand was for items from a very particular period of nostalgia and in short order retro videogames had monopolised half the shop floor. We saw that all the other mainstream videogame retailers had abandoned older formats and let the internet monopolise that segment of the market. There was the unusual situation whereby if you were a movie fan you could buy a film made any time in the 20th century on the high street. If you were an avid reader bookshops carried titles from antiquity. But no videogame retailer was selling anything more than six months old. It was a disservice to the credibility of the industry as an art form. In tandem with the rise of magazines like Retro Gamer and professionally produced online shows such as Classic Game Room, we were in the right place at the right time as classic videogames entered the zeitgeist.
MOCD: What’s the market like in Cardiff for independent retailers? What demographics do you serve?
ST: Cardiff, with its maze-like network of historic arcades is a bastion of hidden independent retailers. We cater to a demographic that encompasses both 30-somethings of the ‘right’ age to have been around the first time many of our titles were released, and a surprising number of younger customers looking to explore the heritage of their hobby. Gender-wise, it isn’t what you might think, with a 50/50 split between male and female and indeed a whopping 85% of our manga customers are women.
MOCD: Do you get the impression that the idea of retro is ‘changing’ as time goes by and demographics shift or people get older? Where do you think stores like yours will be in 20 years, with regards to the way the consoles of today are becoming less reliant on hardware and more on services? I know a lot of people are concerned about the archivability of consoles and video games in the face of DLC and locking games to consoles.
ST: After a couple of years of trading, and when it became apparent with the advent of the iPod, Kindle, DLC and the like that hardcopy media had become quaint, we worried about the sustainability of a retro videogame store. After all, what are the next generation of gamers going to be nostalgic about – it certainly won’t be cartridges or CDs, so what part of that can you make commercially viable? However, as time has gone by, we realised that a new era of gaming or console doesn’t supercede the desirability or collectability of the last. As Spillers Records found its niche catering to music fans who wanted to experience vinyl, we believe there will always be a market for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, or for the endearingly chunky first Game Boy and those actual, tangible grey plastic cartridges that plug into them.
It wasn’t until finding the store a few months ago that I remembered that the Game Boy Camera was a thing. An AWESOME thing.
MOCD: What’s your opinion on the current state of the games industry? Are you beyond being excited for E3? Where would you like to see it move in future?
ST: We’re actually quite optimistic. Virtual Console, Xbox Live and PSN have opened up the marketplace to smaller development teams once again, and to more intimate games. The boon for us is that advancements like downloadable services that offer classic games keep the flag flying for retrogaming and unearth those fun buried memories of misspent youth!
Super Tomato can be found at 17 Salisbury Road between Senghenydd Hall and Koko Gorillaz, as well as on Facebook and Twitter. [Source: Quench]
