Go to shopping: Super Potato

Super Potato (“Get your wonder soft world”、whatever the duce that is supposed to mean) is one of those shops you need to know about. Though it is located fairly centrally in Akihabara, Tokyo’s Geek Central, and has a continuous loop of tinny 8-bit music blasting from tiny speakers near the entrance and a massive billboard at 3rd floor level, it is easy to miss the, what in a foreign country would be, scary, deep hallway leading to the shop, wedged in between two other establishments.

Super Potato is a shop, nay, a shrine to retro gaming. It not only offers shelves and shelves of old game cartridges, often unboxed, for classic systems like Genesis, NES, SNES, Atari, MSX and whatnot, it also has a fine collection of peripherals and merchandise. It doesn’t always come cheap, but where else can you find Mario-themed Nintendo playing cards, Bomberman key chains, the original Game & Watch LCD games or the actual classic consoles? As well as Mario Kart RC karts, pixel-graphic peg board toys, soundtrack music CDs, Nintendo hanafude cards, calendars, etc.

Though some of these are also available in regular toy shops, and some of the retro games can also be found in second-hand shops Super Potato offers a convenient one-stop geek shop hop.

Any self-respecting geek should visit this establishment on their visit to Japan. If you’re in Akihabara you won’t have to go out of your way, and if Akihabara isn’t on your itinerary where the Hell do you get the nerve calling yourself a geek in the first place?

Location: Akihabara can be reached via the Yamanote line or the local Chuo line.
Website: http://www.superpotato.com
Map: here

(Readers may rightly point out that my posts and entire blog are very Tokyo-centric. I cannot deny this. Super Potato has branches in Osaka and some other places; I simply don’t know anything about these so writing them up would be a bit useless)