A Big Box of Famicom Puzzle Boxes

 

Agh, I'm so excited about these!  Amada Famicom Puzzles!

I decided to pull the trigger on a big ticket item that was up for sale on Yahoo Auctions a few days ago.  This beautiful box arrived in the mail from the seller yesterday:

Open it up and you find three more boxes, with jigsaw puzzles for Super Mario Bros, Pooyan and City Connection:

Picking them up, they are so beautiful:

And under them you find 40 more boxes, each containing a random puzzle of a Famicom game inside:

The outside of each box looks the same.  It has Super Mario Bros artwork on the front, City Connection on the back:

They are so cute to hold, slightly smaller than a Famicom cart.

Despite the cover art being the same on all of them, they don't all just contain Super Mario Bros and City Connection puzzles.  Rather the puzzles are a random assortment of games from the Famicom's early releases.  I haven't opened any of mine to see what is inside, but I've found a few online like these which give a representative sample.  

I think all of those games came out in 1985 or earlier so I would date these to around then.  I've also seen puzzles of 10 Yard Fight, and Route 16 and Sky Destroyer are also featured on the big box so there are probably puzzles of them out there too. I'm not sure how many exist in total, no checklist is known to exist of them.

You might ask why there are three bigger boxes containing larger puzzles and 40 boxes containing smaller puzzles.  The three bigger ones weren't sold in stores, they were prizes.  Kids would buy the little ones (which cost 50 Yen each) and out of the forty in the box, three were "winner" puzzles, which contained something on the inside which the kid could redeem for one of the three prize puzzles.

The box I have is complete, in the same shape as it would have been when distributed to toy stores.  This allows me to know exactly which of the three were the winner puzzles, since they came packaged in a plastic bag to allow the store owner to know which was which so they could randomize them. The three in the upper left hand corner of my box are still in the bag, so they must be the winners!

These things, particularly whole unopened boxes of them, are pretty rare so I was super psyched to be able to pick it up at a reasonable price.  What is a reasonable price?  Well, its way more than I would have paid for something like this 10 or even 5 years ago.  But that is ancient history (sadly).  There is just one other of these available for sale anywhere in the world right now and this is the starting bid:

That is 450,000 Yen, about $4500 US.  I did not pay anywhere near that much for mine (as proof of that I offer as evidence the fact that my wife has not killed me), and I doubt that anyone is going to buy it at that price.  But with the absolute insanity of vintage game related prices over the past year, you never know.  These things are ridiculously hard to find and pretty cool, so I wouldn't be too surprised if some tech millionaire with money to burn dropped it on something like that.  

Anyway, I'm glad I secured one for my collection.  As with my previous posts about Famicom Menko and Famicom Milk Caps, there aren't any checklists of these puzzles out there and very little information exists about them, so I'm kind of having fun delving into this end of the hobby where I can shed some light on these things.  These aren't the only Famicom puzzles Amada released, so another side project for me will be to try to put together a catalogue of all of them out there.  

UPDATE!

After writing the above post I just found this tweet from last year which contains still images from a TV show on Fuji TV (which I think might have been Game Center CX?  Not sure) that did a feature about these puzzles.  It answers some of the questions I wasn't sure on.

From these we learn a few interesting things about these types of puzzles.

1.  The puzzles were issued in 1985 in two types.  One (the one I have) was distributed in little boxes containing 20 piece puzzles which sold for 50 Yen each.  The other (which I don't have) were sold in little envelopes containing 12 pieces which sold for 20 Yen each.

2. Most importantly, the last image there shows all the games that were featured on the puzzles (at least the bigger 20 piece puzzles), so we can create a checklist!  Almost at least, some of them are hard to make out due to glare.  This however is a tentative checklist, if anyone can identify the two I couldn't (which might be two from among Championship Lode Runner, Mach Rider, Bomberman or Binary Land, but I can't tell from the picture), please let me know!

Super Arabian

Star Force

Wrecking Crew

Super Mario Bros

Lode Runner

City Connection

(Not sure)

Challenger

Sky Destroyer

Formation Z

Duck Hunt

Elevator Action

Devil World

Balloon Fight

10 Yard Fight

(Not sure)

Clu Clu Land

Zippy Race

Route 16

Chack n Pop

Exerion

Field Combat

Ninja  Kun

Hyper Sports

Astro Robo Sasa

Road Fighter

Ice Climber

Hyper Olympics

Nuts & Milk

Space Invaders

Geimos

Yie Ar Kung Fu

Urban Champion

Baseball
Front Line

Famicom Jigsaw Puzzles are Awesome

 

I picked up these on Yahoo Auctions recently: four Famicom jigsaw puzzles!

I already had a couple of Famicom game jigsaw puzzles featuring Star Force and Yie Ar Kung Fu which I picked up a few years ago and look like this:

Those ones were produced by Amada, a company which put out a lot of Famicom related odds and ends back in the 80s.  The ones I got this week on the other hand were put out by a different company called Toyo.  In addition to featuring different games and coming in differently designed boxes the big difference between the two is size.  The Amada ones are small puzzles with only a dozen pieces, while the Toyo ones are bigger and contain 60 pieces each.

As the photo at the top of the post indicated the four I got were Balloon Fight, Donkey Kong Jr, Front Line and Exerion.  These games were put out by three different makers (Nintendo, Taito and Jaleco) whose company logos are on the front.  The Amada ones (at least the ones I have) featured games by Hudson Soft and Konami.  

The back of each box has a checklist of the six different puzzles.  In addition to the four I have they also made Wrecking Crew and Hyper Sports. I'll have to find those at some point so I can complete the set!

The back also tells us that these cost 100 Yen each back in 1985, which was a pretty good deal (I paid way more than that for them in 2020!)

The sides of the boxes say "Pocket Jigsaw Puzzle" in bold lettering:

The top edge of the boxes tell you which game is depicted:

These are pretty awesome.  They are all still sealed in their original bags inside the boxes, I think these are "dead stock" that were store leftovers.  I haven't broken them out to put them together because I bought them more for the box art than the puzzles themselves!

More Famicom Rarities: Amada Puzzles and Menko

In the mid-1980s a company called Amada had a contract with Nintendo and a number of game producers like Jaleco and Konami to produce novelty items related to Famicom games. I first got interested in their stuff a few years ago when I stumbled upon a box of Famicom mini cards they put out in 1985.  They made a number of other things, including the ever popular series of erasers shaped like Famicom carts, complete with their boxes and a series of stickers that I have a few of but haven`t posted about yet.

Amada`s relationship with Nintendo was very brief, they seem to have only had a 1 year contract as all of the merchandise they made was limited to games released in or before 1985.  So for games from 1986 onwards there is none of this stuff, which is kind of an interesting divide in Famicom game history.

Last week I picked up a couple of other Amada Famicom goodies released in that one year.  The first are a pair of Famicom jigsaw puzzles of Star Force and Yie Ar Kung Fu pictured at the top of this post.  These were relatively tiny puzzles with only a dozen or so pieces

Though the boxes are almost the same size as the regular Famicom game boxes:

Judging from this blog here (in Japanese, but there are some pretty cool photos of Amada Famicom stuff so its worth a look) these puzzles sold for just 20 yen each back in the day, though most of them were sold in little envelopes rather than boxes like this. The boxed ones were given out as prizes to lucky winners of a game (if your puzzle had winner written on the back you could trade it for one of the boxed ones I think).

Another thing that I picked up were a couple of boxes of Famicom Menko.  Menko are like trading cards, but they are made of very thick cardboard and intended to be throw at the ground in a game (the goal of which is to flip over other cards). 

So these are different from the mini cards Amada also issued for the Famicom, though the fronts are largely the same, featuring images from games that look like they were created just by somebody pointing a camera at a TV (something which a number of Japanese trading card makers were known to do back in the 80s).

 Like the puzzles, these Menko came in pretty cool boxes that replicate the look of Famicom cart boxes, mine featuring Star Force and Wrecking Crew on the fronts:

 The backs of the cards look like this:

These things are pretty hard to find unfortunately.  Loose mini cards and some erasers turn up on Yahoo Auctions regularly but the puzzles and CIB stuff only shows up every once in a while.  I think they are a pretty cool side-collection type thing to compliment an actual Famicom.