Recently, Yahoo Auctions business account yugen2plus has been selling a bunch of purportedly never-opened, never-used PC games for a variety of systems, mostly X1 and PC-8801. A lot of them have been on the pricey side, but some are in the realm of reasonably priced.

I have a bit of a fascination with Daikokai Jidai (released in the west as Uncharted Waters). I haven't actually played it that much, just poked around a bit with it. But I've seen the introduction dozens of times by now. Why? Because it was the first game I put on my X1 Turbo Z where I was just absolutely floored. The beautiful, colorful imagery and rich, full soundtrack caught me totally off guard.

It started out kind of simple-looking, a sort of prologue with a high-res but monochrome image of a fleet of ships on the ocean, but after a moment, there was a surprising crack of thunder and a reasonably convincing visual effect of lightning. Soon it started scrolling large kanji characters over the graphic. Thunder cracked again, but mostly it was just producing the sound of rolling waves.

Then it moved on to the meat of the intro. This image of the ship appearing on the screen with some reasonably complex 3-voice FM build-up tune was among the earliest clues that the Japanese 8-bit gaming experience could be quite different from the western one. Not saying better, just different. A parade of colorful images marched onto my screen, setting the background story of the game.

Without going into great detail, the basic gist of the story is that you are the son of a ship captain, the rest of his crew takes good care of you, your father dies at sea, you become captain, and the crew accepts you as such.

Anyway, yugen2plus was selling an unopened copy of the PC-8801 version of this, and the price ended up at a point at which I didn't mind springing for it, as the chance to obtain an unopnend game from the 80s doesn't come along that often these days. Here are some external shots of the box.

And the below image is what supposedly makes this special, but I don't really know for sure that it's unopened. yugen2plus says this themselves, they don't have any way of knowing.

Honestly, I hate those stickers so much, because so many people tried to preserve them. They keep re-sealing them or put them on the inside of the box, and the box gets all gooey and gunky as dust collects on the residual glue. Gross.

Graphic warning: some people think it's uncouth to open a game that has been unopened for all these decades. I think no such thing, I think the games want to be played, and I think I want to play the games, so we're a good match for one another. After photographing the unopened condition for posterity, I ripped right into it (very carefully and delicately).

Well, it all looks pristine enough! But is it just really well taken care of? Another telltale sign would be the disks. Are they scratched? Do they have mold? Granted, they could have mold either way, but I would suspect opened packages to be a bit worse off and more likely to have mold, and in any event it's prudent to check.

But the disks appeared to be clean and free of scratches and mold. But ah-hah! I noticed the disks are notched and covered with write protection tabs. Could these be fraudulent copies? Well, it's impossible to prove, but I wager that they're not. It seems unlikely that ham-and-egger crackers would go to this trouble and make this kind of financial investment, and I think it about as unlikely that a knock-off company would be able to produce all these documents at this level of quantity and sell it for cheaper than Koei was selling it for. So I guess we will say that these are "new and genuine, as far as I can tell."

Free time is relatively scant at the moment, but I wanted to take the photos of the intro that I used above, so I gave them their (probably!) virgin load in my PC-8801MA2.