Topic: Oh Snap...Amazon is selling Dreamcasts!

You'd be amazed. The ordering pipelines and distribution networks for these systems are so large that it happens quite often. Granted, they're not really "lost". They're on someone's inventory sheet somewhere. It's just that they were never flushed out to retail for sale. The reasons for this can be varied and robust. For example, if the last order was cancelled before the factory contracted for the work shipped it, a partial (or even full!) order can already be off the lines and in storage with nowhere to go. On the other end of the chain, the retail market may change suddenly, leaving a distributor with a warehouse full of product that no one wants. The product often sits in a corner until the distributor figures out what to do with it.

Things get even more interesting when the original molds and PCB designs are available to a manufacturer. If they are unconcerned about legal backlash (as is the case with many Chinese companies) they can even restart production on an old product! It appears that this may have happened with the Amiga CD32. A few years ago, brand new systems started showing up on ebay in large quantities. All from the same seller, all with the same buy-now price. Last I checked, they were still selling them.

It's also possible to get brand new CX-40 controllers for the Atari 2600 system. Seems a chinese manufacturer found the mold and is currently using it to re-manufacture the design. Yet another example was the Illinois Railway Museum I went to last week. They had original ads in a train car from 1948. When I asked the conductor about the ads, he said they were able to find the company who produced the ads for the train cars back when they were in operation. Amazingly, they were still in business and still had all the original plates! So it was a no-brainer to get reissues of the ads, just as they were originally printed!

Ain't that the truth. GDROM was a REALLY bad idea. By getting rid of the error correction, Sega ensured that the shelf-life of these discs was nary a few years. At this point, the market is staring down an ever-dwindling supply of GDROM games. Compare that to Saturn, PS1, 3DO, CD-i, or Atari Jaguar CD games, which are still as plentiful as they ever were.