I'm giving away a boxed copy of Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War to celebrate 1,000 subscribers

Hello ROM readers new and old! After about five months of working on this newsletter about emulation, it's grown to more than a thousand subscribers and even more regular readers who come to the site with each new issue. In that same span of time, a megalomaniac has sent Twitter into a shitspiral and the brainiacs in charge of Reddit have managed to alienate the most dedicated members of many of their subcommunities. What I’m getting at is: Boy did I pick a great time to launch and try to get the word out about a super niche publication!!

It's been exciting as hell, though, and this labor of love has grown fast despite what a weird time it is right now for social media and sharing things you create on the internet more broadly. I truly appreciate every single person who reads this newsletter or shares it in some way. And I'm energized knowing at least a thousand people think Read Only Memo is worth getting in their inbox every two weeks.

So to celebrate that milestone and kick off the road to the next thousand, I’ve decided to give away a game from my personal collection: a copy of 1996 strategy RPG Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War for the Super Famicom.

How to enter the giveaway

Update, 8/26/23: Aaaand we’re at the cut-off! Thanks to everyone who’s subscribed in the last week, and since the start of ROM! Winner coming soon…

All you have to do for a chance to win is be subscribed to Read Only Memo by Saturday, August 26 at 8 am Pacific. At that point, I’ll pick a random winner from the email list and reach out. If the winner doesn’t want the game (😢) I’ll draw again.

Shipping’s on me! I will even ship international unless you live in Antarctica. I am not rich.

More about Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War

Genealogy of the Holy War (aka Seisen no Keifu) is itself a milestone game: it was the last thing at Nintendo that Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi served as producer on before he left in late 1996; it was the second-to-last Fire Emblem game that series creator Shouzou Kaga worked on, and there’s a reason fans have been clamoring for a remake of this one for years. It’s a genuine epic with sprawling battle maps on which you can deploy your entire army. It introduced the rock-paper-scissors weapon triangle to the series. It includes a nascent version of the relationship system Fire Emblem would later focus on and the parent-children passing of the torch.

Since there hasn’t been a remake, at least not yet, the Super Famicom version remains the only way to experience Genealogy of the Holy War. There have been a couple fan translation projects, including Project Naga released in 2016; unfortunately this effort ended with a beta release, but the group behind it did manage to translate the whole game, so it’s absolutely playable.

But even if you don’t plan to play the cartridge… this Super Famicom box just looks real nice on a shelf.

Thanks again to everyone who’s jumped on board Read Only Memo so far. Much, much more to come. 💽