Cooking Mama: Cookstar | $30 | Best Buy
Cooking Mama: Cookstar | $30 | Amazon
The saga of Cooking Mama: Cookstar’s bizarre release, and subsequent de-release, feels like it happened 20 years ago. But it was only this March when the video game industry was hit with an absolute whirlwind of cooking controversy. Recapping the story now feels like a fever dream, but here are the basics for the uninitiated: the game was quickly removed a day after it launched, with series’ creator Office Create threating legal action against publisher Planet Entertainment for releasing an “unauthorized” game. It turned out that Office Create did not sign off on the game’s final release due to quality issues, so Planet Entertainment released it anyways without seeking the company’s final approval. On top of all that, the game became the center of a tinfoil hat theory that it was being used as a way to mine cryptocurrency from the Switch.
All of that made Cooking Mama: Cookstar an immediate collector’s item for fans who just wanted a piece of history. The game was impossible to come by after its failed release, but now you can add it to your Switch collection for just $30. Consider investing in a secure vault where you can keep the game safe for decades.