A hyper-rare Tsukihime game was destroyed by US customs

You have just found the holy grail of visual novel collecting. A Tsukihime Test Edition floppy disk from Comiket 57. Only fifty copies exist. That is the entire universe of this artefact.

And some absolute muppet in a warehouse decided to treat it like a suspicious takeaway container.

The Collector’s Nightmare

The collector, Keripo, documented the whole sorry affair on X this week. The seller in Japan had wrapped this thing like it was the Crown Jewels heading to a war zone. Bubble wrap. Rigid cardboard. The works.

Proper respect for a piece of gaming history that predates TYPE-MOON‘s transformation into the multimillion-pound Fate empire.

What Happened Next

US Customs opened the package. They stripped every layer of protection. They snapped the floppy disk. They bent the casing. They crumpled the poster.

Then they slapped their official tape across the wreckage reading opened and resealed by customs.

Brilliant. Thanks for that.

We are not talking about a dodgy knock-off here. This was the progenitor. The thing that started it all. Sold for 100 yen in 1999. Now effectively priceless because there were only fifty.

Now there are forty-nine. If we are being optimistic about the survival rate of the others.

The Preservation Community Responds

The preservation community is absolutely livid. Two and a half decades of careful stewardship in Japan. All of it undone in a customs inspection room somewhere in America.

We Cannot Ignore

• How do we convince border agencies that certain packages require specialist handling without sounding like we are asking for special treatment?
• What would need to change in the training or protocols for agents to recognise the difference between suspicious materials and historically significant items?
• Is there a way forward for collectors and institutions to work with customs rather than viewing them as an unavoidable hazard?

Because frankly, watching history get crumpled because nobody thought to ask what is actually in here before going in with both feet—that is a loss nobody wins from.