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Introduction

I stopped eating at fast-food restaurants a little while ago, and I figured—after seeing so many “tiered” rankings of such restaurants on social media—that I’d commemorate the period in my life when I was occasionally eating fast food by doing what I believe Retro has always does best: curating a large amount of data in a journalistic format that honors a highly specific subcategory within the broad fields of History & Culture.

My feeling on fast food is the same as basically everyone else’s: it should be avoided whenever possible. But there are times when it does seem impossible to do so, for example when one is on a road trip or at an airport or profoundly pressed for time and not near home (yes, all of these situations can be navigated without eating fast food, but sometimes we feel harried and incapable of inflecting our inertia).

I’ve tried to acknowledge how circumspect I am about fast food by refusing to put any establishment classified as such in the “S” tier—the top ranking tier—below. I think it is a sort of mistake to say that any fast-food restaurant is (or can be) “S”-tier in quality.

{Above: A visualization of the largest fast-food chains worldwide, from 1971 through 2021.}

That said, some fast-food restaurants are better than others in terms of food quality, variety of food options, friendliness of food service, cleanliness of operations, menu navigability, availability of (relatively speaking only) “healthy” options, consistency of product, and ease of drive-through or pickup. And given that, as noted above, there will be times fast food seems unavoidable, I figured there’s some value in identifying the places to gravitate toward if you must—and the places to be avoided at all costs.

Rules

Obviously the ranking below is solely the opinion of the author, but it is an attempt to be comprehensive in the consideration of each establishment—by which I mean that I am trying to avoid geographic bias (which would of course require me to put Dunkin’ first), food-type bias (burgers have conventionally been my go-to fast food, but you’ll see many restaurants that do not feature burgers highly ranked below), or any ranking that only considers one aspect of an establishment, or gives an establishment a pass for being very good at offering only one type of food (as you may have noticed in the Introduction, above, “variety of food options” is one of the stated considerations here).

With only a few exceptions—all of which are noted with an asterisk—I’ve only ranked restaurants I’ve personally eaten at. The restaurants are ranked not just by tier but also within their tier. Any restaurant I have chosen to list in a given tier despite not having eaten there (a decision I made only when views on the proper tier for the restaurant in question appear to be all but unanimous) gets automatically placed at the back end of its tier, which is my way of saying that the tier placement for that restaurant is clear but not its placement within the tier. Virtually all the fast-food restaurants I’ve never eaten at appear in the final tier, “NT” (for “Never Tried”). Here, however, they’re listed alphabetically, rather than ranked.

As noted above, the considerations in ranking a given restaurant are as follows: food quality, variety of food options, friendliness of food service, cleanliness of operations, menu navigability, availability of (albeit relatively speaking only) “healthy” options, consistency of product, and ease of drive-through or pickup. The considerations here that relate to food are weighted much more heavily than those relating to service and user experience, though to be clear “cleanliness” is treated as a food-related assessment.

{Note: Included in this Top 50 ranking are several restaurants considered to be “fast casual.”}

The Top 50 Fast Food Restaurants

{Note: No fast-food restaurant deserves “S”-tier status because of how unhealthy fast food is.}

{Note: These fast-food restaurants are uniformly excellent for the range of good that they offer.}

1. Culver’s
2. Five Guys
3. In-N-Out Burger*

{Note: These fast-food restaurants are either good or excellent but offer limited food selection.}

4. Chick-fil-A**
5. Popeye’s
6. Starbucks
7. Wendy’s
8. Shake Shack
9. Bruegger’s Bagels
10. Krispy Kreme Donuts
11. Panera Bread
12. Jersey Mike’s*
13. Raising Cane’s*
14. Whataburger*

{Note: These fast-food restaurants are either middling or good but offer limited food selection.}

15. Steak n’ Shake
16. Chipotle
17. Sonic
18. Boston Market***
19. Potbelly Sandwich Works
20. White Castle
21. Au Bon Pain
22. Einstein Bros. Bagels
23. Jimmy John’s
24. Panda Express
25. Noodles & Company
26. Johnny Rockets
27. Taco Bell
28. Firehouse Subs
29. Pret a Manger
30. A&W
31. TCBY
32. McDonald’s
33. Burger King
34. Dairy Queen
35. Wingstop
36. Subway
37. D’Angelo’s
38. Dunkin’
39. Papa Gino’s
40. Mrs. Field’s
41. Baskin-Robbins
42. Honey Dew Donuts

{Note: These fast-food restaurants are either bad or middling but offer limited food selection.}

43. Hardee’s
44. Nathan’s Famous
45. Charleys Philly Steaks
46. Cinnabon
47. Arby’s
48. Auntie Annie’s
49. KFC

{Note: These fast-food restaurants are just so terrible that they should be avoided at all costs.}

50. Pizza Hut
51. Domino’s
52. Orange Julius
53. Sbarro

{Note: These fast-food restaurants I have never tried (“Never Tried”) are listed alphabetically.}

Big Boy
Blimpie
Bojangles
Carl’s Jr.
Checkers
Church’s Texas Chicken
Dave’s Hot Chicken
Del Taco
Duchess
Elevation Burger
Fatburger
Freddy’s
Hunt Brothers Pizza
Jack in the Box
Jollibee
Little Caesars
Long John Silver’s
Marco’s Pizza
McAlister’s Deli
Moe’s
Papa John’s
Papa Murphy’s
Pita Pit
Pizza Inn
Pizza Ranch
El Pollo Loco
Portillo’s
Qdoba
Quiznos
Runza
Salad and Go
Schlotzsky’s
Smashburger
Smoothie King
Spangles
Sweet Frog
Sweetgreen
Taco Bueno
Taco del Mar
Taco John’s
Tim Hortons
Tropical Cafe
Which Wich
Zaxby’s

{Note: These fast-food restaurants no longer exist, but are likely to be known to many readers.}

Burger Chef
Carrols
D’Lites
Kenny Rogers Roasters
La Petite Boulangerie
Pizza Haven
Red Barn
Seattle’s Best Coffee
White Tower

* This is the rare instance of a restaurant the author hasn’t personally tried but which holds such a clear consensus reputation among those who have that it can enter this ranking. If I try this restaurant and have a different opinion from the conventional wisdom, I’ll adjust its ranking accordingly, though as noted in the Introduction I am more or less off fast food now.

** Retro can’t support Chick-fil-A as an institution due to its terrible corporate record with respect to acknowledging the human rights of the LGBTQIA2S+ community.

*** This ranking is a historical one—as Boston Market has fallen on hard times of late and is currently in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings. Retro does not recommend it.

Conclusion

Don’t eat fast food if you can avoid it. Carefully prepared food using the best possible agreements is almost always going to taste better and be better for you. But anyone reading this already knows all that, so me saying it here is, I suppose, a bit pro forma.

It’s interesting to me how associated with America fast food is, and how poorly that speaks of my country, if I’m being honest. It does often seem like American cuisine is simply the food of other nations dumbed down in some way or simply made far worse by virtue of being mass-produced or cluttered with unhealthy preservatives.

At the same time, I hate the sort of snobbishness that says we should never make any distinctions between objectively bad (or bad-for-you) things, as though once one has crossed a certain line there’s no difference—that is, it’s no matter to—cross all lines.

I disagree.

For instance—to refer to an old canard, here—if you’re going to McDonald’s and you’re willing to get a Diet Coke instead of a Coke, do it. No one thinks that you think getting a Diet Coke makes the meal healthy, or even that Diet Cokes are particularly healthy in themselves, but by the same token anyone who would make fun of you for trying to minimize the “damage” of the meal is in my estimation a fool. All is relative.

More importantly, some fast food is simply better than other fast food, and it should be sought out if fast food is what’s going to be on the menu. And it’s not only a matter of taste, either; some fast-food restaurants are healthier, cleaner, and more convenient than others. The only drawback is that many of the best fast-food joints are limited in their geographic scope, which means that most of the country has never been exposed to them. In-and-Out Burger (largely to be found in California), Whataburger (largely in Texas), and Culver’s (largely around the Upper Midwest) are good examples of this.

All of which brings me to a broader point, albeit one that some may take as trifling.

I have many issues with and questions about American capitalism, and one of them is—contrary to everything we’ve been told by its defenders—how inefficient it is. Why is it that there’s a Subway and a McDonald’s on every corner, but I have to travel across the continent to get to an In-and-Out Burger? Why do I find White Castle everywhere if I travel four hours south of where I am, but there are none in my immediate vicinity?

There is, of course, an answer for this, which is that profitability—which is not the same thing as quality—governs how widespread any given food-service corporation is.

And profitability is tied to things like management and food-shipping logistics and liquidity and franchising policies, all of which are also intimately connected with the question of how far apart from one another any given instance of a certain fast-food franchise can be.

As the chart below ably confirms, there is only the smallest imaginable correlation between the quality of an institution the dictates of American capitalism have blessed with ubiquity and its profitability. Or, perhaps better stated, it’s not so much that the top brands are bad so much as that many amazing brands are nowhere near the top in terms of being profitable, which is a shame and (again) underlines the inefficiencies of a free market.

If you’re interested in finding out how the executives at the companies list above use their salaries when it comes to political donations, see here. If you want to make your own tiered list of American fast-food restaurants—or anything else, for that matter—you can do so by starting out on this website.

So what do we learn from the above? First, that fast-food pizza is very hard to do right.

Second, most fast-food restaurants are underwhelming. Only a few get things right.

Third, there are as many local fast-food joints that deserve to stay local as deserve to go national.

Fourth, that fast-food or fast-casual sandwiches are easy to do fine, but hard to do well.

Fifth—and this is no surprise—chicken and burger joints will dominate any ranking of fast food joints.

Sixth, for all that there’s been talk of making fast food healthier, it’s been slow going.

Seventh, there are more fast-food restaurants than most of us realize. Even the 100+ such restaurants listed above are only the most well-known ones; there are others.

Finally, there are virtually no fast-food restaurants that are worth going to unless you absolutely have to, with the exception of those establishments in the “A” and “B” tiers above—a grand total of just a dozen eateries on a list that numbers over a hundred.

And that probably tells the story of fast food in America as well as anything else does.

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{Note: Prior to October 19, 2021, RETRO was Proof Games. Earlier quotes refer to RETRO content that was originally published elsewhere on Substack. In some cases, individual media outlets published reports about RETRO reporting via discrete branches in different countries; for this reason, the country of origin of each media outlet is listed after the outlet’s name.}

🇺🇲 The Athletic (United States, 2021):

Also critical of WATA and Heritage Auctions this summer has been Seth Abramson, perhaps best known as a leading critic of Donald Trump on Twitter. {link}

🇨🇦 RDS (Canada, 2021):

In addition to the inconsistency of WATA’s [game-grading] evaluations, what many point out is that the company is careful not to communicate the number of [copies of individual] games it has evaluated and that therefore are potentially available on the [open] market. Yet this is done in other collectibles markets.

As author and journalist Seth Abramson observes, many people involved in the [sealed and graded video game] market are trying to hide this [so-called “population”] data. Following the release of a documentary on WATA and Heritage Auctions [by Australian YouTuber Karl Jobst], Abramson decided to release a compilation of his research on the NES games market—research that prompted him to remark that the [video game] auction [and grading] houses don’t want it known that the games that make them rich are in fact the most readily available games on the market. 

[In late 2020], WATA accidentally revealed that it had already graded 750 copies of Super Mario Bros. 3 since the company’s founding in April 2018, though Abramson was “only” able to trace 65 sealed and graded editions of the game being introduced to the market since January 2019. While we must remove [from this 750 figure] any graded but unsealed copies of Super Mario Bros. 3, this still suggests that some of these games are in the hands of investors and are coming to market just slowly enough to avoid flooding it. And we’ve known for three or four years now that several players in this speculative pyramid scheme systematically buy up the most popular sealed titles so that it’s no longer possible to find them during retro gaming events or trade shows.

According to Abramson, these speculators are quite familiar with the practice [of reselling games at artificially inflated prices], and won’t hesitate to buy games for $30,000 and then resell them for $40,000 or $60,000—until the market collapses because there aren’t enough buyers anymore. These speculators hide behind the notion that the games they’re selling have historical significance, but in reality they’re just in it for the money. {link}

🇨🇳 Chuapp (China, 2021):

In theory, a grading house should be an independent arbiter, with self-grading and self-dealing disallowed in the same way a person can’t at once be the referee of a game and an athlete in the contest. Since the last time [grading house] WATA was exposed as being involved in scandalous conduct, concerns about the graded video game market have only increased. And the scandal isn’t over yet, according to investigative reporter Seth Abramson, who found, while cleaning up empty boxes at home, that there was a note in one regarding a game he had bought on eBay. It had an email address on it and read, “Send an email to Mark Haspel to get more games.”

So who owns this email address? Seth’s investigation found that this person was at the time selling 74 Atari 2600 games rated by WATA on eBay, with the games having a total value of $46,405. Seventy-three of the 74 games had box grades higher than “9.0” (out of a possible “10.0”), all with seal grades of “A+” or above. WATA’s own assessment scheme suggests that such sealed games are “games worth investing in.”

Whether the collectible in question is cards, antiques, or games, people send them to a grading agency to get a grade. That grade represents the appearance of the item. Each grading house focuses on different things, but generally, all look at the extent to which the collectible has been well-preserved. For [Chinese] gamers, game grades may still be a relatively unfamiliar phenomenon. This scheme has mostly enthralled gamers in Europe and the United States. In both locations, the nature of the grading process is the same: it considers the integrity of any plastic packaging and the lack of [any flaws] in or on the box. The scores derived from this assessment basically quantify the appearance of the game. Even if you don’t consider a title’s rarity, the higher the score, the more costly the collectible will be when it is sold.

A simple [online] search tells us that Mark Haspel is one of the co-founders of WATA. Of course, this may be coincidence—a stranger may happen to be selling games under the same name [at the WATA co-founder], or two men may happen to have the same first name and surname. But candidly, this sort of coincidence is unlikely. So we have reason to believe that Haspel, a co-founder of grading house WATA, is manipulating the [video game] grading market—for profit—by secretly selling or buying graded video games. {link}

🇩🇪 Eurogamer (Germany, 2021):

In response to the [YouTube] video [about WATA and Heritage Auctions by Australian journalist Karl Jobst], lawyer and journalist Seth Abramson referred to a lengthy article [now at RETRO] containing his NES [game] market analysis. He said the report showed that the games that “make them [WATA and Heritage Auctions] rich are the most widely available (and yes, also the most admired) in the world.” In addition, wrote Abramson, WATA had in the past “accidentally” leaked information saying the company had rated more than 750 copies of Super Mario Bros. 3 since its founding, even though only 65 of these carts have been sold [in a public market] so far. According to Abramson, this suggests that “big investors are holding back many copies of Super Mario Bros. 3 and slowly releasing them [into the market] to hide how common the game is in sealed and graded condition.” “While this may be legal,” Abramson continued, “it underscores that by 2024 the market will be saturated with games that people are paying $30,000 for today. But here’s the catch: the people paying $30,000 for these games aren’t serious collectors, they’re speculators working with a big budget. They’ll look to resell their seemingly ‘rare’ Super Mario Bros. 3 copies for $40,000, then $60,000, and finally $100,000—right up until the market collapses because there are no more fellow resellers to sell to.” {link}

🇫🇷 Game Blog (France, 2021):

Last week, we told you about revelations from journalist Seth Abramson, who is trying to bring sanity to the retro gaming market by publishing a list of the [sealed] NES games most commonly sold at auction—his aim being to raise awareness about the sudden surge in retro game prices. Now Abramson is further helping to set the scene by publishing the results of a new investigation that’s sweet with the scent of conflicts of interest. It all starts in the summer [of 2021], when [Abramson] receives at home one of the retro games he ordered a few days before from a well-known auction site [eBay]. He discovers in the package a Post-It Note and email address belonging to a well-known recipient: Mark Haspel. Haspel is well known to retro gaming fans on both sides of the Atlantic, as he’s one of the co-founders of WATA—a company that assesses the condition (and thus the rarity) of games sent to it before giving them grades and protecting them in one of its now-famous plastic cases.

Described this way, the story doesn’t sound like much—but then the journalist [Abramson] discovers that he has already bought other games from this same person, which is revealed as a problem once you understand that WATA has publicly declared itself hostile to any conflicts of interest. Haspel—who was selling WATA-stamped games [on eBay] under the pseudonym “m*s*h”—had his own company judge the quality of his games, which he then sold via the internet.

Faced with the revelations from [RETRO], the WATA co-founder explained his approach: “I have only visited the WATA premises twice since April 2018. I have never evaluated my own games, or any game submitted to the company’s experts. I submitted my games to WATA like any other collector would. I am proud to have contributed to the founding of WATA, and I am confident that the new management team [that took over in July of 2021] will ensure its success.”

So while not employed by the company on-site, Haspel nevertheless let subordinates assess the quality of his retro gaming collection and then sold it at a good price, taking advantage of the importance that [he and WATA] have been gaining in recent years via the WATA [grading] system—whose success he’s personally invested in as a WATA co-founder.

Abramson concludes his article with sixteen questions directly addressed to Haspel, who in response deleted all his online advertisements. {link}

🇦🇷 Diario Tiempo (Argentina, 2021):

In response to a [YouTube] video from [Australian journalist Karl] Jobst, Seth Abramson, a lawyer and columnist, posted an article offering all his market research on the NES [video game market]. Abramson reports that “the games that are most [artificially inflated in market value] are the most available, and [the most common] in the world in terms of [being graded].” He also claims that WATA “accidentally auto-populated information [on its website]” revealing that it has graded more than 750 copies of Super Mario Bros. 3 since its inception; only 65 of them are available on the market today. Abramson says that these data suggest “that [high-end resellers and speculators] are holding many copies of Super Mario Bros. 3, and are releasing them slowly onto the market to obscure the [commonness] of these games.” Although doing so is legal, Abramson states that by 2024 the [vintage video game] market will be saturated with [common and popular] games [like Super Mario Bros. 3] because people are paying $30,000 [for them] now. Abramson adds, “Here’s the rub: the people paying $30,000 right now aren’t serious collectors, they’re just resellers or speculators with a lot of money. This causes copies of Super Mario Bros. 3, which isn’t a rare game, to sell for $40,000, $60,000, or $100,000. Soon the market will decline—when there are no more fellow resellers for the resellers to sell to.” {link}

🇫🇷 Marseille News (France, 2021):

Video Games Chronicle reported this week that Mark Haspel, one of the co-founders of WATA, is selling games rated by his company as a side gig on eBay. This was discovered when reporter Seth Abramson noticed that a few games he had purchased over the summer were all from the same seller, Haspel, and [that] the seller had included his name and email. In Abramson’s last audit, Haspel “was selling 74 Atari 2600 rated Wata games for a total value of $ 46,405.” That’s a lot of potential money, and it’s definitely a shady practice. If you are able to make a profit on the games you are responsible for rating, of course you will want to rate them higher than you would otherwise. WATA has a policy that prohibits employees from selling their own rated games, but apparently Haspel felt he was above the rules of his own company. It makes you doubt buying retro games on the market right now, especially since the price of many of them has gone up in recent months. {link}

🇺🇲 Nintendo Life (United States, 2021):

According to lawyer, author and journalist Seth Abramson, power-brokers in the [video] games auction market are “systematically trying to hide data” in a get-rich scheme. Abramson has now released some hard data in an attempt to spread the word and combat this artificial market. You can get a more thorough rundown of the whole thing over on [RETRO]. {link}

🇬🇧 Games Industry (United Kingdom, 2021):

The chief advisor of game grading firm WATA has been accused of selling in contradiction of company policy. In his substack newsletter, writer Seth Abramson has said that WATA’s Mark Haspel has been operating a side business on eBay selling WATA-graded Atari [2600] games. Abramson discovered 74 games listed on eBay by Haspel’s account, the vast majority of which had “investment-grade” WATA ratings of 9.0 or higher. He put the total value of those titles at nearly $50,000. {link}

🇺🇲 Nintendo Enthusiast (United States, 2021):

[A]n online source of curatorial journalism run by lawyer Seth Abramson has compiled and published an enormous treasure trove of sales data for all sealed and graded copies of NES games sold publicly since January 2019 across the six most major platforms for such sales. These platforms include Heritage Auctions, eBay, Amazon, ComicLink, Evolve Comics & Collectibles (but it’s “essentially moribund” now), and Mercari. The intention of this data collection was to illustrate for the first time exactly how scarce (or not) sealed and graded copies of games in the NES library are, especially because game condition grading house WATA does not release data on how many copies of games it has graded.

[Abramson] effectively, well, proves that the massive amounts of money paid in recent headline-grabbing auctions and sales, such as $2 million for Super Mario Bros., wildly overvalue how much these games are actually worth. Long story short, the lists of sales data for sealed and graded NES games demonstrate how many copies have been sold since 2019 and how many copies were graded at least WATA “9.0” or the grading equivalent by another grading house [VGA]. It finds, for example, that 65 sealed and graded copies of Super Mario Bros. 3 have been sold since 2019, and 35 of them were at least 9.0-grade by WATA standards. It is the most commonly sold game in sealed and graded condition, followed by Friday the 13th, Dragon Warrior, and [the original NES] Super Mario Bros.

Although it’s ultimately all one collection of data on display, Abramson breaks the data up into a few segmented lists to further highlight which games are genuinely scarce. The first two lists of games represent games he would recommend never buying for investment purposes because the data supports that they are just not rare. (For example, sealed and graded copies of Zoda’s Revenge: Star Tropics II are not as rare as you’d think.) That being said, Abramson does not offer up this massive sales data on sealed and graded NES games for the purpose of investment advice in the first place. He makes explicit that it’s just “a market analysis by a video game collector, not a financial adviser.” Still, this NES game sales data is extremely useful and may become a thorn in the side of investors hoping to make a hefty payday off of commonly bought WATA-graded games. I would recommend reading the full report, as it’s really interesting... {link}

🇩🇪 Artnet News (Germany, 2021):

Seth Abramson argues [in an article at RETRO] that platforms like Substack free writers from the demands of corporate employers, who are ultimately driven by the financial bottom line. “America’s corporate media structure is living on borrowed time—and the ‘creator economy’ can’t possibly be forestalled”, Abramson wrote.

🇬🇧 Video Games Chronicle (United Kingdom, 2021):

Journalist Seth Abramson reports that while clearing boxes at his house he discovered a note included with a game he’d purchased from eBay in the summer. The seller’s note told him to “email markhaspel@[redacted]” for more games. Abramson realised that he had purchased a game from Mark Haspel, one of the co-founders of WATA, then looked at his previous purchases and realised he’d bought three in total. Looking further into Haspel’s eBay activity, Abramson discovered that, according to his claim, Haspel was “running a significant side business selling games his company graded”. According to Abramson, Haspel is trading on eBay under the name “m*s*h” and, at the time of the article’s publication, was selling 74 WATA-graded Atari 2600 games with a total value of $46,405.

Of these games, only one of them had a WATA grade lower than 9.0 and none of them had a seal rating any lower than A+, meaning practically all of them were what WATA considers “investment grade”. Abramson alleges that by exclusively selling Atari 2600 games, “[Haspel] ensures that most or perhaps even all of his business on eBay escapes the notice of US journalists, who thus far have written almost exclusively about Nintendo Entertainment System games.” He also surmises that Haspel may be focusing on Atari 2600 games in an attempt to raise their value, and that his role at Wata may make him privy to data about which system’s games are selling better than others. “Because it is possible (but not yet confirmed) that Haspel has access to internal WATA ‘population’ data—data that reveals how many copies of each video game WATA has ever received and graded—there is a chance that Haspel is selling only Atari games because he knows that this market is waning due to few people sending in these games to be graded”, Abramson suggests. “If Haspel is using any such data to determine which games to buy, get graded, and sell, there’s at least the danger that he’s participating in what investigators might consider insider trading.”

Abramson stresses that he is not specifically accusing Haspel of “illicit conduct”, but does point out that WATA’s refusal to make its population reports public could give [Haspel] an unfair advantage in studying the market. “In almost every collectibles market in the U.S., grading companies make population reports public so that no one in the market has special access to corporate data they could use to make investments relating to their own company”, Abramson says. {link}

🇺🇲 Nintendo Life (United States, 2021):

Goldin Auctions is one of several companies being investigated by journalist Seth Abramson amid ongoing allegations of insider fraud in the realm of retro video game grading and auctions. {link}

🇬🇧 Eurogamer (United Kingdom, 2021):

A detailed report into Mark Haspel, the co-founder of game grading company WATA, has brought to light worrying details of his business activities, and of WATA in general. WATA appraises and rates the quality of collectible video games, often pushing their prices into the hundreds and thousands of dollars. To avoid any conflict of interest, it has previously stated it does not allow employees to have their own games graded or sell any that have been graded by the company. But, this week, Seth Abramson discovered he had apparently bought several WATA-graded video games from an eBay seller that turned out to be Haspel. One of his purchases reportedly included a yellow sticky note that invited Abramson to email Haspel privately “for more games.” At the moment, Haspel is simply accused of breaking WATA’s company promise not to own or sell stock it has graded. But after [it] look[s] into the matter further, Abramson’s report raises a number of concerning questions. The eBay account in question currently lists nearly $50,000 worth of WATA-rated games, almost all of which have been rated [by WATA] as “9.0” or higher, described as an “investment grade” tier. The majority are 9.6 or higher, among the highest-possible grades WATA gives. Among the questions Abramson raises…are when these games were bought and rated, and who by, and what insider knowledge Haspel has of the market, such as how many other copies of a particular game might exist of a particular quality. There’s much more in [Abramson’s] report, which is well worth a read. {link}

🇺🇲 Nintendo Life (United States, 2021):

Over the past couple of days, investigations by both [RETRO] journalist Seth Abramson and YouTuber Karl Jobst have shone a light on alleged foul play and collusion between retro game grading service WATA and auction house Heritage Auctions. Copies of NES games have recently sold for record-breaking prices—$2 million for a copy of Super Mario Bros., $870,000 for a Legend of Zelda—and have attracted suspicion and attention from some quarters. The latest question comes once again from Abramson, who has highlighted on his Twitter account the disparity between two far-from-mint examples of NES games which were graded differently—specifically in the way the company flags items that have been compromised by mould….If you're wondering exactly how this speculative market is drawing such large and improbable sums, Abramson has an excellent (and lengthy) Twitter thread that explains his findings, and Jobst’s 52-minute YouTube video is also a fascinating exploration of the evidence and allegations so far. {link}

🇬🇧 Input Magazine (United Kingdom, 2021):

“[Video game grader WATA’s grading operation and its relation with auction house Heritage Auctions] is all a song and dance”, [Australian journalist Karl] Jobst tells Input. “It’s all completely fake. The more I looked at it, the more I realized, ‘Yeah, there’s something going on here.’” Both Heritage and WATA have denied all the allegations. Separately, journalist Seth Abramson has made similar allegations of collusion between the two [in articles on RETRO]. {link}

🇦🇺 Kotaku (Australia, 2021):

The obvious [sealed vintage video game] market bubble has even been enough to attract the attention of Trump thread man Seth Abramson. The Twitter pundit, whom the Columbia Journalism Review described as a “Lawyer turned poet turned professor turned journalist turned influencer”, recently…research[ed] a rough working list of how many actual copies of rare [NES, Atari 2600, and Intellivision] games are currently known to exist in the wild…his accounting…continue[s] to raise questions about why WATA, which maintains its own [population reports]….won’t release them. {link}

October 19, 2021: RETRO is founded.

October 20, 2021: RETRO debuts as the #19 history substack in the United States, having welcomed more than 1,500 visitors in its first 24 hours.

October 20, 2021: The RETRO email list hits triple digits as the publication rises to #17 in the substack history rankings.

October 21, 2021: As RETRO crosses 2,500 visitors in its first 60 hours of operation, it reaches #16 in the substack history rankings.

October 22, 2021: RETRO rises to #15 in the substack history rankings and reaches two hundred email-list subscribers as it releases its first-ever breaking news report, “Halloween Night Video Game Auction Set to Break Multiple World Records and Change Video Gaming Forever.”

October 23, 2021: RETRO rises to #13 in the Substack history rankings.

October 29, 2021: Ten days post-founding, having seen over 5,000 visitors and 300 new email-list subscribers, RETRO rises to #12 in the substack history rankings from its starting position at #19.

November 13, 2021: In part on the strength of its first-ever subscription sale, RETRO moves up from #12 to #11 in the Substack history rankings.

November 19, 2021: On its one-month anniversary—having just launched a new Film section—RETRO surpasses 500 email list subscribers and rises to #8 in the Substack history rankings.

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{Note: Content creators should feel free to link to this article whenever, in the course of their own professional employments, they find it useful. This piece of my professional work product—born of anguished experience as an independent content creator—is being provided for free.}

Introduction

Did you recently enter a business establishment and demand that its goods and/or services be provided to you for free? Did you make this demand either (a) arrogantly, (b) self-righteously, or (c) exasperatedly?

Did you recently go to work—a place where you’re paid thousands of dollars monthly for your work product—and tell your boss that going forward you’re willing to work for free?

Did you recently enter the home of someone who’s a total stranger to you and give them unsolicited advice about their professional career? Did you, for instance, tell them that whenever they produce work product that is really valuable or important it should be given to you for free, but that you’re okay with them not charging for work product that you personally don’t want—a business plan that would, not coincidentally, leave them financially bankrupt but give you all the free content your heart desires?

Did you recently lecture a stranger about how them not giving you their professional work product for free means that they are clearly (a) a nihilist, (b) a greedy person, (c) unpatriotic, or (d) some combination of all three of these?

Did you go to the workplace of a stranger and heckle them by telling them that their work product is without market value? Did you tell them that a few bucks—maybe even less than the cost of a cup of coffee—is more than weeks, months, or even years of their professional work is worth? Did you do all this while trying to guilt them into giving you free stuff by saying what they are asking is more than you could imagine being able to pay for a good or service, when in fact almost every good or service you’ve ever purchased has cost what this professional is asking for or even much more?

No?

You haven’t done any of these things?

You can’t envision yourself ever doing any of these things?

Then why are you on social media demanding that professionals give you free stuff?

If you think the stuff you want for free isn’t worth what’s being charged for it, that’s no problem at all—just walk on by and say nothing. No professional is upset when you don’t buy their product; you may have noticed that small business owners don’t yell at passersby for not stopping and spending cash at their establishments.

But if you were to decide, instead, to go inside a business (the equivalent of commenting on someone’s social media feed) and arrogantly, self-righteously, and/or exhaustedly demand free goods or services, you’d expect to be thrown out of that establishment instantly, right? And if you persisted in such antisocial behavior, you’d expect the police to be called, right?

Fortunately, you have engaged in your antisocial behavior online. So the worst that will happen to you now is that you will be blocked from viewing the free (i.e., social media-published) writing or other work product of an independent professional whose work you have already declared without value and who you have advised to adopt a business plan that would bankrupt them.

So, be happy! This is the nicest way a professional can call you out for being a presumptuous jerk.

For Aural and Visual Learners

But what if you’ve engaged in the conduct described above and you’re an aural learner?

Don’t worry. We still have you covered. Check out this free video:

And if you’re a visual learner instead, don’t worry! We’ve got something for you folks, too:

Like the song above says, if this article for some reason hasn’t been enough to keep you from harassing independent professionals over their fees rather than just going along on your merry way with your mouth shut—and if your recalcitrance causes you to keep commenting in the vein of your previous social media comments rather than (as you should) deleting the ones you’ve already made—you can expect the digital equivalent of being tossed from a privately owned establishment on your ass: a block.

Conclusion

Since you are a stranger to the author of this article, they cannot know your intellect or reading comprehension skills. So please treat the summary below as a polite but firm reminder of what you should already have understood from the paragraphs and song above:

1. You are free to think my work is worth less than what I charge for it, or even to think that it is worth nothing at all. I am not bothered by this in the slightest, nor am I bothered when someone decides not to pay for any of the goods or services I offer. Part of being a professional is having the right to set my own prices without your unsolicited input, but another part of being a professional is understanding that no one is obligated to use my professional services and that no one should be given grief for declining to use them. That is not why you have been gifted this wisdom-filled article.

2. What you have done wrong is presume to demand for free something you can perfectly well understand is not free—and worse still, something that is not free because an enormous amount of professional work went into it. Chances are you know little about my background, or else you would not have stepped to me in the way you did online. Suffice to say that my professional work product is the result of years and years of education, training, and experience. Just because you want me to have spent all those years of blood, sweat, and tears for your singular and free enjoyment does not mean that that’s what is going to happen. While I will and do sometimes give away my work for free, it is exclusively my judgment as to when and why and where to do that (and, as the case may be, how and for whom).

3. I am particularly insulted because you came into a digital space that is at once my workplace and my home in order to insult me in this way. It would take an enormous amount of familiarity between us for me to be willing to take from you silently what you have done to me here, but of course anyone who actually has any familiarity with me as a human being—someone with bills and a family and self-respect—would not have disrespected me in the way you have in the first instance. I want you to know that I find your presumptuousness breathtaking.

4. You have compounded your error with self-justifications, insults, and/or a guilt trip. Do not point out to me that other professionals have made different choices; if you like those professionals so much, patronize their work instead of mine—that’d be fine. I am not bound by the actions of others any more than you have shown yourself to be bound by the actions of the 99.6% of my audience who do not harangue me in the way that you just have. And it should go without saying that insulting strangers in their digital home/work space, let alone going further than that and actually trying to gaslight them, is contemptible and richly warrants an instablock.

But most importantly, I want you to understand that I believe you will learn absolutely nothing from this article. I long ago learned that people do not change their minds about things unless (a) they have entered a space in which people voluntarily go to have their minds changed (and this article, which you were directed toward but did not—at least not consciously—solicit, is not such a space), and (b) they encounter in that space someone they trust (and clearly you do not respect me, so the chances you trust me are almost nil). Also, though this is a bit repetitive with (a), a mind is only changed when (c) it wants to be changed, which I doubt yours does—as I expect you have been told everything you have been told here before and have simply chosen to ignore it.

In fact, I expect your response to this essay will be to go back on social media and hurl invective at me, giving me the moral license I already had but—for some inexplicable reason—decided not to exercise by referring you to this article in the first place rather than instablocking you. If I do hear from you again in a way that suggests you did not read or did not understand this article, please know that I did not enjoy our brief time together and I am not sorry to have thrown you off my social media feed. In fact, I’m likely wishing I’d simply done so from the beginning.

If, however, you have taken this article to heart and not only won’t ever again do what you did to me but feel regret at having done it to me or to anyone else, I thank you for meeting the basic requirements of living in a civil society that has a market economy.

Howsoever you choose to respond, please be aware that I will not be discussing this further with you. It goes without saying that I wrote this article specifically to save myself the time and energy of doing so. Because—as I hope I have established—my time and my energy do have a discernible value, just as yours do, and it is not zero.

{Note: This running index enumerates the sections of RETRO, and all the ongoing series in each. Series are listed within each section in alphabetical order.}

Games

• The Definitive Top 100

  • launched (at Proof Games) on September 24, 2021

  • relaunched (after launch of RETRO) on October 19, 2021

• Top 25 NES Games

  • launched August 7, 2021

  • relaunched (after launch of RET…

Read more

Notes

• The member of The Ramones who was in Dust in the late 1960s and early 1970s was of course Marky Ramone, not Joey Ramone. At least I got his instrument correct! (It was the drums!)

• The Oregon State Beavers running back I was thinking of was the memorably named Jacquizz Rodgers, who later played in the NFL for the Atlanta Falcons, the Chicago Bears, a…

Read more

Introduction

Those who read my Twitter feed will know that I often post photographs of our two now-four-year-old rescue hounds, Quinn and Scout. In the Photoshopped cell-phone photograph above, Quinn—our “alpha”—is closest to the window sill, lying in her preferred, cat-like position.

A couple months ago, my wife and I finally sent in our pups’ DNA for testing, which I recognize some people think is a strange thing to do, so I’ll briefly justify what even for my wife and I was an uncharacteristically idiosyncratic decision. Not only do we love our dogs so much that we want to know everything about their lives and their background that we can—for instance, Quinn was rescued along with her mother and siblings by a mailman in an empty lot in Arkansas, while Scout was found by local animal control in Alabama wandering around by herself—we also want to gather any information we can that might make us better parents. If we know more about what breeds our mixed-breed rescues hail from, it could help us better understand their instincts and personalities—which I can tell you are dramatically different and often bewildering. {Note: I mean this in the best possible way! We love how different the two are.}

In any case, whenever I post photographs of our dogs, readers share the same interest my wife and I have, and repeatedly ask what breed(s) our dogs are. Well, we now have the very surprising answer! I decided to post that answer here because, quite literally, I’ve been asked for the answer to this question hundreds of times over the last three years and have never—until now—had a notion of how to reply besides empty guesses.

Quinn the Dog: A DNA Profile

According to DNA testing, Quinn is the following:

• 12.5% American Staffordshire terrier

• 12.5% Shibu Inu

• 12.5% Akita Inu

• 12.5% Bloodhound

• 50% Hound Breed*

*Believed to be Red-Tick Coonhound.

We’d seen pictures of Quinn’s mother—an oddly nondescript white dog that looked like a Labrador Retriever to me but actually, if I’m blunt, didn’t really look much like any particular breed—and due to Quinn’s coloring and habits and much else, assumed her dad was a Southern hunting dog who’d mixed it up (perhaps against the wishes of his owner) with a local stray. That certainly still seems possible, though both the Shibu Inu and the Akita Inu (whether the Japanese Akita or the American Akita) are hunting dogs, which makes it seem a bit like someone out in Arkansas was trying to create the Terminator of hunting dogs or whatever and callously abandoned the project—and its offspring—in midstream.

While we don’t know where Quinn’s mom ended up, or most of her siblings, we were there when one of her brothers was adopted, and he ended up with a nice family from Concord, New Hampshire. He was already far bigger than her, so we assume he must be positively huge now.

Conclusion: Should You Do a DNA Test on Your Rescue Dog?

Obviously, it’s 100% up to you—and because the test is around $150, I fully realize that not everyone will be in a position to make this decision.

For those considering it, however, I’ll say this: it’s a totally painless process for your dog, it only takes a few weeks to get the results, and besides the additional emotional component it adds to your relationship with your pet—because you understand a bit more about their background—it can also give immediately useful information that may help you be a better steward of your dog’s long-term health.

I’ll give an example.

When Quinn first reached her full adult size—we got her when she was around 13 weeks old—she weighed about 54 pounds, and in our vet’s mind that understandably came to be seen as her ideal weight (she was quite fit at that point). Since then, despite getting a decent amount of exercise, Quinn’s weight has increased to about 61 pounds, which neither we nor the vet consider ideal. While we still hold that opinion, the fact that Quinn’s DNA profile suggests she should weigh between 46 and 75 pounds gives us a little bit more of an understanding of her size and shape. For example, she has a lot of loose skin, which one might normally associate with some weight gain but must also be tied to her hound (and particularly her bloodhound) genes. Also, all of her DNA profile suggests a stolid, thick-build ancestry that seems to match what we see in her.

I don’t mean to suggest—at all—that we don’t continue to follow our vet’s advice. Our attitude is that our vet knows best, period. I think this DNA-profile information just helps us contextualize our parentage of this dog in a way that perhaps is difficult to summarize but feels meaningful to us as dog parents and, whether it’s real or illusory, I think even that feeling of empowerment has value. For those of us who treat our dogs as our children, but who have chosen to rescue dogs rather than get them from a local breeder, anything we can do to better connect with the history of our family member seems genuinely important to us. My wife and I are just grateful we’re in a position to spend the $300 to do this research on both our dogs. We’re still in a holding pattern on Scout’s results, but I’ll post them here in RETRO’s Extras section when they arrive.

{Note: I realize this is a bit of a frivolous post. In my defense, (a) readers truly have often asked about Quinn’s heritage, (b) the “Extras” section does advertise itself as essentially a space for miscellaneous frivolities, and (c) it’s free to read and, of course, free to ignore. My thanks in advance to all those who’ve sent in well-wishes to our pups in the past. This article is for you!}