So there was this game—Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3—that I kept hearing about where Japanese high school students fight monsters by, well, shooting themselves in the head! Crazy, right? Gets crazier.

When not crawling dungeons as a member of the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad and dispatching evil creatures by firing a handgun at your own temple, your days are spent attending classes, prepping for exams, playing sports, making friends, going for ramen, singing karaoke and dating cute girls. It’s eccentric and ambitious and despite its shocking imagery, not exploitive. This Playstation 2 title even beat out Mass Effect to take Gamespot’s 2007 RPG of the year.

Thing is, Persona 3 came out in the late summer and by year’s end there were no copies to be found—like, none. As with most of publisher Atlus’ niche releases, it went quickly out-of-print, becoming a rarity fetching way inflated secondary market prices on eBay. That’s also the only place you’ll find Dead Head Fred, a film noir parody on PSP which also came out last August and even won the inaugural Writers Guild of America award for videogame scripts.

See, the future-fixated videogame industry seemed designed against building itself a back catalogue. While the book, TV, film and music industries are more than happy to keep selling their shit, many publishers would rather just move on to the next game. So it’s awesome Atlus gave it another shot with Persona 3: FES, an expanded version adding about 30 hours and a quasi-sequel to an already sprawling RPG that mixes Buffy and Dark City with tarot cards, coffins and cyborgs.

The popularity of this re-release should help prove that people aren’t necessarily disinterested in a game just because they didn’t buy it in the first months of release. In fact, Atlus also reprinted 2004’s Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne which shot up the Amazon sales charts and sold out of stock within days.

Other publishers have also proven willing recently to give their games another go—Rockstar ported Bully over to Xbox 360 and PS3 while Capcom brought their watercolour-based masterpiece Okami over to the Wii. Sure, these were attempts to revive old PS2 games that initially arrived at the tail-end of the generational console cycle—but a good game is a good game regardless of release date.

Hopefully, these re-releases will catch on, preventing future cult classics from succumbing to digital disintegration dust or eBay extortion.