I’ve heard that Mr Tamiya was very hands-on in choosing their topics for kits so it will be interesting to see how things change. But what a company he built!

Edit: here is the official Tamiya announcement https://www.tamiya.com/english/pressrelease/20250722/index.h...

Their assembly manuals have always been top notch. Giving me hours of entertainment even after assembling the model. It was a great introduction to systems design.

I’ve been wanting to get a re-release of the original grasshopper. It’s too cool to pass up.

That said, I'm surprised once in a while, like Yodobashi camera in Japan, or some other specialty stores in akihabara etc which feature lots of this.

any other must-see stores?

Of course the old NiCad battery is long since dead. And R/C frequencies have changed since then, so the controller and receiver are probably useless. But from time to time I wonder about what it would take to modernize and revive it.

https://tamiyabase.com/tamiya-models/56003

It was a bunch of plastic and nothing competitive but I must have rebuilt it a dozen times just for fun. Then at some point I got a Motown Missile 48,000 RPM motor for it. It was a battery connector melting ballast resistor glowing riot. But eventually my parents got tired of taking me to the hobby shop for replacement spur gears... next xmas I got a rc10 graphite and never really looked back at Tamiya anything.

But it was a great low-cost introduction to how cars work and the hobby in general, super fun times.

RIP