If literally no words in that preceding paragraph made sense, we both sympathize, and will now try to break it down for you: See, Cory In The House was a short-lived spin-off of the Disney Channel’s That’s So Raven, in which Kyle Massey played the son of the White House executive chef, getting up to various money-making shenanigans while occasionally getting life advice from the POTUS. (The show was apparently killed off by a combination of the 2007 Writer’s Strike and Massey’s family getting litigious after he was injured performing a stunt on the show; such are the means by which Cory becomes no longer in The House.) In 2008, Disney Interactive Studios tapped developer Handheld Games—the minds behind That’s So Raven: Psychic On The Scene, natch—to make a Cory In The House game for Nintendo’s twin-screened handheld, a stealth adventure in which the playable Cory sneaks around the White House, foiling a plot involving mind controlling bobbleheads. It was, by all accounts, not a very good video game, with critics criticizing its clunky controls and general Cory In The House-ness. But, the internet being what it is, the idea of a licensed game for a barely remembered TV series struck a chord in a certain kind of online person, and memes about Cory In The House for the Nintendo DS began picking up periodic bursts of the internet’s eternally scattered attention.
Cut to this month, when a new fascination with the game bubbled up on 4chan—and then managed to metastasize to Metacritic, where user reviews (glowingly declaring that the game “changed my life”) were soon taking off. (Cory In The House for the Nintendo DS is currently the sixth-ranked game of all time on the site’s user rankings, nestled in alongside games like The Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater.) And while those simply wanting to catch CITHFTNDS Fever could just pirate the game, or watch a longplay on YouTube (Hard+100%+Bonus), the urge to actually touch a physical copy of the game (or make money off of those who do) is apparently very powerful. Which is to say, it’s now hit a point where Ebay listings for the game have started cropping up with prices that start around $150, and then grow from there. And while no one has yet bit on, say, alexg2205’s “Cory in the House Nintendo DS Promotional Poster drawn by the Anime Creators rea”—which appears, to our untrained eyes, to be very similar to a hand-drawn picture of the game’s box art done in pencil—for $600, Ebay does have records of the game actually being sold this week for as much as $400. Which, we have to assume, is more money spent on a joke than Disney spent for any of the individual gags in the actual series, because when the internet hyper-fixates on something, it inevitably winds up doing so in ways where very silly amounts of money start getting moved around.
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