What were your favorite stores to browse for games back in the day?
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Old Game Stores
What were your favorite stores to browse for games back in the day?
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In general, game stores were the worst place to buy used games. Other than Funcoland.
toys r us, kb toys, electronics boutique and babbages. and media play
homie, there was a time way back when stores couldn’t even sell preowned games
What ever happened to KB toys?
Victim of a leveraged buyout.
Bastards!!!!!!!!!!!!
They only started cranking up the prices on "pre-owned" games in the mid-00s in the UK. Before then they were a good deal.
Dude, before the grift started in the 2000s you used to be able to buy last gen games for .25 cents to a dollar. I bought all Megaman X's for snes sometime in 1997 or 98 for less than the price of a cheeseburger.
Can confirm. I got into NES collecting in 1998 because I couldn't stand the N64's "one game worth playing every 3 months" release schedule. At Funcoland, 30 bucks would get you a sack of NES classics, sleeper hits, weird but interesting stuff and shelf filler. It was a really magical time honestly that will never be replicated.
>I bought all Megaman X's for snes sometime in 1997 or 98 for less than the price of a cheeseburger.
I still remember buying Breath of Fire IV, Harvest Moon (SNES version), and Wild Arms all for $20, and even then that was pricier for used games. I almost forgot how great prices used to be.
It hurts
The one by my house, which wasn't a chain. I used to walk there all the time when I was a kid and use money I found in the cushions/on the ground to buy games. Back in those days you could often find change on the ground so it was easy to save up a few bucks to buy a game. Sometimes I'd get lucky and my parents would buy something. Then of course there's birthday money.
I loved you Game Den, even if it did turn out that your owner was a drug dealer who was using his business as a front to distribute his product. You had the products I cared about and that's all that matters. Mr Fox may have been a drug dealer, but he will always live on as a game dealer in my memories <3
Wholesome 🙂
>selling drugs to children
>wholesome
It didn't sound like he was selling the drugs to children if the anon only found out later. He was using selling games to children on the cheap as a way of covering up he was selling drugs on the side.
>use money I found in the cushions
Are you latino anon?
I love electronic boutique, was my go to throughout the 90s, that and kaybee toys
game stop until 2004, then i stopped going to these places altogether
What?! They don’t got no Turbografx games?
kaybee toys did
they sometimes had a heaping bowl of staple sauce
K-mart. Anything else was superfluous.
Got a job at KB Toys in the late 90s mainly for the 25% discount on games. I also got 2 copies of the gold OoT to save one but ended up trading it in a few mobths later.
babbages
software etc
funcoland
kmart
walmart
jcpenney
sears
kaybee
electronics boutique
best buy
probably went to babbages most often (mall) but im pretty sure i bought at least 1 game from all these places
I always went to Funcoland and some smaller local stores
I miss Rhino Games. They got bought out by Gamestop in mid 2006, before the Wii/PS3 released, and the stores were all Gamestops by early 2007. Going in there in ~2006 and still being able to pick up /NES/SNES/N64//Dreamcast/Saturn/Sega CD/Dreamcast games felt fricking magical because Gamestop had already stopped selling all of those at that point.
Being bought out by Gamestop is truly a fate worse than death.
I was just thinking about Rhino. I bought this red-button Genesis controller there because I though it looked cool. All my other ones had grey start buttons. IIRC, it was in a bin/table at the front of the store for $3.
Mofrickas need to put some respect on CIRCUIT CITY
i remember buying the gameboy player from there
>*funky bassline starts*
>big ass electric plug comes flying out of nowhere and connects to the entire building
>Wellll-come-to Cir-cuit Ci-ty
>Where service is state 'o the art
I miss jaunty late 80s / early 90s commercial jingles. That was such an optimistic time.
I love you anon
Toy R Us was the grandest. They had a Turbografix, laser disk kiosk that showed all their latest games back in the early 90s. Their selection was unmatched in it's variety. Everything from Final Zone to Ys Book 1 and 2.
I loved the little game slips Toys R Us used. I’d always admire all the Game Gear games I couldn’t have.
Lol same. Also it was cool to see the " coming soon" slips to see what was over the horizon.
my favorites was the small independent shops that always went under in a couple years.
much more soulfu and better selection of less well know stuff than gameslop
EB was the best for me. I could read magazines in there and they had used games to sift through. Babbages I'll admit had more class though.
Video Game Exchange in Malden, MA
>though
There was this place called rays video where you could rent out systems, rent games, buy games, arcade games, VHS/DVD, huge kids playpit. Video is of bw k in 92, bit it didn't change much when I remember it in late 90s/early 2000s. It was legit the best.
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Looks awesome, I would've loved that. Our local video store had a tiny play area set up with a little play house like people get in their backyards. Enjoyed that a lot as a kid, so a giant setup like that would've been sweet. Playing games there would've been nice too.
Electronics Boutique, Argos and Virgin Megastore in the UK used to be a really good place honestly, the prices were amazing back then because of the currency differences and the need to attract a wider market. I still remember as a young lad going in to pick something up on the Goldeneye in EB on release it was so packed my dad had to put me on his shoulders to just to push through the sea of 30 year old men trying to get their reserve copy.
i remember sam goody had the 3do set up with night trap.
sears with a sega genesis where you could play super thunder blade.
a big hanging rygar cardboard thing at kb toys.
toys r us where you had to get a poece of paper with the game price because the games were in a back room and they had 32x afterburner.
media play with final fantasy 3 for snes for $85.
babbage’s with phantasy star 4 for $95.
electronics boutique with shining force for $75.
trade-in games got you dogshit $5 and it was the beginning of them collecting for used games sales. more money if you used it as store credit. trade in like 5 old games hoping to get close to paying a fraction of something new.
babbage’s let you take a game back and get another one if it sucked, which was like renting a game but they marked your receipt and limited how much you could do this.
kaybee toys had these bins filled with mostly shovelware pc games. i bought the piece of shit FX Fighter from them, but also lucked out on picrel which i loved
I honestly don't remember the names of the stores. In some places there were entire buildings or even areas of several blocks that were full of electronics shops, many of which were game shops It was sort of like if you took every game store/department in a big burger city like LA/NY and pack them into one place.
I could spend hours in the game aisle of Toys R Us as they had a huge selection and multiple demo stations and a rack of magazines and strategy guides. I loved actually getting a game there with the ticketing system and seeing the huge stacks of games they kept behind the counter.
When I got into NES collecting, I dropped hundreds of dollars at various Funcolands. In the late 90s/early 00s, NES games were DIRT cheap there and the stores had an excellent selection.
In Greenwood, IN there was a used game shop a stones throw away from a Funco called Video Game Exchange. They had a smaller selection of Funcoland but they covered a wider variety of products. It was the first place I remember seeing Neo Geo games in the wild and they used to have a ROB (not for sale unfortunately) holding business cards on the counter. Some used guides too, I remember getting the awesome Mario Mania guide there.
Around here the big box store that always had the best set up display cases and demo kiosks was MediaPlay, they used the Toys-r-us bring your ticket to the counter for your game system.
But my fondest memories come from a dumpy hole in the wall called RSE VideoGameStar which was literally ran by the comic book nerd from the simpsons. Just tons and tons of flea market bins full of totally random video game crap. Its where I got my virtual boy for $18. Once bought what I assumed was a boxed Atari ST that had 2 busted jaguars inside.
The guy was totally cool and once let me trade in my sega cd model 2 for model 1 straight up just because I thought it looked better. I still wonder whatever happened to that dude whenever I drive past the lot where the building used to be.
The babbages near me had two tv screens that were constantly running the preview VHS so you could see the the new games and games coming out in action rather than reading the back of the box.
Babbages was top tier.
I used to love Babbage's back in the day. I remember going there with my mom as a kid and getting Goldeneye 64, not knowing that it would become one of the most legendary games ever made. I just got it because my dad showed me a few old Bond movies and I thought it looked cool.
The ones that came later like EB games with the bright white lighting were nasty, like buying games from a chemist. The one i bought half-life from was just some guy's shop and it was like buying a statue or something. an artefact.
I used to go to this shop called GForce that had imported US games which was really great because UK release date was always like 6 months to a year after the US release.