These were the days !

[GameGavel]

http://www.chasingthechuckwagon.com/photos/store1.jpg

http://www.chasingthechuckwagon.com/photos/store2.jpg

http://www.chasingthechuckwagon.com/photos/store3.jpg

http://www.chasingthechuckwagon.com/photos/store4.jpg

http://www.chasingthechuckwagon.com/photos/store5.jpg

http://www.chasingthechuckwagon.com/photos/store6.jpg

Lord! Look at all those electronic games.

[Dhalamar]

God it'd be awesome to see more pictures like this. :P

Oh, and I kinda stole it http://wastedseconds.com/?p=5231 :D

I've got some old TG-16 brochures around here SOMEWHERE I've gotta get scanned. And I think a Gamecube one. Granted, Gamecube isn't exactly retro, but still worth preserving. :)

[Leathco]

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80 bucks for Phantasy Star 2. Oh yea, I remember.

[F-zero]

Great pictures, more people than ever play videogames but i've never seen a shop as cool as that, even the art on modern video games suck.
I'll happily stick with the old school.

[Relayer]

That last picture in the first post, with the electronic games, is a great reminder of the stores in which I wasted plenty of time visiting while my Mom was shopping for clothes or whatever. I should print that picture out an use it as a checklist for the stuff I want to buy for my collection.

Does anybody remember or recognize some of those games? I can identify some of them as ones in my collection.


Microvision
Stop Thief
Simon
Merlin & Super Merlin
Speak & Spell (& Math) (& Read)
Electronic Battleship
Coleco Head-to-Head Baseball


The pic quickly gets blurry. It's a geek's paradise there. At least for THIS geek....

[meu2]

If only those were the days for me. Where I lived when I was growing up we had pretty much had one rack of games in the whole town and were glad to even have that. Great pictures though.

[Turbo2Xs]

That picture set is truly EPIC.

:J

[SepticLemon]

Yeah... Makes me wish I existed when the Atari 2600 and Intellivision was big. Being born in 1984, and Not getting into games until 1989, I've never seen any epic shop layouts like that. HOWEVER, I do remember back in the early to mid 90s, there was a Future Zone store in my town, and it worked in the epitmy of the Nintendo Vs. Sega wars where the left side of the store was all Nintendo, and the right hand side of the store was all Sega. I read on a forum that some Future Zone stores were modeled to be like Game Master's "The Game Rig", where did the 90s go!?!?! :<

[meu2]

I grew up during the Nintendo Vs Sega wars too, but I had a Sega Master System instead of a Mega Drive. That certainly made finding stores that sold games for my console more challenging.


I read on a forum that some Future Zone stores were modeled to be like Game Master's "The Game Rig", where did the 90s go!?!?! :<

I remember being so excited when Game Master started. A TV show about games shown in the UK and Ireland, sign me up. It went down hill pretty fast if I recall. How odd was it that Patrick Moore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Moore) was the Game Master?

Where did the 90’s go? Where did 1990-2010 go more like :SONRUN:

[Edwards80]

. I read on a forum that some Future Zone stores were modeled to be like Game Master's "The Game Rig", where did the 90s go!?!?! :<

Born in 1984 also :D The future zone in Stockport was modeled with strange blue lighting and sparkly plastic walls/floor/shelving. Was a bit odd but cool back then! Then it became "Electronics Boutique" next I think and became bland and white.

There was something much more exciting about routing through big cardboard box versions of Amiga games which was lost when EB took over and only really sold console and PC stuff.

[meu2]

Was a bit odd but cool back then! Then it became "Electronics Boutique" next I think and became bland and white.

Electronics Boutique where then bought out by the GAME group, so presumably there’s now a bit of purple to add to that white.

[Relayer]

Electronics Boutique must have assimilated many similar stores in the late 80's. My first exposure to an EB store was called Games & Gadgets. Thinking back on that, it might have been a co-branded EB store and not a wholly separated entity. I remember buying my first Amiga 500 from Games & Gadgets in Lancaster, PA. It has since become Electronics Boutique, and then EB Games, and finally Game Stop.

I worked at an Electronics Boutique around the time they stopped selling PC hardware (1990). It was a brand new store in a brand new mall. For the first two months, we had an Amstrad (IBM XT compatible) with CGA graphics and dual 5.25" floppy (no hard drive). It was used to demo the PC software we had in stock.

You heard me... CGA graphics in 1990 when VGA was affordable, and it was used to demo game quality... (Hey, I only worked there and didn't set policy)

Before long, we had over 1/3 of our wall space covered in NES games and gear. However, we still had an Amiga section. Games only, of course. It was upper management's decision NOT to stock any productivity software for the Amiga (a dumb assed decision based on the quality of Amiga games they also stocked). We must have had the best Amiga underground pirating group in the area also. Our liberal return policy allowed a handful of "regular" Amiga owners to buy the games and return them (opened) the next day. We were obligated to accept the return as long as the kit was complete. About a year later, the Amiga software line was dropped due to poor sales or something... :P

[Edwards80]

Electronics Boutique where then bought out by the GAME group, so presumably there’s now a bit of purple to add to that white.

EB actually bought GAME out and rebranded. Strange but true! Game now own Gamestation too. They say they are retaining the brand despite them being clear rivals offering very similar service. They are even next door to each other in Stockport.

[meu2]

EB actually bought GAME out and rebranded. Strange but true!.

Interesting, I always thought it was the other way round since all the EB's eventually became GAME's after the merger. Of course regardless of what their called, be it Game, EB or even GameStation nowadays, their all basically the same store.

[Compute]

Even though I can only dream of those times, I do have fond memories of spending hours in Software Etc. (much to the staff's chagrin) playing their demo kiosks. They had Lynx, Genesis, Game Gear, NES, SNES, and I'm sure something else. Then they got rid of ALL of the kiosks. Sigh.

[SRG]

The original pics SoCal posted remind me of something that to this day I've never seen since, in around 80-81. The local Safeway moved into a new strip mall that they were the anchor store. They had an area for electronics?? TV's, and video games in a Safeway, this was the only place I ever saw Kool Aid Man for sale. This electronics area lasted about a year to 18 months...

[Todd1780]

> look
You look at the pictures of gaming goodness of days gone by.

> scroll down
You scroll down the page to reveal even more pictures of the golden age of video games.
The memories come flooding back. The lazy days of youth, spent sitting wide-eyed in front
of the family TV playing games that spurred your imagination.

> weep
......get a grip