Unbelievable find

[Guest]

Heh, I've asked a few toy stores myself, and I've always been told that they got rid of that stuff long ago. If they did have it, they probably don't know it and can't be bothered to look, unless you get a really helpful person. Best I ever found, in terms of recent retail, was a couple copies of RealSports Baseball on the sale rack at Service Merchandise in '97. And they rang up at 97 cents each.

 

Thing is, KayBee closed out some pretty rare titles, so you never know what you might find there. I'm sure that somewhere in the country there are Kaybee's with some Atari club games under a thick layer of dust.

[utamav91]

Speaking of Service Merchandise, I worked there from 1988-1996. About a two years before I left I was able to purchase the last round of Atari releases Off The Wall (the Breakout clone) and Double Dunk (the still-amazing basketball game).

 

The key is getting an employee (store managers are very good usually) or someone who knows their stuff of the various chains to dig around the computer inventory system for you--many companies can have stuff like that transferred to their store or shipped to your house fairly cheaply.

 

However, there's probably not much laying around, since each company does inventory at least once a year for tax and accounting purposes. Things that are too old to sell often get thrown away, given away. Not many store managers want to get audited and have questions like "what's this? No catalog/stock number on it. It's not on inventory listing" getting asked...

 

Often that stuff has been written off financially or even deleted from the "official" computerized inventory, but again, just keep asking--you never know.

[Bob Bytchin]

I've been reading the message boards for a few weeks now, and decided to try something that I'm sure others have thought about. I went to a KayBee Toy store in my local mall, and began chatting with the manager, who is a friend of mine. I asked him if he happened to have any old Atari 2600's in the back, and what an amazing discovery he found. I got the following, all in original packaging...never opened.

 

1) 3 Atari 2600 Jrs (If someone can tell me what to look for on the boxes, I could be more specific)

 

2) 3 copies of Yars Revenge.

 

3) 2 copies of Defender

 

4) Crystal Castles

 

5) 2 copies of Mountain King

 

6) Jungle King

 

7) 3 copies of Adventure

 

2 copies of Warlords

 

 

My friend is going to tap into the computer and see if he can find other gems that are in hiding, and if so, this weekend I will be taking a trip from mall to mall. Will keep everyone posted.

[Tempest]

Wow! I did something similar awhile back. About 4 years ago I went to my local Toys R Us and asked the same thing, after being told there was no possible way by 2 different managers I found one that was willing to check (probably just to get rid of me) and lo and behold they found about 10 Lynx games, and a few 2600 games (I don't remember which ones, but nothing too rare). I guess I should have asked my local K-Bee to check before they went out of business last year. God knows what they had in back (they had been there since the early 80's).

 

Tempest

[Tempest]

BTW, I assume you mean Jungle Hunt not Jungle King (which is what jungle hunt was based off of). If you found Jungle King then we'd have to talk...

 

Tempest