Kay Bee toys during the Crash

[Mazerati]

i remember Kay Bee was the place to be during the video game crash in 84

they use to get a new shipment of games every monday and man was it fun waiting for the stuff

to come in every week

it was especially good for Colecovision stuff during the crash

 

i didn't know until recently that Kay Bee went out of business this year..it's a shame..i had a lot of good memories there

[kroogur]

I was actually amazed at some of the stuff that was turning up during the going out phase, not so much games but action figures that were over and done with over a decade or more ago! I mean why would you sit on that inventory for all that time?

[Almost Rice]

i didn't know until recently that Kay Bee went out of business this year..it's a shame..i had a lot of good memories there

 

Are you sure? It seems to me that Kay Bee has had a few out of business events in my lifetime.

[cimerians]

Around summer of 84' I would find piles of Atari and Activision games (for the 2600).

 

I remember picking up the crappy Mythicon Firefly and Sorcerer for a $1.99 as well.

 

They also had discounted Colecovision piles once in a while. I remember getting some Sepctravision games and being very disappointed.

[vrocko]

I remember going into the local Kay Bee during the crash and they had 3 tables set up in a U shape with games all over them. You could go into the store with $10 bucks and come out with 5 to 10 games. I think I got Exocet from them for a dollar and others like M.A.D., Entombed, Mega Force, M.A.S.H., The Earth Dies Screaming and plenty more. Lots of what they had were 2600 games but there were some Intellivision and Colecovision games. Just stacks and stacks of games they were selling off real cheap, but everybody was dumping videogames at the time. I thought at that time that videogames were just a fad and now the fad is over. I never thought I'd see another videogame system again.

 

Rich

[nonner242]

I remember picking up a new Jaguar for 19.99 Jaguar CD for 49.99and Rayman,Iron soldier,Flashback,Missle Command 3D,AVP for 4.99-9.99 around 1999-2000 by me.

And a couple of Big transformable metal/plastic ROBOTECH figures SDF-1 (matchbox) & a green/tan Apha fighter for 19.99.

I will miss you KB.

[thegamezmaster]

Great place, great memories from the 80's. Sure do miss them.

[phaxda]

I bought a copy of Tax Avoiders there because I was a weird kid and thought it looked cool. To this day, I still can't find the cartridge, though I remember the game in great detail. I am sure it's in my parent's house somewhere. It is one of those carts I am still missing but son't want to buy because I just know I already have it, just need to find it. Drives me nuts. I paid $1.99.

[+Random Terrain]

During the crash, that I didn't know was happening, I lived in Lynchburg, Virginia. The mall was 5 miles away and sometimes my mother would take me there, but the rest of the time I walked and went to K-Bee or Kay-Bee or whatever it was called and agonized over what marked down game I should buy with my yard mowing money. Walking 10 miles for a 7 dollar game that usually sucked wasn't very fun, but I'd get a good one every once in a while, so I'd walk another 10 miles, and another, and another, and another, and another . . . I was as stupid as a gambler.

[bust3dstr8]

I have great memories of digging through their watermelon box for INTV games. The last game I remember getting

was Sewar Sam.

[Uzumaki]

The few local (all within 5o miles) had already closed as recently as a year ago. They join with Children's Palace and other chain toy stores that failed and pretty much leaves poor Toys R Us all alone up in the toy store section.

[Atariman]

I remember picking up a new Jaguar for 19.99 Jaguar CD for 49.99and Rayman,Iron soldier,Flashback,Missle Command 3D,AVP for 4.99-9.99 around 1999-2000 by me.

And a couple of Big transformable metal/plastic ROBOTECH figures SDF-1 (matchbox) & a green/tan Apha fighter for 19.99.

I will miss you KB.

 

I hear ya on that one! I can thank Kay Bee for introducing me to the Jaguar around '98 or so when they were closing them out for around $40. I picked it up and started buying their Jaguar games for about $13 whenever I could.

 

Such good memories at Kay Bee... (picked up Baldies for the Jag CD back in the day, too)

[thrax]

Where i live in Canada there isn't a KB (i only heard of it from this site) but i remember when the market crashed in the 80s and all the department stores were liquidated their cartridges. I pretty well doubled my collection by gobbling up intellivision carts for 2 bucks when they were selling for as much as 60 bucks (which in those days was quite a bit of money!).

[lhfreak]

The last two games I bought at Kay Bees were Fortune Builder and It's Only Rock n Roll for colecovision.....I wish I knew then what I know now..............

[Mazerati]

The last two games I bought at Kay Bees were Fortune Builder and It's Only Rock n Roll for colecovision.....I wish I knew then what I know now..............

 

lol i bought It's Only Rock N Roll there too

[cvga]

I think the last games I bought there were Bugs and Sssnake. Yuck, not even worth the $2 closeout price!

[y-bot]

I got a bunch of Intellivision games for $.99 out of big bins at the front of the store. The best game I got was Safecracker. I'm not sure if this was a national chain or not but around here King Norman's was the toy store at the mall until Kay Bee took over in the early 80's. I got some Eagle Force toys from King Norman's when it was closing.

 

y-bot

[Stan]

Sigh, Kay Bee was the only cool toy store around here until it recently tanked. Now I'm just left with Toys r' Us/Babies r' Bus combo crap. Anyone remember Children's Palace? That place was the shite too.

[shadow460]

I remember Kay Bee as a place for slot racers, although I believe I have some boxes nowdays that were originally sold at Kay Bee. I wouldn't be surprised if my daddy purchased a bunch of games at Kay Bee when they went on discount. He didn't take us to the store to buy 2600 games, instead, he purchased many titles at a time on his way to or from work. He had a list of games "he could get for us". In reality, all of those games were locked up in the attic. That list grew substantially in 1984, and I would imagine Kay Bee's liquidation of Atari games had a lot to do with that.

 

The last games I purchased from Kay Bee for myself were Game Boy games. As for Toys 'R' Us, I purchased a few Saturn and maybe one or two N64 titles from them. N64 games were quite expensive as it was, though, so I stayed away from the markups Toys 'R' Us had on them.

 

After that, I switched to Babbage's and the Navy Exchange for most of my game purchases, with a little EB thrown in for good measure. Now I shop almost exclusively at Vintage Stock, Game X Change, or the thrift shop for games. Occasionally I'll pick up games from the ailing Blockbuster chain.

 

Still, though, a trip to Kay Bee Toys there at Shawnee Mall was very special. It meant that we had a little extra time that weekend to spend at the mall. I'm sure my Dad wouldn't have let us hang around the mall so long if he didn't have the energy to keep up with us. Usually trips to the mall consisted of eating at Luby's and then going to Radio Shack. Places like Kay Bee were awesome extras we got to visit once in a while.

It's funny how once I was able to come and go as I pleased, going to Kay Bee just wasn't the same. I was still very interested in some of the stuff they sold, but it wasn't special anymore.

[cimerians]

Sigh, Kay Bee was the only cool toy store around here until it recently tanked. Now I'm just left with Toys r' Us/Babies r' Bus combo crap. Anyone remember Children's Palace? That place was the shite too.

 

 

aka Child World?

 

Yes...nice place. I used to love going there. I remember buying Space Panic for the CV there.

[jboypacman]

Yup i remember Children's Place well i got copies of M.U.S.H.A. and HellFire there for the Sega Genesis for $20 those were the first "cheap" Genny games i ever picked up(I got DJ Boy shortly there after and it was like $15 if i remember correctly).

[videogamesbook]

I purchased the ADAM expansion module when KB clearanced it out for $199 in 1985. I took it back about a week later though when I discovered the word processor program couldn't single and double space in the same document. I was in college at the time and needed something to use for term papers, so I had to take it back and get a typewriter instead.

 

I remember walking into Schnucks (grocery store) one day in 1988 and seeing a pallet size stack of Driving Controller/Turbo sets for $19.99. It struck me as strange that they would suddenly pop up out of nowhere when I hadn't seen a ColecoVision in the stores in a few years. It got weirder as I went through the store and they had nothing else at all remotely related to video games. They must have got the pallet for nothing. I worked at KMart at the time and we got pallets of Coleco toys at the same time - must have been the liquidator emptying out the last of their inventory.

 

And, in 1985, I went into Camelot Music (small music chain?) and they had an 8' table of ColecoVision games 4/$10. I was in college and losing interest in games at the time, but for some reason I bought four that day - Jumpman Junior, Gateway to Aphshai, Jukebox and WizMath. I remember picking out WizMath because it was the biggest and weirdest box on the table. They had lots of titles I had never seen before (lived in a small town then), and could have had a complete collection just from what was sitting on the table that day. I think I bought a stack of 45s instead.

 

20 years later I miraculously had all my old video game systems, carts and boxes, magazines, etc. I moved 11 times in 10 years between college and working in retail. I moved so often, the same pile of boxes went from a closet in one apartment to a closet in the next apartment because I never had time to go through them. I didn't even know what was in those boxes until I stopped moving. I just kept reminding myself that there was a reason I packed them in the first place so I must have needed what was in them, and then I'd shove them into the next moving van.

[+FujiSkunk]

I missed out on shopping Kay-Bee during the '84 crash, but all through-out the late '80s and early '90s, finding a new Kay-Bee to look through was like finding a treasure chest. By then the 7800 cartridges were in the clearance aisle, and they still had plenty of 2600 carts and sometimes even games for other systems to dig through as well. At least once on a high school band trip, while we were spending a couple of hours at a mall to grab lunch, I wandered into the Kay-Bee to see what goodies I could find. That particular day I found Choplifter for the 7800 and, surprisingly, Contra for the Commodore 64. And of course all my classmates were wondering what I was doing "wasting" my meal money on old video games.

 

Good times.

Edited March 30, 2009 by skunkworx

[A2600]

I bought a Sega Master System II Around 1991-92 for 35 Dollars at Kay Bee in Puerto Rico

[yuppicide]

I do not recall any Kay-Bee toy stores near me in the early 80's. In fact, I've only came to know of them either in the late 80's or Early 90's.

 

We had a bunch of Toys R Us stores, some local stores (Tiny Tots comes to mind since it was within a 5 minute walk) and one Lionel Kiddie City.

 

During the NES era we used to swap out games. 5 people would chip in $10 each and a Super Mario Bros cart.. in return you'd get a Tecmo Football in a Super Mario case and one person would get an actual Tecmo Football. Back then the return policy was very easy for the consumer.

 

I don't remember much about Kiddie City. I remember that they usually had crap and looked almost like Toys R Us. I remember them going out of business and having bins and bins of Atari 2600 red-boxed games for cheap. They weren't anything rare that I can remember.. stuff like Kangaroo, Desert Falcon, Dark Chambers, etc., but looking back I wish I would have bought them anyway.

 

Toys R Us used to be my favorite. I loved that long aisle of games. Looked like they went on forever! I always kick myself for not getting a Virtual Boy on clearance. I loved the whole take a ticket system and go wait at the window. Behind that window you could see all the game boxes, sometimes stuff new not on the shelf yet.

 

Tiny Tots was an interesting store. It was a decent size for an independently owned store. I wish I was there when they closed so I could dig through every corner of the store. In the 60's and 70's (I think that old) they had slot car tracks in the back with the toys up front. Later on they got rid of the slot cars (rumor had it they still had the track hidden in the warehouse), and they brought in baby cribs and stuff. They always had playground equipment outside as far as I can remember. During the 80's possibly earlier they had remote control car stuff up front and we built a track outside. Oh they had dolls and models too. I have a memory, a visual picture in my head, of a time when I went there in the 80's and they had a "wall of fish". The tanks were built into one of the walls if I remember correct, but it could have been a shelf. Now, I was maybe 3 or 4 feet talk back then and I remember the fish tanks higher than me! They didn't have a good selection of video games from what I remember and were overpriced.

 

I don't know of ANY good Kay-Bee toy stores and never have. Everyone around here is a tiny store in the mall. Not a great selection, always messy. We didn't have any "standalone" type stores in a strip mall or anything.

 

My greatest memory is of the Route 20 indoor fleamarket. I can still see this one booth in my head. Atari game wall to wall in a little booth just big enough for 2 people to stand in. Guy had the whole wall covered.. above his head and everything. Years later another guy there sold used games. Really nice guy. I picked up 20 or 30 + TG Hu-Cards from him. Don't know why I liked DJ & Jeff. Probably because everyone else hated it.