Kay-Bee toy store cheap Atari 800 games

[firebottle]

Makes me wonder who set up the fixture/display for the cheap Atari 800 games. If it wasn't a Kay-Bee employee then maybe the salesman or distributor might've taken a photo of it to impress the boss... if only it was posted on the 'net along with a video tour of a Kay-Bee store from back then.

[leech]

The store I remember buying Atari 8bit stuff from was called Lionel's Play World.  We bought al least the old Popeye and Qbert carts there.  I also recall that we used to buy Avalon Hill Board and Role-Playing games there.  Sadly they closed down many moons ago.

Accirding to Wikipedia,  Kay-Bee Toys had 1324 stores in 1999... and declared bankruptcy 5 years later, finally closing in 2009 with 461 stores left.  That is insane.  Even Toys R Us has had financial difficulty.   Do parents just buy their kids iPads and not bother with good ol' fashioned toys anymore?  Won't someone PLEASE think of the children?!?!

[Keatah]

45 minutes ago, leech said:

Do parents just buy their kids iPads and not bother with good ol' fashioned toys anymore?  Won't someone PLEASE think of the children?!?!

 

Well you know how it goes. Nothing can compete for a kid's attention like the social media giants like youtube, facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, and so much more. Especially when laden with teen idol news and all those influencers.

 

And for younger kids its a perfect babysitter. Kids will sit for hours mesmerized by the blinking lights and high-pitched shrilly sounds. Kids'a'crying? Give them the ipad. Shuts'em up like a dog muzzle.

 

There are a few staple toys remaining outside of the social media traps. Thankfully construction sets and puzzles are among the top.

[www.atarimania.com]

Quite possible you saw something like this:

 

 

[zzip]

9 hours ago, leech said:

The store I remember buying Atari 8bit stuff from was called Lionel's Play World.  We bought al least the old Popeye and Qbert carts there.

Where they related to Lionel Kiddie City?   I remember they had a store like Toys R Us, and they had a large stock of Parker Brothers carts for some reason.   In addition to the common ones, it was the only place I ever saw the Parker Bros Chess cart.

[+davidcalgary29]

22 hours ago, firebottle said:

The Atari 800 games I saw at Kay-Bee were being sold sometime between 1984 to 1986.

The only time I saw this at a Kay-Bee store was at a mall in Charleston, West Virginia in October 1984. I bought the following titles, all boxed and all under five bucks each (I believe that they were priced at between $1.99 and $3.99):

 

-Thorn EMI Kickback (terrible game)

-Pastfinder

-Alpha Shield

-Final Orbit

 

I still have all of those games today, although I did later lose/destroy the boxes for everything except Kickback. 

 

There were no "A" games offered for sale; all titles were at least a year old, and most of them were on cartridge. And everything, except Pastfinder, sort of sucked. I clearly remember not recognizing many of the titles beyond knowing that they weren't the cream of the crop of Atari gaming. There may have been some disk games, but I didn't have a disk drive at that point, so I didn't bother to get any. There were games on tape, but I wasn't going to touch one with a ten-foot pole. The load failure rate on my 410 was just too great for me at that time. 

 

I distinctly recall the computer section being huge and messy. There were titles for other computers, too, but the Atari section was huge. 

[zzip]

18 minutes ago, davidcalgary29 said:

There were games on tape, but I wasn't going to touch one with a ten-foot pole. The load failure rate on my 410 was just too great for me at that time. 

We didn't know better.   Shortly after we got our XL's, my friend and I found heavily discounted 410's:  $29.99 marked down from $80 (maybe that was Kaybee too, don't remember).  We snatched them up and started buying games on cassette.   But his in particular had a terrible failure rate.  He put his computer on the floor like a console, and the tape as well.   We learned to start the tape load and quickly leave the room for 10 minutes, because even the slightest floor vibration seemed to cause the loading to error out.     Mine was on a desk and I rarely had much trouble with tapes I purchased.   The tapes I recorded myself were another story though..

 

22 minutes ago, davidcalgary29 said:

I distinctly recall the computer section being huge and messy. There were titles for other computers, too, but the Atari section was huge. 

Which was pretty amazing given how tiny they average Kaybee mall store was.  

[Keatah]

Our local Kay-Bee was also small. And sometimes difficult to move around because the shelves were nearly overflowing. That was part of the charm. It was like going on an adventure and exploring a cave of toys. Overwhelming and stuffy. You'd buy your stuff then "escape" to the fresh air of the mall - reveling in your new acquisition.

 

 

[+davidcalgary29]

Ugh, it's all coming back to me now. I shouldn't have said that those Sirus games were boxed: they came in these awful ziplocky baggies (with printed instructions) that refused to close after about three uses. Pastfinder was definitely boxed: I remember I cracked the plastic insert about a week after I bought it. And Kickback had that hard plastic clamshell that's survived countless moves and thirty six years. Now that I think about it, I bought Space Eggs at that Kay-Bee store as well. That's what I remember: lots of Sirus and Activision titles at the Kay-Bee store at the Kanawha Mall. And then I went back to our hotel room and watched Max Dugan Returns. Damn!

[Keatah]

I used to love the bagged Sirius Software titles for the Apple II when they first started making games. A Big difference than the dumping mentality toward the end. This was from around 1980-1982, not much further.

 

I also don't recall many bagged titles for the Atari 400/800 or C64. Bags were only popular for the Trash-80 and Apple II. Everything else was boxed.

[+davidcalgary29]

I used to see a lot of bagged titles for the A8 on both tape and disk (dating from the Crash, or before) for sale around the Toronto area well into the late '80s. Lots of Adventure International titles, but there were lots from other software houses as well. I usually found them in the non-Atari stores -- the ones that specialized in Commodore stuff in particular, but that would also always keep a box of random items for other computers in a big box at the back of the store, along with old issues of COMPUTE!. They were -- of course -- always dusty and looked liked they wouldn't load at all, and it was clear that no one wanted them. I didn't either, and went for the loose used commercial disks that stores were selling in bulk for about a dollar by that time. 

 

In any case, I'm not sure if Kay-Bee repackaged their items or got job lots from a liquidator, but yes -- those Sirius titles were baggies. Alpha Shield may have been a box (I have a dim recollection of having a yellow one), but there were lots of baggies.

[zzip]

31 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Our local Kay-Bee was also small. And sometimes difficult to move around because the shelves were nearly overflowing. That was part of the charm. It was like going on an adventure and exploring a cave of toys. Overwhelming and stuffy. You'd buy your stuff then "escape" to the fresh air of the mall - reveling in your new acquisition.

agreed, it was full of cool stuff.  We eventually got a Kaybee "Toy works" in shopping plaza here, and it was several times larger than the mall stores.   But It didn't seem to have much more inventory,  just larger aisles and more empty space.   So it didn't have the same charm.

[leech]

8 hours ago, zzip said:

Where they related to Lionel Kiddie City?   I remember they had a store like Toys R Us, and they had a large stock of Parker Brothers carts for some reason.   In addition to the common ones, it was the only place I ever saw the Parker Bros Chess cart.

They very well may have been!  Yeah they were very Toys R Us like.  Used to love that store.  Last time I was at a Toys R Us, I think the only gaming stuff they had was Nintendo Wii stuff.  Otherwise it was mostly just toys.

[firebottle]

7 hours ago, zzip said:

We didn't know better.   Shortly after we got our XL's, my friend and I found heavily discounted 410's:  $29.99 marked down from $80 (maybe that was Kaybee too, don't remember).  We snatched them up and started buying games on cassette.   But his in particular had a terrible failure rate.

Those 410's were made cheap. I went through 3 of them back then. The play buttons wouldn't stay engaged after a while. Had to wedge a pencil or a pen in back to keep it down. That and ERROR-138 and ERROR-143! Finally saved up the money to buy a 1050 disk drive.

[leech]

48 minutes ago, firebottle said:

Those 410's were made cheap. I went through 3 of them back then. The play buttons wouldn't stay engaged after a while. Had to wedge a pencil or a pen in back to keep it down. That and ERROR-138 and ERROR-143! Finally saved up the money to buy a 1050 disk drive.

Sounds like any of the Philips based monitors!  The power buttons die, and you need to either stick them in and wedge them there, or otherwise trick them to always being on, then buy a passthrough power cable with a switch.  My poor Atari SC1435 went that route after I thought I'd fixed the video input... Still pissed the solder pads evaporated on me...

[jefffulton]

The Kaybee near us didn't have those disks, but did have 3 or 4 Thorne EMI carts in the cool clamshell plastic boxes. I still have three of them : Kick Back, Sodder and River Rescue from my original purchases in 1984/ They were also $5.00 each. 

[Turbo-Torch]

Here are the Kay-Bee games I picked up sometime in the mid 80s.

Cosmic Intruders isn't too bad.  It's a clone of Atari's Star Ship/Outer Space.  Sound is ok too.

Blitzkrieg is sad.  You just move your guy back and forth trying to avoid the bombs.  Sound is basic beeps and it doesn't even keep score or time you.  It was compiled in Z-Basic.

 

 

[adam242]

2 hours ago, Turbo-Torch said:

Here are the Kay-Bee games I picked up sometime in the mid 80s.

Cosmic Intruders isn't too bad.  It's a clone of Atari's Star Ship/Outer Space.  Sound is ok too.

Blitzkrieg is sad.  You just move your guy back and forth trying to avoid the bombs.  Sound is basic beeps and it doesn't even keep score or time you.  It was compiled in Z-Basic.

 

 

 

I really wish i hadn't set my Model III (which I bargained the owner down to $10 at a swap meet) at the curb in a move. Damn.

[gilsaluki]

Got Thorn EMIs Computer War and Soccer from KB Toys.  Sadly, for some reason, last year I removed the $2.99 price tags from their cart shells.  Now I wish I had left them alone.  History. 

[StickJock]

I have a NiB trakball that I haven't opened.  I think it is the one with the triangle buttons (my opened one has the round buttons).  I thought I got it at KB, but I just saw that the price tag is from Weird Stuff.  I must have bought it in 1990 or 1991.  (I'm positive that I got the round button one at KB, though).