Zellers

[Alex]

So, somebody else mentioned Zellers as being innacurate. Anyone else care to make their estimation of rarity? Here is our Zellers page for our take. When we created the Zellers section, we basically started at 5 and went up or down depending on where we felt they fell on the scale. Comments?

[King Asmo]

Here's my opinion of the rarity.. but obviously I'm just one source, so you'll have to get others.

 

I've been talking to a former Zellers employee, and he thinks he may be able to get a game catalogue or an inventory sheet for me, so we can find out which games were actually released by Zellers.. I won't have it for awhile, unfortunately. Anyhow.. the first # will be the Atari age rarity.. and the second # will be my estimate. I've only found Zellers stuff in Ontario.. not in the other provinces, so rarities in B.C. may be different than in Ontario.. so I'd love to hear from other collectors:

 

Busy Police (5) [KA - 6 or 7 -- tough title]

Challenge (4) [KA - 4]

Circus (4) [KA - 4]

Dragon Treasure (5) [KA - 4]

Earth Attack (5) [KA - 4 or 5]

Farmer Dan (5) [KA 6 or 7 -- tough title!]

Freeway (4) [KA - 4]

Frontline (4) [KA - 3 or 4]

Inca Gold (6) [KA - 6]

Laser Volley (4) [KA - 3]

Laaser Voley (4) [KA - 6]

Ocean City Defender (4) [KA - 3]

Pinball (4) [KA - 4 or 5]

Radar (5) [KA - 4 or 5]

Space Adventure (6) [KA - 7.. maybe even 8 -- toughest title]

Time Warp (5) [KA - 5]

Turmoil (5) [KA - 5]

 

Okay.. so maybe we agree a lot more than I thought. I guess what I'd say is that the rarities are a little more spread out.. some titles are pretty easy to get (Laser Volley and Ocean City Defender) whereas some are near impossible. I've *never* see a copy of Space Adventure here.. and I only recently picked up a Farmer Dan. Those are really tough titles.

 

Just my two cents.. KA.

[Alex]

Thanks for your comments. Most of my opinions of Zellers rarity has been what I've seen on Ebay, I probably search at least once a week. FWIW, I've seen boxes for all the games listed in our db, but I don't have nices scans of all of them.

 

About Laaser Voley though - have you ever seen a Laaser Voley Zellers box? Or pulled a Laaser Voley cart out of a Laser Volley Zellers box. I've seen that cart too, but my opinion has been that it was just a similar pirate cart never sold by Zellers. It seems that there was a large source (or several sources) of those games with a black end label, white text, and a funky picture on it. Zellers probably bought from that source and put them in their own boxes. So there are many Zellers style games that weren't actually sold by Zellers. Thoughts?

[King Asmo]

I'm not sure if my copies of Laaser Voley came from a Laser Volley box or if I picked them up loose.

 

If you look at the instruction manuals of Zellers games, you can tell that quality control wasn't exactly their strongest point, i.e. Turmoil is spelled "Termoil" in several places in that games instruction manual. I've always figured that they produced a first run named "Laaser Voley", then somebody pointed out the mistake, and they fixed it in the next batch.

 

I've come to agree with you that not all the games came from Zellers.. there must have been some common source. One thing I have noticed is that the font on the end labels of some of the games suspected not to have been sold at Zellers is different than the Zellers font. I think small visual clues like that will help in determining the origins of different games. With Laaser Voley, the label tends to be on the other side of the cart than Laser Volley. Not too sure what to make of that.