Kmart sold LOOSE 2600 carts?

[Room 34]

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...item=1355370070

 

Note the Othello cartridge in the picture for this auction... there is half of a Kmart price sticker on the cartridge... and it looks like it was selling for over $5!

 

I don't remember ever seeing loose cartridges at Kmart (or any other retail store, for that matter). Anyone else?

[Rick Weis]

scott, how long have you been looking for atari carts? i ask because when they first came out i got a lot of my games from a chain store called Longs drug store.. i'm sure at one point some small retail stores would sell loose games! way back when..

 

Take Care,

 

Rick

[Room 34]

I have never really stopped looking for them. I just got lazy for about 10 years.

 

In the mid- to late-'80s I saw lots of really cheap carts, but they were always still boxed. And I wouldn't really consider Kmart a small retail store.

 

Just a quick rundown (if you care, or even if you don't):

 

1982 - Got my Atari 2600.

 

1987 - Kept playing Atari even though my friends had Nintendo. Started using my allowance to buy the $1.99 carts that were showing up in a bin at the front of Kay-Bee.

 

1989 - Got my first summer job in high school. Bought whatever Atari remnants I could find at Shopko.

 

1992 - Last great retail find... I got a brand new pair of Gemini-brand paddles that I found shoved way back in a dark corner in the brand new Kmart store in Austin, MN.

 

1994-2002 - Some half-hearted searching whenever my girlfriend (later, wife) dragged me to a thrift store to look at old jeans. (Best find — a Millipede with a missing end label at the V.A. Thrift Store in Des Moines, IA. This tells you how hard I was trying.)

 

April 2002 - Decided to dust off my cartridges and get serious about collecting.

 

[ 05-31-2002: Message edited by: room34 ]

[FelixtheGamer]

I know this probably does not help and only is slightly related, but...I have seen used Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Sega games at K-Mart. Some had packaging saying they were used and some were loose with little more then a price tag. The last time I went, they had several. However, no Atari games. Since they have a current(?) practise of this, they probably did it with 2600 games at one point in time.

[Philflound]

Yes, K-Mart does sell used games from the newer systems, so I don't see why they wouldn't have back then. Of course, I had moved on to the Commodore 64 by this time and sold my Atari in 1985, at least all my games. I think I still have my original heavy-sixer woodgrain somewhere in storage. After the Commie, I moved on to the IBM or better yet its clone at the time, an 8088 processor that I got in freshman year of college back in 1988. So till 1995, I didn't look for Atari games, and by then, they were all gone. I've been trying to get a job at Toys R Us as a buyer, and if that happens, I may try and dig in warehouses to see if I find any.

 

On a seperate note, one of my friends bought Star Wars ESB sealed 5 copies in TRU in the early 1990s for 20 cents each and let me have one of them for $2.00 a few years ago. So I pray that maybe they are buried somewhere. I've heard of original Star Wars figures being put out on the shelves a few years ago at a TRU that found them buried, so who knows?

 

Phil