A few winters ago I was visiting my wife's grandmother; her sidewalk was
especially icy so I offered to shovel it. When I opened her closet door
to look for some salt I found myself instantly buried under an avalanche
of old phone books and various catalogs. Despite her protests I threw
out anything that was over five years old. However, while sorting
through the piles of dusty books I found a couple of gems. Notably,
several Sears Catalogs
from 1988-1994. I'm not talking about these little 20-page "Sears
Wishbooks", I'm talking about the full-blown 1,500-page catalogs
that listed every item Sears
had for sale. I don't know if they even make these anymore, I suppose
the internet has made them totally obsolete. Anyway, I tore out all the
video game pages and scanned them for posterity. In hindsight maybe I
should have saved the catalogs and tried to sell them on eBay.
I don't know, that sounds like too much work for someone as lazy as me.
A few things strike me about these catalogs, mostly the insane prices.
$60 for Home Alone, $40 for Space Harrier, $50 for Tecmo Super Bowl,
$600 for a CDI system; did this stuff really cost that much back then?
It's amazing how game systems have become hundreds of times more
powerful while managing to keep in the same price range.
All the pictures are huge (~1200x1600), I held off on posting them for a while
because of how much space they take up. I asked around to see if a
classic game site wanted them but no takers. Maybe I'm the only person
in the world that finds them interesting. Anyway, the pictures on the
left are thumbnails. There are links below the thumbnails to medium and
high quality scans.
1988 saw a presidential election pitting George Bush against a liberal
ex-governor of Massachusetts; oh how times are different here in 2004.
As for video games in these catalogs, it's a pretty sorry year. There was significant yellowing of the two
lonely pages of video games. Sears
got burned pretty badly from the infamous video game crash so maybe they
were hesitant to push video games as a legitimate product again. Of
course, by 1988 the NES was white-hot and the SMS was faltering so it's
odd that they gave each system the same amount of space.
My favorite thing about this scan is the kid's haircut. Yeah, when I was his
age I had some pretty bad hair too. This scan really exemplifies why the SMS
lost out to the NES. It wasn't due to bad games; titles like Phantasy Star,
Outrun, Ys, Zillion, Miracle Warriors, and Shinobi were better than the
average NES game (although the NES certainly won out in the quantity
department). Nah, the SMS was defeated by it's image. From 1986-1988 it was
"cool" to have an NES and not the SMS. Look no further than this
scan: the 3D glasses, left-handed joysticks, those overly cartoony
"Great" sports games, and don't even get me started on the Sports
Pad. Face it, if you admitted to owning any of this stuff you'd be crammed
into a gym locker.
I distinctly remember when Zelda II: The Adventure of Link was the
"must have" game of the year. I thought that year was 1987 though.
Not a real big selection of games to choose from at Sears
here. Of the twelve they list I owned five at the time: Zelda, Zelda
II, Section Z, Punch-Out, and Ghosts 'n Goblins. I've never played
"Jaws - The Revenge Before" but it looks like little more than an
Atari 2600 paddle game with slightly better graphics. There's
even a copy of the game about 5 feet away from me right now and yet I'm
not curious enough to try. That modified printer cart on the right cracks me up.
In 1989 I jumped right into the 16-bit era by purchasing a Sega Genesis
with Altered Beast. Overall, the Genesis is still my favorite
system. By 1990 it looked (briefly) like the TurboGrafx-16 (TG-16) might catch
up with Genesis. Alas, a small and weak library would ultimately doom
the TG-16 to relative obscurity. Yet I still remember the time when
people debated which of the two 16-bit systems to buy.
Even with 16-bit challengers, the NES was still the top dog in 1990. For
about half the price of the competition you could pick up a NES with two
games, two controllers, and a neon orange light gun. I don't think I know a
single person who doesn't own a Super Mario Brother/Duck Hunt combo cartridge.
Here's the real reason the NES stayed on top for another year, the games.
The NES game library really hit it's peak here. Super Mario Brothers III,
Dr. Mario, Wizards & Warriors II, Double Dragon II, TMNT Arcade, and
Castlevania III to name a few. OK, those are almost all sequels but name a
current Nintendo hit that isn't based off a 8-bit NES franchise.
Hard, isn't it?
Ah, more bad hair. Ever wonder why the Game Boy was such a sensation. Real
easy, it was fun. That's all there is to it, make some simple yet fun games
and you'll sell a million systems too. Nintendo's pretty much stuck with
that formula through the years. I never got tired of games like
Motocross Madness, Super Mario Land, and of course Tetris. Oh, and it came
with the best pair of headphones I've ever owned.
When I see this original design of the Lynx I'm not surprised that it lost
out to the technically inferior Game Boy. Let's face it, that original Lynx was a boat.
No way you could hide that in class and sneak in a game. As for the
TurboExpress, it lost purely on price in my opinion. $90 for a Game Boy
vs.
$250 for the Express. I know which one parents are going to buy. The
model holding the Turbo-Express has no idea how to use a control pad.
That's right, $390 for a TG-16 CD. That was in addition to the $160 for the
base system, no wonder it didn't take off. At the time the only good game
for it was Ys Book I&II. Actually, that was the best game made for the
system period.
A lot of people bash Altered Beast as a pack-in game. I'll admit, it's only
five levels and I was bored with it after playing it once. That
notwithstanding, the Genesis had a very strong first generation library.
Last Battle is the only game here that I would say out-righted sucked.
Everything else were solid titles that helped build the Genesis up to be a respectable
rival to the NES. Of these games I owned Golden Axe, Revenge of Shinobi, and
Ghouls 'n Ghosts. Revenge of Shinobi remains one of my favorite games.
Now this was a great year for video games. A full-scale, no-holds-barred
battle on several fronts. Nintendo was at the center of them all. On one hand we had the Game Boy beating down two technically
advanced competitors. On the other hand we had the Super Nintendo (SNES) competing against
the established Sega Genesis.
It's worth noting that
in 1992 I started working at an Electronics
Boutique store (now EBGames/GameStop).
At this point I was just seasonal help but I'd end up working there
full-time for way too long. It
was a fun place to work, I made a few good friends, and it helped me
save a few bucks for college. If working at Electronics Boutique paid what I make today
it would be a tempting job. Memories of the 1992 Christmas season come
rushing back every time I look at these scans..
Man, look at that awful "Game Light Plus". The Game Boy sure
launched a cottage industry of cheap accessories; and we sold them all.
Surprisingly, those knock-off handhelds were popular too. Well,
popular with parents who didn't want to spend money on the real thing.
Nice selection of games here. I don't recall any of them being particularly
big sellers though. Ten years later Nintendo would continue to bend over
backwards to ensure they worked on the Game Boy Advance SP. Off-hand I
can't think of another company that supported their legacy titles as
well as Nintendo.
This smaller version of the Atari Lynx for $99 should have been able to
compete with the Game Boy. Although, by this time the Atari name was such a joke that
people wouldn't even touch what was a vastly technically superior product.
Note that I say "technically". The library for the Lynx was never
really that great. I'm sure I'll get lots of hate mail from Lynx fans but
whatever. Face it, there are maybe four good Lynx games and the rest are
crap. Just breathe deeply and tell yourself that a few times, it'll sink in
eventually.
The Game Gear, on the other hand, should have done better. It was basically
a portable Sega Master System, with a simple converter you could play it's entire
library at least. It didn't need the converter though as Sega put out a strong
collection of games for it. If they could have just dropped the price a
little they might own the lucrative handheld market even today. Nintendo
didn't make a better portable than the Game Gear until the Game Boy Advance
SP a decade later.
Even in the dying days of the NES there were some quality games available. I
remember Dragon Warrior III selling fairly well this holiday season. It seems
like game companies always underestimate how well console RPGs will sell.
I love the "A, D&D Dragon Strike" typo on this page.
There's a screenshot for Paperboy 2, I had no idea that was made for the
NES. Apparently it was rare because I see it going for $20 on eBay now.
Nothing about this page strikes me in any way. The screenshot of Carmen Sandiego that's
cut-off: that's how it looks on the original page. The catalog is over 500
pages, they're going to mess at least one of them up.
I believe this was the last NES bundle released before they redesigned it to
a compact model. There's something nice about the old boxy design.
I bought this Turbo Duo bundle because of the stack of free games it came
with. I built up a nice catalog for it when we started clearing it out
in 1993. The TG-16/Duo hit it's peak too late,
after the Genesis and SNES already controlled the 16-bit market. That
screen shot from "It Came from the Desert" looks like it's
from the Amiga version.
The Genesis had a reputation for being a "sports system", these
next two scans show it was deserved. This was a huge factor for customers in
their early 20s. Time after time I saw them choose the Genesis over the SNES
based solely on the strength of the sports games.
Between the sports games there are a couple other interesting ones here. They
have the hard-to-find D&D game for $65, it's almost worth the price too.
A year after the first Gulf War they have the newly released Desert Strike.
I laughed out loud when I saw the storage center picture because I remember
selling that hunk of crap. It took up a ton of space, which is precious in
an already cramped game store.
The real kicker is that it was very clearly designed to fit a different
system. The ad mentions that it fits the Master System II, I'm guessing that
was the intended system for it.
That might be the worst drawing of Mario I've ever seen. He looks like he
had a stroke. Mario Paint is featured on this page, to this day I can't
believe how many copies of that game we sold. It came with the mouse and
people honestly believed there would be more games that used it. If you
want to play games with a mouse just buy a PC.
Not a real convincing selection of games here. I wasn't wowed by the first
generation of SNES games except for Zelda: Link to the Past. I can't
really put my finger on it, this first wave of games just didn't do anything
for me. I didn't buy
the system until Zelda was the pack-in. Although by 1994-1995 I was definitely
playing the SNES more than any other system.
Street Fighter II really drove sales of the SNES. It was just huge at the
time. The SNES had it and the Genesis didn't yet, if you wanted SFII there
was only one option at the time. Yeah, $70 was the going rate for it too.
This catalog was weird, I didn't see any Sega or Nintendo games in here. Maybe
this was when Sears
was in horrible financial trouble and were changing their
product line around. Now that I think about it, they barely stock video games today. I only go there if I need some cheap
shirts or a garage door opener. One of these pages says the CDI "was
$799.99 in our 1992/93 'Y' Annual Catalog" so maybe there were
multiple catalogs and this was the one without mainstream video games.
Anyway, all I found in this catalog was the horribly overpriced Phillips CDI. We didn't carry the system at
Electronics Boutique but I remember it being
billed as something as an all-in-one "edutainment" system
(ugh, I hate the word "edutainment"). I'm hard-pressed to
think of a game system with a worse library than the CDI, maybe that
Amiga CD32 thing. Once the 3DO entered the market the $600 sticker
price would look
cheap by comparison.
"Oh my God, a freakin' tiger will leap right out of my screen for only
$600! That's a '$200 savings' according to this ad!" I've never met anyone who owns one of
these. Not even someone who bought one on the cheap on clearance or off eBay.
If I find one at a garage sale for 50¢ maybe I'll pick one up. I bet I
could hollow out the case and stick a mini-itx
motherboard in there.
Here's that awful game library I was talking about. Well, if you can call
half this stuff a "game". I'm sure people were lining up to buy
that "high-fidelity stereo" version of Battleship, or to drop $50
on "Treasures of the Smithsonian". Eventually Phillips would sue
their way into getting two Zelda games, but even those were dreadful.
1971 Sears Catalog
1982 Sears Catalog
1985 Sears Wish Book
My Loser Phase: Reflections on Video Game Retail from 1992-1997
Electronics Boutique 1996 Spring Catalog
GameSpy.com - The Top 10 Gaming Holiday Seasons: 1988
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