Babbage's & Electronics Boutique

Electronics Boutique came first, and not as a game store at all. James Kim, who had made his money in semiconductor assembly, opened it in 1977 as a kiosk in the King of Prussia mall outside Philadelphia selling calculators and digital watches. It grew into a chain of small computer-software shops, about 1,200 square feet each, that advertised almost entirely by being in the mall: 318 stores by 1993, with a Games 'n Gadgets sub-brand for the fun stuff. Babbage's was the Texas rival, named for the computer pioneer Charles Babbage and started by two Harvard Business School classmates, James McCurry and Gary Kusin, with a credit line from Ross Perot in exchange for a third of the company; the first store opened in Dallas's NorthPark Center. It sold Atari 2600 software early on, added Nintendo games in 1987, and by 1991 video games were two-thirds of its sales.

That was the store as most people remember it: a narrow shop with the budget titles by the entrance and the expensive boxes along the wall, an inventory that turned over faster than the department stores' shelves, and a staff who did not work on commission. In 1994 Babbage's, then about 335 stores, merged with Software Etc., 380 stores, into a holding company called NeoStar Retail Group, which by one count had a store in more than half the malls in America. It lasted two years. NeoStar filed for Chapter 11 in September 1996, unable to borrow enough to stock the shelves for Christmas; Electronics Boutique bid for the wreckage, but the judge chose a $58.5 million offer from Leonard Riggio, the Barnes & Noble chairman, because it kept 108 more stores open. About 200 stores closed anyway.

Riggio's Babbage's Etc. launched a new strip-mall brand in 1999. It was called GameStop, and Barnes & Noble bought the whole company that October for $215 million. Electronics Boutique meanwhile shifted to console games in the mid-90s, went public in July 1998 with 466 stores, passed 600 by the end of the decade and renamed itself EB Games in 2002. In 2005 GameStop bought EB for $1.44 billion and put its own name on every American store; the Babbage's name had already been retired, and now the EB sign came down too.