Ticket to Paradise

"From bikes to trains to video games..."
If you were wondering, yep, that's Urkel.

Recently, I found a fantastic post by Nadia Oxford on her Tiny Girl, Tiny Games blog, which takes a fond look back at the golden age of Toys 'R Us. These days, members of Generation X don't have much reason to step foot into the store except to pick up Huggies and Barbie dolls for their tykes. However, in the 20th century, when we were youngsters ourselves, the place was a wonderland, filled with every toy on our overly optimistic Christmas lists and even a few we somehow missed.

Toys 'R Us was also the place to go for video games, back in the days when adults didn't take them too seriously. Most retailers were reluctant to carry game software in the mid 1980s thanks to the industry crash of 1983, but I can't think of a time when they didn't have a major presence in Toys 'R Us. I recall visiting my aunt in Milwaukee back in 1986 and finding a wall of black tags with curiously pixelated artwork mixed in with old-school titles like Scooby-Doo's Maze Chase for the Intellivision. Those black tags were games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, a scrappy newcomer which would go on to dominate the game industry years later. I didn't know at the time that I was staring at history in the making, but significant moments like these tend to slip past you when you're a tightly-wound twelve year old.

A rare glimpse of the Toys 'R Us
game wall, circa 1991. Who was buying
all those copies of Budokan, anyway?

Nadia talked at length about the way you bought games at Toys 'R Us, and I'd like to touch upon this too. Most items you could just purchase at the register, but for games (which are a lot easier to slip under your jacket than, say, Malibu Stacy's Beach House), you'd need to take a few extra steps. Games were displayed on the wall as a series of plastic tags with images from the box on both sides. If you wanted to read the description on the back of the game's box, you'd flip the tag up. If you decided you wanted that game, you'd grab a ticket from a pouch under the tag. If the pouch was empty, that game was out of stock, and you'd have to pick something else.

When you were done, you'd bring your ticket to the register and purchase the game of your choice. You'd then take the receipt to an imposing concrete partition near the store exit. This was the electronics stockroom, a veritable Fort Knox of gaming goodness. After you slipped your receipt under the glass window set in the wall, then and only then were you given your game. 

A grown-up would probably find this arrangement needlessly complicated and time-consuming. However, to a child, it brought a sense of gravity to the game purchasing experience, something Nadia describes as a "solemn event." That game was going to be just as fun no matter where you bought it, but retrieving it from the grey brick fortress in the front of the Toys 'R Us made the purchase more significant. The fact that this was only necessary for games heightened that significance. You weren't buying some silly toy. You were buying a video game.

Well, they tried.

The power of that experience escaped me until Nadia's article made the memories come flooding back. I bought so many games with Toys 'R Us tickets, and they're always the ones I remember best. The charmingly hopeful Atari 2600 port of Kung Fu Master, a game that had no business being anywhere near that system. 1942 for the NES, which I'd played to the bitter end despite its shortcomings. Sagaia, a colorful Taito shooter that was one of the highlights in the early Genesis library. My last ticket was Panzer Dragoon Saga, claimed at a Toys 'R Us in Tucson and clearance priced at twenty dollars. (Wired editor Chris Kohler, still in his teens at the time, was pissed that I was able to get a copy for thirty dollars less than he did. Fifteen years later, with the game selling for hundreds of dollars on auction sites, I'd say he still did pretty well for himself.)

The new R-Zone. Boo, hiss!

Shortly afterward, I moved back to Michigan, and visited the Lansing Toys 'R Us with a friend. That location had been something of an old friend itself, but it had drastically changed from when I visited it as a child and a teenager. The walls of tags, the blue and yellow tickets, and the towering concrete stockroom were all gone, replaced with a new section called the R-Zone. (Not that R-Zone.) Games could now be taken directly to the cash register, with a lone security gate standing between them and the store exit. I didn't think much of the change at the time, but fifteen years later, a realization has hit me like a ton of those massive grey bricks. I left my Toys 'R Us kid in the 1990s, and I don't think I'll ever get him back.

(Special thanks to Nadia Oxford for inspiring me to write this, and to YouTube, Flickr's FourStarCashierNathan, and AtariAge for the images.)