Mall Memories

Regular readers of this blog know that I am frequently critical of the impact of consumerism on the hobby of roleplaying. Yet, the reality is that, without the consumerist impulse, the hobby would probably have never become big enough for me to become aware of it, let alone participate in it. I was struck by this recently as I reflected on how closely some of my earliest RPG memories are intertwined with that monument to consumerism, the shopping mall.

In 1981, about a year and a half after I first played D&D, a new mall opened up not far from my home.

By the standards of the day, the mall was quite large and, as luck would have it, included multiple stores that sold RPGs, wargames, and related paraphernalia. There were, for example, two bookstores whose names are well known to anyone who lived through those years: Waldenbooks and B. Dalton. 

B. Dalton was the store I relied upon to pick up copies of Dragon magazine, which, for some reason, I had a harder time locating elsewhere in the mall. That said, Waldenbooks generally had a better selection of RPG products, particularly those published by TSR, which were my favorites. 

Also located in the mall was Kay-Bee Toys & Hobby. In fact, at one point, owing to a bizarre turn of events, there were two separate Kay-Bee stores in the mall, each of which had slightly different selections of goods for sale.

I bought my first set of polyhedral dice at Kay-Bee – the notorious "low impact" dice that many of us associate with the Holmes Basic Set. I also picked up quite a few TSR boardgames, like Escape from New York and The Awful Green Things from Outer Space. 

The store I liked the most, however, was Games 'n' Gadgets.

Games 'n' Gadgets, as its name suggests, sold a wide variety of entertainments, from boardgames to puzzles to electronic diversions. Naturally, what most interested me were its selection of RPGs, wargames, and miniatures. This is the store where I first picked up Traveller, Gamma World, and too many other non-D&D games to remember. I spent more time staring at its shelves than I can recall; it was a truly wondrous place for me and my friends. Eventually, Games 'n' Gadgets changed its name – to Electronics Boutique and, later, EBGames – and its focus. By the late 1980s, its shelves were taken up almost exclusively by video games and I no longer had much interest in visiting it and an era had come to an end.