Wednesday, February 23, 2022

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.

34 comments:

  1. Interesting. I'm from Brasil and, unfortunately, RPG was really hard to find in stores in my childhood (the 90's). Only a few selected stores would sell any RPG books, and usually only the basic games (for example, they would sell Ravenloft's Black Box, but not the adventures or any other related books), and they were usually overpriced (in the back covers there used to be "suggested prices", and I remember seeing "US$ 5.00" or "US$ 10.00" a lot of times, but the stores would charge 10x this value in our currency).

    Miniatures are also a luxury item here (in recent times it got better thanks to e-commerce, but still one cannot find cheap minis in physical stores). I remember reading in the ChainMail rules that the players might use any miniatures from "hobby stores" or smth like that. These were totally non-existent here (At most our toy stores sold the classic "green army men"). This would make playing Chain Mail a little dull, since there were no "medieval minis" anywhere...

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  2. I first encountered the classic Jack Chick "Dark Dungeons" tract at Kay Bee Toys in the D&D section. Someone had thoughtfully left it there!

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  3. Ahhh yes, shopping malls! Daltons, Waldens, Kay-Bee all sorely missed. If you're into the pain of self flagellation and/or nostalgia here's a toothache to poke your tooth at https://deadmalls.com/

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    1. There's a number of Youtube channels dedicated to exploring dead and dying malls and plazas, with the better ones digging into their history and analyzing why they failed/are failing. Some of them are really quite good in a melancholy sort of way.

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  4. Waldens, Daltons and Kay Bees. Good memories.

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  5. I used to bash on the mass market stores, too, until I was informed that the Moldvay Basic Set that started it all for me in 1981 was bought at... Horror of horrors!... Toys R Us!

    That made me think about how, until I found all my regular game/hobby stores, I had to depend on those mall shops -- B Dalton's, Waldenbooks, Kay Bee, and even Hallmark -- to get my gaming fix.

    Lack of entry to the mass market -- likely to the "bad publicity" of the day -- would almost certainly have killed the hobby in the cradle. It would have just been a brief fad in hobby circles, AD&D would never have hit, and TSR would have shuttered its doors by 1982 when the original cycle ended and the Reagan Recession finished them off...

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  6. I had a similar experience, like so many of the era I am sure. The mall closest to me had a Walden Books and at first a Pied Piper Toys. Waldens had basically just TSR and eventually Chaosium too I think. It was at Pied Piper I first saw GDW, Judges Guild, and FASA.
    I was sad when they closed until a Kaybee opened in their place. There I tended to see a lot of SPI stuff. Things I foolishly turned my nose up at the time since it "wasn't D&D". I can still see in my mind's eye the pile of Dragonquest 2e Master Sets marked down to $9.99 which I arrogantly scoffed at. At least I did pick up a stand-alone copy of Delta-Vee (for SPI's UNIVERSE) at the super reasonable price of $2.99 as I recall.

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  7. I frequently visited The Game Keeper in Springfield Mall (northern Virginia) during the 80s, but bought most of my D&D stuff at Craft Corner in Dale City. Those were the days. You could buy role playing games where they sold yarn and beads! As an adult, I returned to find out that a new company - Wizards of the Coast - had snuffed Game Keeper, but I had a good chuckle when I first saw Hack Master. Had zero interest in Magic cards. Didn't much like video games. So, the mall lost its pull. The internet has been good to us though.

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  8. Our "big mall" didn't get built until the early 80s (at which point it immediately added the same Waldens, B. Dalton, and Kay-Bee you had) but our smaller malls and plazas offered a slew of options. There were Waldens all over (we topped out at four at one point), a Kay-Bee in a plaza that actually sold paperback scifi and fantasy books (but not many games, just toys), a mall shop called Kids that sold me most of my Avalon Hill and Metagaming games, another one called AG Bike & Hobby that carried a slew of RPGs and board games (got most of my Yaquinto and Task Force stuff there), and a huge rambling mess of a building called Duane's Toyland. That one was amazing, by far the biggest toy store until Toys R Us came along. The roof shingles spelled out Toyland and you could see the place from miles down the main shopping drag. Bought a lot of board games and TSR RPG stuff there, as well as my first ever miniatures and my entire run of Tom Swift Jr, books.

    Later on we got some dedicated game stores - the Studio of Bridge & Games and Armadillo Games - but for most of my childhood the malls and plazas were where you went to find games.

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  9. It was a B. Dalton bookstore that introduced me to that most fascinating of RPGs, Talislanta. I didn't see it anywhere else. Stores inside of malls were the main source of my RPG purchases, including the world famous Sword of the Phoenix in Atlanta, GA, inside of Lenox Square Mall.

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    1. Bard Games edition? I know I got mine and one of the Atlantis trilogy from a B Dalton's up in Buffalo.

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    2. Yes, 2nd edition by Bard Games. Later, I'd play 3rd edition by Wizards of the Coast; this was before they acquired Magic: The Gathering.

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    3. Yep, I remember that brief stretch where WotC was strictly publishing RPGs. Had most of their Primal Order books as well as the Talislanta titles. Even sent them $5 toward their legal defense fund when Palladium was making legal threats against them. Coincided with me never buying another thing from that ass Siembieda, unsurprisingly.

      That was about the time I found a reliable US source for Ground Zero Games stuff and got into Full Thrust and Stargrunt and Dirtside. Tricky to come by in the days before the internet and the Geo-Hex distribution license.

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  10. A mall. I remember those. Even though I knew little of the game back then, I remember seeing it displayed once in the early 1980s. It was at the Northland Mall in N. Columbus, the cultural center of central Ohio back then. On the coveted intersection of the main entrance and main central mall sat a Waldenbooks. In the display case was the World of Greyhawk, with the maps in full display, and a slew of D&D paraphernalia. In those days of Pac-Man graphics and the limits of pre-Internet access to things, it was impressive to say the least.

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  11. In terms of nostalgia, D&D and the 1980s mall are inextricably linked. That's where the magic first began for many of us.

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  12. Ever get to Harborplace in Baltimore and visit What's Your Game? The toy store at my local mall in Howard County was quite good for RPGs and wargames, but on a school trip to the Inner Harbor in '81 or '82 I was blown away by the crazy stuff in What's Your Game. Still have what I bought: The Tome of Mighty Magic by North Pole Publications and (for Traveller) Scouts & Assassins by Paranoia Press.

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    1. I did. My grandparents lived in the city and when I visited them, I'd often pop down to What's Your Game? They had a great selection of Traveller and Chaosium games, not to mention dice and that glass case filled with individual miniatures. I loved that store.

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    2. That's the store where I found my Original Collector's Edition OD&D set, which I still have, in the later '80s. It was on the shelf, new & unused, and still at cover price, IIRC.

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  13. I purchased my first copies of Dragon magazine at a toy store in the mall and Traveller! Good times.

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  14. Gamemasters Hobbies in San Francisco. Once a small, Chinese restaurant turned into a game store. It was stock-full with nothing but classic RPG games and minis( no puzzles or board games) and were you would see an OD&D Whitebox next to a Wee Warrior module. It was also the first store I ever saw that had a back gaming room and a couple of booths were you could play as well. Also really neat was the owner had the Darlene Greyhawk map displayed at the front of the store with these tiny stickers placed on the map showing the location of a particular module. You'll never see another store of its like ever again...

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  15. Dunno if it's the same in Sepgolia, but in Australia EB Games now sell D&D books and merch, boardgames and other non-electronic nerd paraphernalia. Full circle! Wish they'd kept that original font for their logo.

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  16. I got my D&D stuff at Waldenbooks at my mall.
    A couple of days ago, I saw a 5e Players Manual at Walmart, along with some manga.

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  17. Most of my early gaming sets came from a small independent bookstore in Keokuk, Iowa, but I often found TSR and other RPG stuff or related board games and the like at Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, K-B Toys, and even Sears and J.C. Penny stores. We didn't have much money, so didn't get to buy much, but I really enjoyed browsing the aisles.

    Later, mid-90s, I worked at Waldenbooks for a couple of years and got my 2E books with my employee discount.

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  18. Thanks for the memories!
    My parents divorced and I went to live with my mom. She dragged me to Fair Oaks Mall in Northern Virginia as she needed to do some shopping. The upside to that though, was she let me roam the mall by myself. I stumbled on a gaming store and there I discovered the Ace paperbacks of Conan. That was a memorable day. The next weekend, my mom needed to go back to the mall but this time I readily agreed. I spent the day in that store and discovered a game called AD&D. As I tried to understand the game, it finally dawned on me that in the game I could be Conan. That led to five years of DMing for my neighborhood friends and later, 5 years DMing for my children. The mall and the old school gaming store were transformative in my life, so again, thanks for the memories.

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    1. That's a great story. Good memories for you.

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    2. What's Your Game?

      Great shop.

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    3. They are good memories and that was a great store. It had a little bit of everything. I was trying to recall the name, but couldn't. I even tried looking at old photos of the mall online, but could not find it. I remember it was on the second level, kind of at the apex of a side hallway.

      I played AD&D with my neighborhood friends, then started with 3.5 when I DM'd for the kids. We also went to 4th edition, abandoned that quickly, then Pathfinder for a while, and then, in the end, AD&D. Regardless of which system we played, however, we always played in Greyhawk.

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  19. Great stuff! Truly "low impact" Holmes polyhedra in 1981 must have been quite a find!

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    1. They kept them behind the check-out counter. I had to ask the cashier if they had any in stock and, lo and behold, they did.

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  20. I got most of my first RPG and wargaming stuff from malls, but not from chain stores. The first place I remember seeing the Holmes Basic set was the Cambridge Bookstore in Lancaster Mall in Salem, Oregon, a rather nice independent bookstore. I bought my Holmes set at a hobby shop in Salem Center, though. There was also a hobby shop in Lancaster Mall where I bought Judges' Guild stuff. Most of my early gaming purchases were made at two local Salem game stores: the Games Gallery (later Creative Pastimes) and the incomparably funky Stuff and Nonsense, home of the Gaming Alliance of Salem (a.k.a. GAS). Later on, there was a chain of game stores in Oregon called Endgames which had a reasonable amount of RPG stuff. Endgames was the only place I remember seeing the EPT boxed set, which I couldn't afford at the time. Oddly enough, the Ben Franklin in my hometown (Monmouth) sold some TSR products.

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  21. The carpet on those stairs ... Here's to better days. 🥂

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  22. Here in the UK and Scotland in particular we didn't have the sorts of malls that you guys had. We had some shopping centres but the proper malls didn't appear until the 90s. So we had our local High Street.

    While I could buy White Dwarf in my local chain newsagent & stationer (John Menzies) the nearest Games Workshop was in England, 4h away. I bought my Moldvay Basic of the guy across the road and was able to supplement with other D&D stuff (never AD&D) from the Virgin Megastore in Glasgow. This was Richard Branson's record shop chain and as well as records and cassette tapes it also sold posters, t-shirts, videos and games. By the mid to late 80s I could buy gaming stuff in a couple of shops in Glasgow, but also in record shops in two towns Kilmarnock & Ayr, closer to my home. By the mid-90s there had been a retrenchment most ofnthe shops had closed and I actually bought my first AD&D stuff as bargain bin ends that hadn't been sold before 2e came out.

    These days you can actually buy the D&D starter set in the chain bookshop (Waterstones) in the mall 6mi from my house, and also a gaming cafe 3mi from my house.

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  23. Pretty much the same exact thing happened in my area around the same time mid 1980: A new mall went in (INDOOR??? unheard of!). Same- Waldenbooks and B Dalton (my preference), eventually a KayBee, and a local Mom and pop games store- where I spent WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too much money over the years. This was about 3-4 years after I started playing D&D, but it opened up whole new worlds to me with things like the Arduin Grimoire, Tunnels & Trolls, Call of Cthulhu, Villains & Vigilantes/Champions, Runequest, MSPE/Espionage and dozens of other games in that 1981-1984 ish period.

    Good times.

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  24. Yeah, I always managed to find something of interest to buy at the Waldenbooks or B. Dalton's at the mall. I regret that malls seem to have become less diverse of the years - our local mall on Long Island had both book stores, an arcade, an international food store, a knife store (Hoffritz?) and many other quirky places to while away the hours with my friends. Now it seems to be mostly clothing and shoes. The local B&N in the attached outdoor mall has really stepped up its game though.

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