GameStop is an oddity in the industry, a business that gamers can look at with both nostalgia and revulsion. Most recently, the company shocked fans when they unceremoniously closed long running magazine Game Informer.
While many fans think that the retailer is in steady decline, they’ve made a sudden announcement that seems to debunk that notion to its very essence.
They made this announcement on Twitter earlier today:
“THE CLASSICS ARE BACK.
New Retro GameStops are now spawning near you.”
They also link to a Retro Store locator website, which you can see here. As reported by Shacknews, the company has been selling retro video games on their website for some time now. But as we have seen GameStop’s business drop so that they had to close most of their locations within the past decade, their seeming comeback is certainly surprising.
Based on the comments on this Resetera thread, it doesn’t seem that they have opened new branches again, so much as they have brought back the sale of their retro video games on some of the physical locations they have that are still operating.
True blue retro video game collectors will tell you that there are tons of other dedicated retro video game stores across America that are better places to buy those older games. Here’s a YouTuber who regularly makes videos about those stores. But there’s something here that we can regard with interest on GameStop’s new announcement today.
Gamestop shared their new GameStop Retro logo, and a second image showing all the retro game consoles that they have products for at their stores. Let’s run them down below:
- Nintendo Entertainment System
- Super Nintendo Entertainment System
- Game Boy Advance
- Game Boy
- Nintendo 64
- Nintendo DS
- Wii
- Wii U
- Nintendo Gamecube
- Xbox
- Xbox 360
- PlayStation
- PlayStation 2
- Sega Dreamcast
- Sega Genesis
- Sega Saturn
- PlayStation Vita
- PlayStation 3
We’re going to assume that this is not a definitive list, since there are clear omissions of platforms that aren’t really that obscure, such as the Atari VCS, and the PlayStation Portable. Maybe they don’t have enough stocks of those consoles to really advertise. But GameStop seems to have made it official; the seventh generation of video game consoles, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, are officially retro. But the Wii U, which released in 2012, is also in this list too.
We suppose it makes sense to include the Wii U here now, not in terms of release date or console generation, but because Nintendo definitively left behind Wii U products when they launched the Switch. There’s no backwards compatibility between Switch and Wii U, in the same way that it doesn’t exist between PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. You can play Xbox 360 games on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, but with the Xbox 360 store closing, and the clear age of that platform, it makes sense that the retro games business considers it a retro console too.
Now, we are fortunate to live in a time when it’s become popular to rerelease old video games. They rerelease them as standalone titles, as collections of games, even as premiere museum like experiences. There is even a storefront dedicated to old games, that’s making new rereleases even now. This may not cover all retro games under the sun, but we are not starving for options today.
