Electronics Boutique Summer 1992 Catalog

Weird, I've had these scans sitting on my hard drive for 5 years without posting them. I can only assume I was planning to post them at the start of some arbitrary summer. I'm not going to forget for another year so here they are now. This is the 6th(!) catalog from 1992 I've posted so please forgive if the comments start to repeat themselves.

Kind of a weak opening. The Elbo on the beach thing is fine, it's the game assortment that's puzzling. Larry Bird was retired for a year by now and summer is the most dead time for the NBA in general. Then there's Toki Going Ape Spit, the worst game title ever perhaps, and a junky 3rd party controller. Maybe the vendors paid for the space. Game Boy and Zelda are great picks of course.

As far as I can tell, former CEO Joseph J. Firestone in now retired in Florida.

This must have been printed right before the Genesis took a huge price cut. It was $119.99 in the September 1992 catalog and $99.99 in the October one. There was some pretty aggressive competition between Sega and Nintendo driving that.

"Tired of using normal clunky control pads?" Maybe not the best way to advertize a clunky looking joystick. It's not a bad controller really. I wouldn't want to try it on Mortal Kombat though.

Nice buy two get one free offer on this page.

Even in the Chicago area no one was interested in Mike Ditka Power Football.

Huh, I didn't know that Steel Empire is a strategy game until now. I guess I assumed it was a shooter, now I'll have to try it. I'm not great at shooters, that's all.

That NES Advantage knock-off joystick doesn't seem to have enough buttons for the Genesis. I mean, it has like 100 buttons but only two of the three action ones.

Something about the grid pattern used in this catalog makes a lot of the pages look bad. Unfortunately this is one of them.

This is not a bad scan, the logo is really missing from the Contra III box.

I seem to recall enjoying Drakkhen back in the day - it's one of those games that could benefit from a remake.

Three years after the start of the 16-bit era and the NES is still sold in stores with a nice selection of games.

Thanks to the long delay in receiving RPG ports the NES was still getting new Dragon Warrior games well into the 16-bit era.

The carrying case is only portable if you have a U-Haul.

It's amazing how cheap A-list Game Boy games were.

The Final Fantasy branded games on the Game Boy have been on my backlog for way too long now.

I'm not ashamed to admit being a big fan of the Boxxle games (and the various clones).

Sorry Game Gear but Columns just isn't a good substitute for Tetris.

I have many 90s gaming regrets. One is not buying a GearMaster.

If the holdings company that owns the Atari IP had their act together they'd get someone to build high-end "Lynx Classic". They could easily get a few thousand people to shell out $200-$300 for that.