RIP TRU (March 31, 2018)

[Bandit LOAF]

Toys R Us is in the process of closing, leaving many waxing nostalgic about childhood's spent at the beloved retailer. 1990s console gamers may remember needing to make purchases using a special security system: instead of finding a game on the shelf, you would take a printed card from a display to a 'lockup' where the physical media was stored. It turns out this process and the cards used were provided by a third party vendor called VidPro, which was based in Dallas. They would print the required cards and displays and provide them to toy and electronic stores as needed. Today, VidPro cards are considered a minor collectible, with ones printed for unreleased and especially popular games commanding a premium. In honor of TRU's final days, we tracked down a copy of the VidPro card for Mindscape's SNES port of Wing Commander I (scanned below.) We've also established that cards were available for Wing Commander III 3DO and Wing Commander IV PSX. It's likely (but not certain) that there were also cards for The Secret Missions SNES, Super Wing Commander 3DO and Wing Commander III PSX. If you have one of these in your collection, we'd love to see it!





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Original update published on March 31, 2018

 

[ck9791]

Its sad. I have great memories of going to Toy's R Us, and other large box toy stores. There was one near us that had a front that looked like a castle. I remember going and walking up and down the aisles looking at all the action figures, the GI Joes, the transformers, the micro machines, the legos, and the video games. And in my early years at Toy's R Us at least if a person wanted a video game you took a ticket up to the register and paid and then you took it to a booth at the front where they found the game for you. I am going to miss not being able to take my kid to Toy's R Us or a similar store and watch their reaction to seeing all those toys.