Electronics Boutique: We Byte the Bullet
In the 80s, finding a place to get your computer fix was not always easy. As an Atari enthusiast, it was even harder because, at least in the U.S., Atari computers were always overshadowed by Commodore, Apple and PCs.
When I wanted software for my Atari computers, I didn’t have many places to go. The local Atari dealer was about 45 miles away. For a little while you could also find Atari software at Toys R Us and Service Merchandise, but that dried up quickly.
I remember getting most of my Atari software from the Atari dealer or mail order. And when the Atari dealer went out of business in the late 80s, that just left mail order.
There were other retailers that sold computer software, but they never made it up to me here in Maine. One such place was Electronics Boutique. I recently came across one of their catalogs from 1987 and thought it might be interesting to take a quick look at it.
Apparently, Electronics Boutique was founded in 1977 as a small shop that originally sold electronics gadgets before moving on to computer software and then video games.
The catalog I have is 23 pages and says it is for a sale that “end January 31st, 1987” so perhaps it was related to Christmas of 1986.
It has sections for Entertainment, Productivity, Education and Accessories. It is entirely focused on computers with no mention of game consoles. I was somewhat surprised by that as the Nintendo Entertainment System was huge by 1986 and going into 1987.
What was even more surprising, as an Atari fan, is that many of the software titles in the catalog are available for the Atari ST and Atari 8-bit computers! I don’t know if any Electronics Boutique stores carried the wide selection that is shown in this catalog, but it was nice to see Atari mentioned at all alongside the ubiquitous Commodore 64, Apple II and IBM PC software titles.
The Infocom games were all available for the Atari 8-bit and Atari ST computers, in additional to the Commodore 64, IBM, Apple and Amiga. I do miss these text adventures!
Several of the Activation games are also available for the Atari 520ST.
Timeworks got a big section for their productive software products. Word Writer was popular on the Atari ST and it is nice to see here.
Owning a computer back in the 80s meant you needed floppy disks and Electronics Boutique had you covered. A box of 10 double-side, double-density disks was $12.99 (about $37 in 2025), which seems pretty expensive for a measly 8 megabytes of storage!
It’s also interesting to note the general prices of things in the catalog. A game such as Flight Simulator II was $35, which is about $100 in 2025. A word processor such as Word Writer was $80, which is about $228 in 2025. People tend to forget how expensive computing actually was in the 80s.
I scanned this catalog to PDF for your retro viewing pleasure:
Legacy of Electronics Boutique
By the time the Maine Mall got an Electronics Boutique store (in the early to mid-90s), they had moved away from computer software and were all-in on video game consoles and games. I remember in the summer of 1996 I would stop by regularly to see if MLB Pennant Race was available yet. It had been announced early in the summer, but its release date kept slipping. It seemed like each time I went in to buy it on the previously announced release date, I would be met with a not available and a new release date that was a few more weeks away. When it did finally get released, late in the summer of 1996, I bought it and a Playstation from that Electronics Boutique. It was unfortunate that a baseball game was released at the end of the season, but the PlayStation was still somewhat new and that game was worth the wait, at least for me. I loved its amazing graphics and gameplay, even if it was quite buggy.
Electronics Boutique changed their name to EB Games in 2002 and in 2005 was acquired by GameStop and all the EB stores were renamed to GameStop. Although the GameStop store in the mall has long since closed, there is at least one still in the area.
And GameStop (GME) notoriously became a meme stock in 2021 when the subreddit r/wallstreetbets somehow got its price to surge dramatically. GameStop is still around today.
Dysan diskettes were touted as top-of-the-line. They were $40 for a box of 10. https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-01_OCR/page/n135/mode/1up And that's for SS/SD. DS/DD was $50 ($166 in today's dollars).