For a while, the Dallas area was absolutely crawling with stores where you could buy old games. There were a bunch of Play N Trade stores around - the main company went bankrupt many years ago, I only know of the Lafayette, LA area locations that are still open. All the Dallas area ones would close within a year or two due to unrealistic sales quotas getting raised yearly. There were a couple little indie shops, some that were part of small chains, and shops in flea markets. The majority of them have all gone away.

There's a chain called Vintage Stock that owns a bunch of stores around here called Movie Trading Company, and they sell retro games, but they don't seem to be bringing in too much truly old stuff anymore. And Game X Change stores have spread across the outskirts of the Dallas/Fort Worth area and in little towns dotting the landscape, and those are my favorite.

Now the trend is for little hole-in-the-wall game stores to phase out video games and start selling tabletop games. There was a store called Game Master that used to have decent stuff, but they seemed to find selling video games more of an annoyance than anything, and kept cutting down space for it. The last time I stopped by, I walked in, went to one end of the store and back to the front door without seeing any video games, and left after maybe 40 seconds. So disappointing - especially when the logo on their sign is a D-pad, making me think they still had video games. And recently a two location chain called Game Trade is going the same way, they're marking down all their video game stuff and going full tabletop. It's just so sad to see really good stores change focus away from what I want them for.

There were, at one point, three or four locations of Game Over Videogames in the area. There's only one left now, and they never seem to have anything I want. There also used to be a few locations of a chain sort of/kind of related to Movie Trading Company called Entertainmart that was great for old games, the nearest location is probably a two hour drive away now.