Before PC went digital where did you buy your physical copies from?

Just curious where did you guys go back in the day for PC games? did you have a certain local store or did you go to different ones? for me I mostly got mine at Best Buy when they had full shelves of them.

Mostly at Staples and Futureshop (now Best Buy), a few from EB Games.

Used to get pirated copies in a local market, and for a long time did not even know that the games are not legit (I remember returning the copies, because they did not work for some reason - turns out I just did not know that I had to crack the exe). Legal copies just did not exist in my country back then, no one could afford them anyway.

EB Games.

CompUSA

Best Buy

Staples (very rarely....but they had surprsingly good bargain-bin games).

There used to be small independent games shops when i was a kid but they got overrun by gamestop. Gamestop now basically dominates the street retail part of selling games. so mostly there.

Those small shops were cool though. They would have PCs setup with the latest games for people to play on and try. PC demo stations basically.

Same here, only it wasn't the market but a sidewalk, that red-eyed skinny guy with a cardboard box full of CD's LOL. For us it was the only way to buy games back then (late 90's/early 2000's).

Wow that's going back a while, probably wow

Mainly, I used to buy them at Toys "R" Us or at EB Games before they became Gamestop but mostly, my purchase came from Toys "R" Us. Also, you can find PC physical games at Office Depot but most of the times, they carried very old games you couldn't find anywhere else.

Edit: My final physical purchase was at Gamestop and that game was Diablo 3.

The local Fred Meyer in my town used to have an entire PC gaming section in their electronics department. That was the shit. Whole wall of shelves with basically every PC game on the market, and even a hardware area with a very solid selection of CPUs and video cards. I bought all my old Blizzard battle chests there, Age of Empires and Flight Simulator, Duke Nukem 3D (ATOMIC EDITION. FUNK YEAH), and most of the parts for my first custom build rig. Got Crysis and Prey (2006) there. I even bought Half Life 2, and later the Orange Box, there. Which, obviously, led to the creation of Steam accounts. And the rest is history.

Mostly Fry's Electronics. They used to have a lot of shelf space dedicated cheap older games. I think there were a few times I got something at EB/Gamestop or Bestbuy, but the vast majority of my physical PC game collection came from Fry's.

I got genuinely sad the last time I went to Fry's. Half their shelves were empty hardly anyone was in the store. Writing is on the wall for that place. They already shut down one location near where I grew up :(

Comp USA FOREVER!!! :D

Ya they opened up one of those stores near me maybe 15 years ago. It was pretty impressive; COSTCO-sized building filled with electronics. And competitive prices, too. It was fun to just go there and look at all the hardware and stuff.

There is something to be said about being able to go to a store and still test out products on display. See the differences and such.

Game, Gamestation or HMV. Usually had a pretty decent selection of PC games, old and new.

Mostly at Walmart, though sometimes I'd find some at the Dollar General or Fred's. Nowadays I occasionally order some for older games and on more rare occasions, I find them at yard-sales.

The last physical games I bought new was Civilization 5 at Wal-mart, Sim city 2000 at a yard-sale, and Moon Tycoon from Amazon.

Egghead Software, EB Games, some Best Buy. I'm not sure why this one is so vivid, but I remember being so excited to walk into Egghead to buy my copy of Myst.

Best Buy and EB Games, probably

CompUSA and Electronics Boutique.

CEX, GameStation, PC World and Argos... It would depend on who had the best price for that game.

my first set of computer games was a LARGE stack of 5.25" floppy disks that a relative copied for me to run on my Apple IIe back in the 80s. cost me a couple Transformer action figures.

when I got back into PC gaming under Windows in the 90s I got all of my games at our old Wal-Mart, Electronics Boutique, Radio Shack & Babbage's. over the next decade or so Best Buy & GameStop kind of took over the game scene.

I rallied against all of the online digital distributors for quite a few years and was very disappointed when people everywhere were giving up on the glory of having physical copies. but as games got much larger and endless game updates(VS just finishing a game before releasing) became the norm, I also gave in and turned to strictly digital.

I think the last physical copies of a game I purchased was Fallout 3 from GameStop ~2008 & Rocksmith Remastered from Amazon ~2018. now I mostly wait until a Digital Deluxe\Ultimate Edition type bundle is released for a cheaper price through one of the digital distributors before purchasing anything.

There was a store back in the day that sold physical copies for PC and console games.
They closed in the meanwhile.

I went to the game store.

I haven't set foot in a game store for over 20 years.

Prior to that, I guess Virgin Megastore was the main place, but there was another high street store that I can't remember the name of now which had some good deals. Most of my disc game purchases from the early 2000s onwards were from online retailers like Amazon, Play.com (before it sucked), occasionally GAME and PC World, and a few others that have since gone out of business.

for computer games mostly walmart.

Best Buy, Gamestop, Staples.

CompUSA when I was a kid and they were still around.

I do miss that new-game smell, but that's about all I miss.

EB игры)

Babbages or electronic boutique

Kmart.