Bye Bye Buy-Back Games - Englewood, CO

This one took me by surprise... 


A few weeks ago, I was driving the usual southbound Broadway route to Honkassland, when I passed the "Way Cool Shops on South Broadway". As I do nearly every day, and rarely give it a second thought. On this day, I noticed a new and large gap among the diminishing Cool...


For most of my Colorado life, The Way Cool Shops were pretty much just that... From 1996 (when I moved to Englewood) through 2013, The Way Cool Shops included: 7-11, ACE Cash Express, Buy Back Games, Dominos Pizza, Mike's Sports Cards, Scales & Tales Reptiles and the Cigarette King.

One-stop shopping for my various way cool impulse needs...


Sadly, Mike's was the first to close up shop in June 2013. Leaving an unfilled void in my collecting life... After a few months of posing as an often robbed mobile phone store, the former Mike's Sports Cards became the dining room for an expanded Domino's Pizza...

It's such a tease that they have left Mike's Sports Cards on the sign more than 4 years after he closed his store. I keep hoping it's been re-opened...

The really nice old Asian couple that ran Cigarette King closed their location in the Summer of 2014. Which sucked because they were cool people. However, 7-11 anchors the north end of the Way Cool Shops, and carried my flavor of smokes for just a hair more than Cigarette King did...

Cigarette King became Broadway Nails, after sitting vacant for about 6 months.

In case you are keeping track, today marks day 51 since my last cigarette...


When I moved here in 1996, I was thrilled to have all the necessities just mere blocks away from the first location of Honkassland. Shortly after getting everything set up, I set course on exploring my surroundings. I found the The Way Cool Shops nearby, and Buy Back Games became my go-to for used (and sometimes new) video game needs.

1996 wasn't too far removed from the original Nintendo Entertainment System being the most popular home video game option. It was still played with some regularity in my home, so I was often on the lookout for additions to the NES library.


The very first visit to the Englewood Buy-Back Games brought Athena to my collection. This was a great game, but was so full of glitches, it was impossible to solve. Athena was a game based on Greek mythology, and played similar to Super Mario Bothers.

There were tons of weapons and items to help you on your side-scrolling journey to whatever the objective of that game was. But you could only get to a certain point before the game would completely freeze up on you...

Athena was busy, with lots of the moving enemies and backgrounds, for each level. Unfortunately, the more things that appeared on the screen at a time caused even more flashing and objects disappearing. It was maddeningly impossible to play, yet a lot of fun...

My friend Scott had this game early on in the NES craze, and I was always borrowing it. For $5 in 1996, it needed to be mine.


You also can't go wrong with a post-apocalyptical driving/shooting game, and Roadblasters was really fun to play in the arcade... For what it was, the NES version wasn't a complete failure...


For many years, I checked out the inventory at Buy-Back Games nearly every time I stopped at the Way Cool Shops on South Broadway. They had a wide variety of used and new games for all systems, dating back to the Atari 2600. Bargains could be found, especially when someone local decided to ditch an outdated system.

Buy-Back also carried a limited amount of DVD's (and later BluRays), and sometimes had rare stuff worth the price. Those visits dropped off dramatically once Mike's closed, but I still made it a point to stop in every now and then.


In the late 1990's, I put in over three years of service at the Azzip Tuh, 2 blocks south. Awesome times while giving rides to pizza, for minimum wage, plus cash tips. This was before pizza chains started charging a delivery fee... Which DOES NOT go to the drivers. It also DOES NOT provide insurance for the drivers.

Customers don't like paying and additional $2-$5 for a delivery charge, after paying for the food, then tipping on top of that. This was a very sneaky move by restaurants to undercut their labor force. Those of my friends who continued to drive, told me that quality of tips declined greatly as the delivery fees appeared (and kept increasing).

There is no way today, that I could use pizza money to pay rent, monthly bills and help put myself through college, as I did some 20 years ago...

Those cash tips amounted to a great deal of spare change piling up every month. Back then, all coins went into a large glass jug (which broke in St. Louis, Missouri in June, 2000. I'll get to that story eventually), until I had enough change to bring to the bank...

I always tried to work on Sunday afternoons during football season. I loathe football. But that was a great day for delivery, traffic was down and lots of pizza's were needing rides... The Broncos were an ok team in the late 1990's (I drove pizza's around during both Super Bowl victories), so I made pretty good money during winning Bronco game days...


After delivering a particularly heavy jug of change to the old US Bank, Cinderella City location, I had enough left over to buy a Playstation.

The first one... This was 1998... 

In addition to whatever Major League Baseball game was the most popular (pretty sure it was E.A. Sports back then), I had to have Jet Moto. I played both games at a fellow pizza taxi driver's apartment, while heavily intoxicated, a whole lot that year. Buy-Back Games allowed me to duplicate that in my own apartment for around $250! I didn't even have to be drunk!


The Way Cool Shops on South Broadway would like to encourage today's youth to go out there and skate!

******

After an absolute failure of a 19 month return to Minnesota, I returned to Denver in 2005. The Way Cool Shops on South Broadway remained exactly as I'd left them in 2003. I bought a carton of smokes from Cigarette King, too many boxes of 2005 Bowman Chrome from Mike's, and found these in the display case at Buy-Back Games....


I asked the clerk if they were legit... He told me they were... 

Despite doubting his word, I figured that at $5 each, I should pick up a couple for backups. The SupaNoFriendo is still one of my favorite systems as far as games that are just really fun to play. I need to have back up controllers in case my originals die.

At worst, I have some poorly made bootlegs...

Guess what? I have some poorly made bootlegs!

I continued stopping in as the years went by. Collecting old NES and SNES games gave way to PS1, then PS2, then PS3...

I'm not a gamer by any means. I like the old classics, and don't have patience for new and complicated...


But I do love the bizarre! A game with people screaming in terror as they get sucked up into a giant rolling ball, while Japanese children sing the happiest music ever recorded... There's something that never gets old to me!

However, even a store as useful to me as Buy-Back Games has been, it's still hard to explain my tastes to others...

Shortly after buying a PS3 (but not at Buy-Back Games), I picked up a new copy of the above "roll around and pick shit up game", and looked for another game to package with my new system. The girl half my age (yikes!) working the register, asked me to describe some games I liked. After computing all my information, she suggested Little Big Planet.


Well, the character is cute...

But the controls frustrated me and I gave up on it after an hour. It has yet to return to the PS3. That is how video games and I get along these days...

I keep thinking I'll give Little Big Planet another chance some day...


This was Buy-Back Games official final statement to it's customers. 


I guess those greedy bastards at Game Stop won again...

As I said, I haven't paid much attention to Buy-Back Games in the last 7-10 years. 97% of the time I turn on a video game, it's MLB The Show. (About 2% for the roll around and pick shit up game...) With the closures of the other stores I patronized, there wasn't enough of a reason to come here anymore...


But I will miss Buy-Back Games...

It's been an Englewood institution during all my years of living here...

******

Minnesota was one and done...

Colorado was one and done...

Guess I'm a Nationals fan now...


Go This Guy!!

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