atari, SpriteCell

Overview

This archive aims to preserve catalog and circular ads for electronic games. These ads show how much games cost when they were new, and how quickly or slowly that price changed as they became older. We can compare prices of games across stores and see how different stores pushed different games, and we can directly compare disc and cartridge based game prices. The way games are seen and the language used to talk about them has changed significantly over the years, and how stores have tried to entice sales is a good example. Some of these have beta or mockup cover art that is not well preserved. This can also be fun nostalgia trip back to a time when you used to daydream about what games you hoped you would get for your birthday or Christmas.

To be included the advertisement has to be from a retail store and it has to feature an electronic game or an accessory for such. Electronic game for our purposes includes consoles and games that are played on a television, handhelds with or without interchangeable media, computer games, and some miscellaneous gadgets that you can play games on, such as watches. All ads are from American stores and prices are in United States Dollars. Magazine ads and catalogs made by game publishers or hardware makers aimed at retail stores are not included. The included ads come from catalogs, circulars, and newspapers.

The quality of these images will vary considerably. Some have many watermarks, some are small, some were not scanned well, and some are not scans, but pictures of a page. I am not withholding anything on the basis of not meeting a quality standard in the name of preservation. I don’t take credit for making any of these scans or taking any of these pictures, I have only collected what I have been able to find, asking permission when I am able and it makes sense to do so. I encourage you to check out the sources, many of these people make other things related to video games, or preserve many kinds of ads.

The archive currently has images from 1975 to 2023 including more than 35 different stores. The ads are organized alphabetically by store on each year page and by page number when applicable. When there are multiple catalogs or weeks of circular ads featured within a store section I have ordered them chronologically when possible. Sometimes I have had to guess what year the ad was published based on the games featured, please let me know if I have made a mistake.

You can click the images in the galleries to make them full size, either press the left or right arrow keys or click near the left or right edge to go to the previous or next image, and press escape or click outside of the lightbox to close it.

I typically update every year with the new Black Friday ads during December. For a few years in the late 2010s I was looking through every weekly circular ad but that became too much, especially for GameStop.

If you can find or scan any ads that aren’t on these pages, please send me an e-mail at thespritecell@gmail.com, or message me on twitter at SpriteCell.

Current total images: 3,770

Sources

Christmas Catalogs & Holiday Wishbooks has hundreds of text searchable catalogs.

Hughes Johnson has personally scanned a number of catalogs for his site and blog. His scans are available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license . No changes were made to his scans.

WishBookWeb has a number of Christmas catalogs.

Video Game Art & Tidbits has personally scanned a number of catalogs, as well as other art & tidbits. The individual tweets are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18