Any Old Idiot Can Be A Hero (Final Fantasy II)
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Video games came from Toy Works. At least, in the Super Nintendo era they did. It moved around; the Nintendo era was mostly Toys ‘R Us, at least in practical experience, which was down by the mall, and is still there. (That’s also the area where the Funcoland that fueled my late high school/early college retrogaming phase, a second childhood of NES and SNES.) But in the summer of 1990, we moved to Newtown when my mother left the corporate world to return to academia. That was the high summer of my Nintendo days – a gap between when we could occupy the two houses meant that my mother and I spent a month or two living with my maternal grandparents in Mahopac while my father did a road trip to attend a math conference in Wyoming. My mother, appreciating that I was going to be bored to tears living there, went on a NES game buying binge, and I basically spent the summer in my grandparents’ basement playing Nintendo.
Toy Works was in Sand Hill Plaza, in the south of Newtown, which I remember the construction of, and which must have, based on other memories, been in late 1990/early 1991. The store is long since closed, and there’s a store for baby stuff there now. Originally, the video game section was over in this corner of the store, with a demo NES where I got some of my only tastes of games like Punch-Out (my father disapproved of boxing as a sport, so this was never a game I was allowed). The demo unit is what I now know to be a Nintendo M82, although that wasn’t terminology that existed in my vocabulary or worldview of the time. At the time the floor was an industrial carpet in that section only, giving it the same black/red/grey livery of the NES itself.
By the Super Nintendo, though, the video game section had moved to about over here, although by this time there was plenty of competition in the mall as well, where stores like Software Etc., Electronique Boutique, and Babbages sold both computer games and console games. (Indeed, the historical reality may well be that I got most of my actual games from those stores and not Toy Works, but the Super Nintendo Project is not about historical reality nearly as much as it is about memory.) They’re all Gamestops now, though mostly in the same locations, as is the Funcoland by Toys R’ Us. There’s a Gamestop in Sand Hill Plaza too now, actually. I assume the white and pastel linoleum of Toy Works is still there under that wood floor; it was still there when Simply Baby and Kids moved in, a jarring fossil of my childhood.
This would have been where people bought Final Fantasy II. It wasn’t for me, though, as I never bought this game, although I did rent it. That would have happened in Stop & Shop, two doors down from Toy Works, and still there.
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