GameStop Corporation (nyse: GME) is the world's largest video game and entertainment software retailer. The company, whose headquarters are in Grapevine, Texas (a suburb of Dallas), United States, operates 5,889 retail stores throughout the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Austria, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Portugal, Sweden and a test store in the United Kingdom. GameStop is expected to open around 600 new stores for the 2008 business year.

Retail stores operate primarily under the GameStop and EB Games brands. In addition, the company runs two e-commerce websites, GameStop.com and EBgames.com, and also Game Informer magazine, GameStop's proprietary video and computer game publication. In addition to video and computer games, GameStop sells magazines, strategy guides, entertainment DVDs, and other related merchandise. A major source of the company's profit is also buying used games and movies from its customers and selling them back at an increase. A new store concept called MovieStop]], which focuses on selling movies rather than games, is currently building and operating stores in the southeastern United States, including the Dallas area.

Babbage's and Software Etc.

[[image:Software etc logo.jpg GameStop traces its roots to Babbage's, a small software retailer that started in Dallas, Texas in 1983. The movements that made Babbage's into GameStop started in 1994 with a series of mergers. The first was with Software Etc. in 1994, the second was with Funcoland stores in 2000, and the third was with Electronics Boutique (now EB Games) in 2005, taking four competing, major mall software retailers and placing them under a single corporate umbrella.

When Babbage's merged with another mall software retailer, Software Etc., in 1994 [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10A13FB3B5D0C758EDDA10894DC494D81&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fC%2fCD%2dROM%20%28Compact%20Disk%2dRead%20Only%20Memory%29 COMPANY NEWS; Two Software Peers Combine Their Specialties - New York Times ] the combined company was named NeoStar Retail, but the two halves continued to operate as if they were separate entities.

The combined management of the newly formed entity developed a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left was doing. This ultimately caused NeoStar to go into Chapter 11 reorganization in early fall of 1996. At this point the company had approximately 800 stores in the United States. Several potential buyers of NeoStar's assets emerged.

Leonard Riggio