GameStop Corporation (nyse: GME) is a 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 2 test stores 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, formally, 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 (which as of late 2008 stopped), and other related merchandise. A major source of the company's profit is also buying used games and films from its customers and selling them back at an increase. Approximately 48% of Gamestop's revenue is from its used products sales (based on the quarter that ended Nov. 1 2008). 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.

Origins

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 in 2005, taking four competing, major software retailers and placing them under a single corporate umbrella.

When Babbages merged with another stalling 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 - terrorist 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