It’s been a while since I’ve been out adventuring. I still have a long backlog of posts about the east coast, so I haven’t been as gung-ho about exploring the town as usual. Today the weather was nice, so I decided to get out and take my mind off the stress of everyday life. Today would be dedicated to milling around northwest Minneapolis without regard to self-deprecating people who can’t be motivated. You know who you are.
Today, we’re in Brooklyn Park, a small town named after a park named after a city in New York. Contrary to what the name suggests, there aren’t many parks in this part of town. I’d only been to this part of town once several years ago, so everything looked new to me, like this fancy crosswalk pattern. I totally would have remembered this.
The nice thing about the Twin Cities is how few Walmarts there are. There are only a couple of them near the center of town, while all others are on the outskirts. Since Minneapolis is the location of Target’s main headquarters, they’ve managed to keep the city on lockdown. At least the lack of Walmarts makes it easy to know when to get off the bus. Speaking of which, I could have sworn there was a Target around here. It must be a couple of blocks away or something.
As someone who used to travel with my family in a motor home, this is a familiar sight. Whenever you need to stop and have lunch, you can park at a rest area or the back of a Walmart parking lot. You can even stay overnight because Walmart doesn’t care. I even lived in a Walmart parking lot for a while, and nobody noticed my car hadn’t moved for almost a month. Good times.
Once upon a time, these areas in the front of the store would sometimes have full-blown arcades. I once saw a Walmart in South Haven, Michigan, with a DDR solo machine up here. Most Walmarts have since downsized to a Toy Shoppe, tag machine, and maybe a kiddie ride. That’s not to say Walmart has completely gotten rid of its arcades. Nowadays, they usually have a dedicated room near the eyeglass center. I’ve wanted to get photos of one since I started this blog, but none of the Walmarts I’ve run into lately have had one. I do know of one in Nebraska. I’ll stop there again someday.
For those of you who live in countries that don’t have Walmart (…Germany?), it’s a really big store that sucks the life out of any town it moves into. For example, in the town where I grew up, we had Meijer and liked it. Near the end of high school, they suddenly decided to build one a few blocks away from my house. During my final days in Michigan, I decided to count up all of the empty buildings on Westnage (our main business street) that were closed and empty. There were over thirty.
The most notable thing about Walmart is that the managers in the electronics department are only allowed to mark down a set number of items every month. Those markdowns almost always go to things that they believe might sell. The result is the electronic department’s notorious for having a bunch of random outdated stuff mixed in with the recent releases.
I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but I’ll repeat it because it’s now more relevant than ever. When I was young, I often spent time in the video game section of Walmart, skimming strategy guides while my parents shopped. This was a pretty normal thing to do in the 90s. I still remember one specific Walmart, a way out of town, having a small shelf of them. When I say “small,” I mean, “you couldn’t line them up vertically even if you wanted, so the whole shelf was just a big, messy pile of magazines.” The two that caught my attention were a printing of the Super Mario comics and a Mario Paint strategy guide because they were pretty unusual to find in 1996-ish. Fast forward to 2002: The Mario Paint strategy guide was still there. I felt obligated to buy it because it had been sitting on that same shelf for so long.
And that’s the story of why I used to own the bloody Mario Paint strategy guide.
According to Amazon, the Kodak Easyshare M1020 was released in 2008. Given how many other versions of this thing there were, I doubt it was still produced into 2009. These things were all the rage in the late 2000s. Nowadays, most Goodwills have an entire shelf dedicated to them, assuming they don’t just throw them out now. In a few months, it will be the 10th anniversary of this electronic photo frame joining the Walmart family. Here’s to ten more years, Easyshare!
They had an entire endcap of ancient video games that would never sell. With news of the 3DS’ lifespan coming to an end, it’s just going to get harder and harder for these original DS games to sell. They’re so desperate to get rid of that Nancy Drew game that they used a special markdown to price it at 36 cents, but still, nobody wants it.
The real winner here is the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy box. According to Gamefaqs, it was originally released on December 5th, 2005. To prevent its oldest item from being stolen, they’ve equipped it with a special security sensor. If you tell the department manager that you want to steal this game, he’ll probably take it off for you.
Do yourself a favor and Google “Raiders of the Lost Walmart.” 12-year-old video games pale in comparison to some of the crazy stuff that people have unearthed.
After leaving Walmart, I decided to head to the arcade. I milled around for about 15 minutes, trying to figure out which direction it was in, before coming to a horrifying realization: The bus route passes by two different Walmarts. I got off at the wrong one. After pondering what to do for a while, I realized I was close to Robbinsdale. There was a place down there I’ve been meaning to visit again.
This quaint part of town here is Robbinsdale. I couldn’t remember where it was until I looked it up. I came here once, and only once, before. Allow me to recount that story. Remember how when I broke up with one of my ex-girlfriends, I decided to go to Las Vegas and started this blog? Well, she’s coming up yet again.
You see, she had very, very strict parents. They refused to buy her video games growing up (although they had no problem with her playing them, so long as they didn’t have to buy them). After hearing her talk about how her friends liked Kingdom Hearts, I surprised her by scrounging up a PS2 and a bunch of games. The PS2 came from Savers for ten bucks and was so dirty that I had to take the whole thing apart to clean it. Resident Evil 4 and the memory card were originally going to be ten dollars on Craigslist but were both free because he forgot to bring them the first time. Final Fantasy X came from a pawn shop for another five dollars. I stumbled upon a copy of Viewtiful Joe for five bucks later. All in all, a Playstation 2 with a decent starting library of games only cost me 20 dollars, but I was still missing the original Kingdom Hearts. Eventually, I found another seller on Craigslist willing to part with it for eight dollars.
This bus station was the meeting point. After waiting around for like two hours, the seller turned out to be a teenage girl who had to have her dad drive her there. We quickly made the exchange, and the Playstation 2 package was complete.
While my girlfriend was ecstatic upon receiving it, she ultimately couldn’t find her way out of Traverse Town and never touched the system again. And people wonder why I wouldn’t say I like talking about her.
This is the outside of the bus station. It was originally a fire station but was later converted into an indoor marketplace before becoming the bus depot we all know and love. They never bothered to change the sign.
Since I was hunting for PS2 games at the time, I wandered into this pawn shop across the street.
Pawn shops usually think that taking pictures of the merchandise means you’re planning a robbery, but I stealthily managed to grab a shot of this. The variety in this pawn shop is amazing. Dreamcast games aren’t uncommon, but how many do you know still have Virtual Boy games lying around? And not just any Virtual Boy game, but the one good Virtual Boy game! I owned a virtual boy when I was younger, mostly because my grandparents found one dirt cheap in the clearance aisle one Christmas and had no idea what it was. While I thought Mario Tennis was fun enough, there wasn’t much to it. A guy from school who gave me a nasty concussion that took me out of school for a month also had one, so I could borrow Wario Land from him. Wario Land is- Wait, you’d rather hear about the concussion? What’s wrong with you?
There was a copy of Breakout for the Atari 2600 in there, too. I don’t know why it was there since they had other Atari games on the rack. The other thing is probably something you don’t recognize. Even I mistook it for an Atari Lynx game at first. It’s a third-party Gameboy game, similar to that infamous bible NES game. See? That’s way more interesting than hearing about where my scar came from.
After getting Kingdom Hearts all those years ago, I decided to roam around town. You know, in case any other places around here sell old PS2 games. Most people would think the odds of that happening would be too low to bother with. I am not most people.
That’s the story of how I discovered the Video Universe. It might not be the best video rental store in the world, but I’d wager it’s pretty high in the rankings. A rental store still existing is a miracle, but this place takes it to another level. I’ve wanted to write about this place forever, but then Dinosaur Dracula started writing about video rental stores. I had to wait a while, so people didn’t think I did it just because he did.
Video Universe isn’t just a video store; it’s the culmination of years upon years of movie releases. Nearly every wall in the building is covered in the movie poster, promotional cutouts, and other related things from the last 30 years. The owner has poured every ounce of his love into this place.
While I was snapping photos, the owner specifically asked me to get a shot of this. “Pigasaurus Rex,” as he called it, was something he made back in 1995 by combining the promotional cutouts for Babe and Jurassic Park. It’s a mascot of sorts for the store.
It’s not just the walls that have been turned into monuments to the age of cinema. If you look to the sky, you can see promotional items for Antz, X-men, and the live-action Scooby Doo movie. The label on the plastic foot hanging out of the ceiling clarifies that it’s the foot of someone who shoplifted from them, so it was justified.
Behind the checkout counter, the windows were just as crammed full of stuff as every other inch of Video Universe. I’m not enough of a movie buff to appreciate any of this, but I’m sure this place would be heaven for certain people. I tried to document it as best I could.
Back in simpler times, you couldn’t use your phone to learn about movies. You needed to consult the documentation. This video store has a small shelf chock full of it. If you want to know anything about any movie, it’s in one of those books somewhere. Unless the film was released after the book. That’s why internet movie databases replaced these.
This is the back corner. Beyond that door lies the porn section. The porn room is huge, taking up a big chunk of the building’s back, so I can’t imagine how much they must have back there. I wanted to see the inside but didn’t want to ask to be let in. Let’s assume it’s wall-to-wall porn.
Next to the porn room is the VHS section. Don’t let this picture fool you; the VHS selection is pretty big. Scroll back up to the porn room picture. Everything on the shelves surrounding it is a VHS tape. I’m unsure if anyone still rents these or if they’re just kept around as decoration. I imagine at least a few of these never had a DVD release.
This is the anime section. All four of these shelves are nothing but anime. They’ve got so many anime DVDs here that you’d browse this section find stuff you’ve never heard of. That’s one way to compete with streaming.
While I’m not big on physical anime prices, I recognize that middle series as Paranoia Agent. I once owned those same DVDs. When I tried to rebuy them, I discovered they were going for ridiculous prices. Maybe they’ve deflated since, but there’s probably a goldmine of rare discs in here.
Given the sheer size of it and how many of the titles are from the early 00s, I think it’s safe to assume that Video Universe was a hotspot for anime fans around that era. Can you imagine what it would have been like to stumble upon this place before fansubs were reliable? Back when single DVDs would cost you 30-40 dollars at FYE? This would have been heaven for high school me. Like the owner told me when I asked to take photos, “It’s like going back in time, isn’t it?”
These are original late 90s Pokemon wall scrolls imported from Japan. Three of them hung throughout the building; all faded with age. A part of me wonders if they used to sell these at some point. That would explain why they have so many of them.
Most of the back wall is foreign movies. If you want any niche foreign horror movie released in region 1, they probably have it. I’d wager that the store’s owner has the most impressive collection of film in the Twin Cities.
Have a couple more misc photos, to hammer in how ridiculously decorated it was.
Video Universe probably would have given me two or three posts worth of content if I knew anything about movies. Some movie buff is probably screaming at me right now for not knowing enough about the subject to highlight some of the movies they had in stock. It’s likely the same way I feel when people only know Ridge Racer through the RIIIIIDGE RAAAAACER meme, despite it being one of the most significant video games ever released.
In part 2, let’s try somewhere I’m more in my element. This is an arcade blog, afterall.
