GameStop

GameStop Corp. is an American video game, consumer electronics, and gaming merchandise retailer. The company is headquartered in Grapevine, Texas (a suburb of Dallas), and is the largest video game retailer worldwide. , the company operates 4,413 stores including 2,949 in the United States, 216 in Canada, 419 in Australia and 829 in Europe under the GameStop, EB Games, EB Games Australia, Micromania-Zing, ThinkGeek and Zing Pop Culture brands. The company was founded in Dallas in 1984 as Babbage's, and took on its current name in 1999. The company's performance declined during the mid-to-late 2010s due to the shift of video game sales to online shopping and failed investments by GameStop in smartphone retail. In 2021, after retail investors noticed that the short interest well exceeded the float, the company's stock price skyrocketed. According to the SEC report, this volatility was only in part due to the shorts covering their positions, but mostly thanks to the massive buying power of retail investors. The company received significant media attention during January and February 2021 due to the volatility of its stock price. The company is now ranked 521st on the Fortune 500. In addition to retail stores, GameStop owns and publishes Game Informer, a video game magazine, transformed itself into an e-commerce business, and launched an NFT platform. GameStop traces its roots to Babbage's, a Dallas, Texas-based software retailer founded in 1984 by former Harvard Business School classmates James McCurry and Gary M. Kusin. The company was named after Charles Babbage and opened its first store in Dallas's NorthPark Center with the help of Ross Perot, an early investor in the company. The company quickly began to focus on video game sales for the then-dominant Atari 2600. Babbage's began selling Nintendo games in 1987. Babbage's became a public company via an initial public offering in 1988. By 1991, video games accounted for two-thirds of Babbage's sales. Babbage's merged with Software Etc.