Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre looks back at the origin of game retailers, movie stocks, and now meme stocks.

Video Transcript

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BRIAN SOZZI: GameStop shares are below $100 and down 75% over the past year but this bearishness on the video game retailer was definitely not in play around this time last year during that meme stock mania. Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre joins us to recap GameStop's rise and fall before the unwitting banner of the meme stock movement and where it is one year later, Jared?

JARED BLIKRE: Well, I don't know about the fall part, it's still up what, something like a few hundred percent? But let's go to our then and now production here. This is something we're doing on a monthly basis and kind of comparing two different time periods. We've done now versus the 1930s and the 1920s and now we're going to do GameStop and meme stocks versus one year ago.

So we're talking about GameStop obviously. This is a video game retailer that traces its roots back to Babbage's and that's a Texas-based software retailer that opened its doors in 1984. Now in 1999 Babbage's launched its GameStop brand along with gamestop.com, allowing customers to buy video games online.

Later in 1999 and 2000, Babbage's and video game retailer Funco, not to be confused with Funko, were bought by Barnes and Noble who officially renamed Funco to GameStop Inc. Now, GameStop went public in 2002 with an IPO of $18 per share as you can see there and in 2004 became an independent company when Barnes and Noble sold 59% of its stake in the company to its stakeholders. Remember, Barnes and Noble everybody? I do.

The year set off a period of success for the company as GameStop would acquire, it would acquire EB Games in 2005. Full disclosure, I worked for a predecessor of EB Games called Electronic Boutique way back in 1994, that's how old I am, and also they would acquire Rhino Video Games in 2007.

GameStop also spawned movie retailer MovieStop in 2004 and at its height before the meme-- meme craze excuse me, GameStop was trading just shy of $64 per share and that was at its 2007 peak. So let's take a look at this chart now. And this is AMC, can you believe that? We got the wrong stock there. Anyway, if we got a stock-- if we got a chart of GameStop I would really appreciate it because back in 2019 GameStop said it was closing 180 to 200 underperforming stores over the next two years.

A year after the announcement, four GameStop board members, they stepped down. GameStop would eventually rally 14,000% from the pandemic low of $3 and change, all the way up to $483. Since the meme stock frenzy a year ago, things have cooled down for GameStop but the stock is still well above pre-2021 numbers, trading at about $92 as you can see on your screen, guys.