“تفضل” which roughly translates to “come in” is a short documentary on Rihab Complex that was released a couple of months back but I only got to watch it a couple of days ago. For those of you who’ve never been to Rihab Complex, it’s an old shopping complex in Hawalli filled with video game stores. The documentary gives a bit of a rundown on the on the complex as well as interviews some of the shop owners to get their story as well as explanations on why some games are expensive, while EU games are cheaper than US and other things. Sadly the video is in Arabic so if you can’t understand Arabic you’re not gonna get much out of it. [YouTube]
I’ve personally been going to Rihab since the late 90s (when the best gaming console ever the Dreamcast was released). But before Rihab, during my SNES and Game Gear days I used to get all my games from the shops in old Salmiya. There used to be a bunch of great shops in the building right next to mine, I don’t remember their names but I do remember there were three of them, two on the main street and one inside the complex. One of the ones outside used to have a 3DO in the display playing either the Night Trap demo or the original Need for Speed on loop while the store inside the center had a Neogeo on display playing mostly Samurai Showdown. You also had two computer shops upstairs, one called Computer World where I got my original copy of Windows 95 from and the other shop right next door where I used to buy my pirated games from. You’d buy a game and then have to wait for the guy to make copies of it and some games like Duke 3D for example used 13 floppy disks so you had to either go and come back or wait there patiently until he finished copying them. Then you had Burj Al Abyad (White Tower) further down the road which was the gaming center of Kuwait back then with most of the shops also housing arcade machines.
This post is really making me regret selling all my old gaming consoles. All I kept from the bunch are my Game & Watches.
If you really want to step back in time, back in the 80s there used to be a computer shop in Salhiya, I think it was on M1 or M2, it was right across the Korean restaurant that used to be there. I also got my Coleco in the mid 80s from a video game shop in Kuwait City that was located in the hexagon shaped blue glass tower. Kuwait was so different back then.
