9 ms·

Too much of a good thing: Mourning the slow death of the retail game store

46 points by indigodaddy 5y ago

akira2501 5y ago
Perhaps the author never went to a game store that specialized in customer service, or never thought to ask for any. While there are some benefits to a purely digital market place, our current offerings seem to leave this particular part of the business in limbo. I'm not exactly excited for the middle future we're going to have to get through.
- baby 5y ago
  What kind of customer service do you get from a game store? Most of the time your gripes are with nintendo, sony, etc. directly.
  - akira2501 5y ago
    Demo units. Demo consoles. Video displays. Staff that knows their inventory and their customers well and can help you find the purchases that will be most valuable to you. Sure, but those companies do not have brick and mortar stores where they sell inventory. It's always been a distributors market, shouldn't the distributor service you? What else is their cut for?
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      Demos became obsoleted somewhat by refunds and youtube gameplay. You can buy any game on steam, play it for less than two hours, and if you don't like it, you can refund it. Using the refund process as a trial/demo method is explicitly allowed by valve. Having a retail person give game recommendations has kind of been obsoleted by youtube and the wider internet. "top 10" lists do a good job of showing you what the hottest stuff in each category is.
      - gruez 5y ago
        >Using the refund process as a trial/demo method is explicitly allowed by valve. Where does it say that? The best quote I could find from them: >Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games. If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you. We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.
        asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
        I've never heard of anyone having their ability to get steam refunds curtailed. I've personally refunded dozens of games without an issue.
        SilverRed 5y ago
        I was actually thinking of that last line about refunding for a sale but that doesn't quite apply. But if you read in to the first line about removing risk, that would imply trying it out with the intent of purchasing if you like it which is the purpose of a demo. I have refunded about 40 purchases on steam and never had them denied if you fit in the 2 hours / 2 weeks rule.
        void_mint 5y ago
        > Where does it say that? Literally the first paragraph on the refunds page. > You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it. https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/ https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        Honestly games are so damned cheap these days I don't know why most people (that is, not the desperately poor) would even bother refunding them unless they're completely broken or they're being a dick. $60 is an expensive AAA game by Steam standards and almost certainly comes with entirely too much content to appease people who think they need a lot of content to justify paying $60. $60 is also what your average NES game retailed for, which would in today's money be over $200. And most of them were complete garbage. Most games today that aren't AAA titles, which is to say the actually interesting games, go for a lot less than $60 anyway. A $20 game is the cost of one decent meal out.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      Logistics, risk management, and customer acquisition mostly. The latter is less of a thing nowadays with digital distribution but was a bigger deal when people would go to local game store to find something new to play. It’s so much cheaper to ship units to a few central warehouses of your distributors and then let them handle getting it in the shelves into 100,000+ stores nationwide. And your distributor handles all the retail risk for you, you don’t have to figure out where to build stores, how many to have, how to attract customers, worry about real-estate or rents.
    - gjs278 5y ago
      wait until you find out about the internet
  - emsy 5y ago
    Think of parents buying "Gameboys" for their children for example ;)
  - yellow_lead 5y ago
    Kid wants the new XYZ game, mother doesn't know what to get him. Clerk helps deduce the game name, console, etc. Or they recommend games.
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      In 2021 the kid shows mum the steam store page and asks for permission to buy the game right there and then. Or the child is given a steam gift card and allowed to get whatever they want. Your method has caused a lot of upset when the parent comes back with the wrong game or for the wrong console.
      - allturtles 5y ago
        It has also caused a lot of joy when a game arrives unexpectedly and unasked for. I still clearly remember the day decades ago when my father drove up next to me and my friends while we were riding bikes with 3 computer games for me on his passenger seat.
        crocodiletears 5y ago
        The value of the spontaneity in this can't be overstated. The modern method feels so much more transactional because we've optimized it away.
        PebblesRox 5y ago
        My little brother took over my Steam account. He kept my email address on file and I'd occasionally get emails about games on his wishlist going on sale. It was fun to buy those games sometimes as a little gift out of the blue :)
        boomboomsubban 5y ago
        You can still do that with steam, just randomly buy a game for your child. Only now you can see their wishlist or recommended based on what they play or many other methods. Much better for the child than a parent going to the store and saying "well they liked this movie, let's get them the cash grab game."
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    Some brick and mortar shops can turn into some kind of club. The owner tries to federate people around the shop, and sell his stuff along the way. In the case of a game store, he may organize tournaments, special events around the release of a game, help discover some obscure games, hunt down rare items and imports, and of course give competent advise.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    In the classic formulation, a “shopkeeper” is not only an expert in the product, but also in matching product to people. Someone can come in and say “I played Grim Fandango and Monkey Island when I was a kid and I want something like that for my kid but with modern graphics” and they can say “Have you tried Machinarium?” But this cant exist without some business model for the shopkeeper.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    This is not a new debate by any stretch, there always was a slice of gamers that didn't rely on any specific shop, got their info through magazines/events etc. and didn't need any support outside of returns and repairs. But as in the olden days, store staff have a role in solving "I wish I knew X or Y" kind of issues: basically the less verse a user is in the field the more the store can step in and help. There's recommendations, but there also will be small info that is not obvious, like Switch's dock needing special USB chargers, or how language switch works, or what kind of violence there actually is in a game etc. All that info is available somewhere online, but for people who didn't/don't want to spend the time to get up to speed, knowledgeable staff is a boon.
- acdha 5y ago
  I bet this follows the same difference we saw with books, music, videos, etc.: when you had a great store conveniently located, the experience is better with knowledgeable staff, a good selection, and better support. The average, however, wasn’t so great and probably had issues with location/hours/atmosphere which turned off many people (e.g. how many women avoided certain shops due to common behaviors of male clerks?) so there was a large enough underserved market for online stores to tap into.
- smolder 5y ago
  I don't know of a games store doing this, but there are other retail startups working on putting experts in touch with buyers, such that experts can earn commission for reviewing & recommending items. It seems like a good development to me that can be applied across many areas of online retail.
  - im_down_w_otp 5y ago
    What you're describing sounds an awful lot like paid shills, unless I'm misinterpreting the thesis.
    - smolder 5y ago
      That would be the case if they took money from the brands they're recommending, which isn't the model. They get money from the retailer instead, who isn't supposed to take sides. It does seem pretty corruptible, though, to your point. How do we stop corruption if there is a never ending supply of people willing to use deceit to get ahead? Fake reviews, shills, politicians for sale... on what front are people willing to be principled? I think they need to have something at stake, like reputation, at least. Back to the customer service at games retailers thing, do you think they were ever pure in motive, as far as helping the customer? It was probably a choice that some made, but sales people often have incentives to mislead. I'm sure sometimes the employees were pressured to push certain products, like how warranties get pushed at some retailers.
smoldesu 5y ago
Some fun supplementary reading is the multicart catalog [0]Tom Fulp (yes that Tom Fulp) acquired and donated to the Video Game History Foundation. [0] https://twitter.com/GameHistoryOrg/status/1408092554818695169 https://twitter.com/GameHistoryOrg/status/140809255481869516...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Aeolun 5y ago
What I miss about physical games is the full box, the small collectors items inside and reading through the richly illustrated manual. Ever since games became a disk inside a cheap plastic box buying games in stores lost all magic for me.
- NickNameNick 5y ago
  I do miss the manuals, particularly the simulation games that had technical references, historical information and stories. The art-books that came with some games were pretty cool too. But for the most part, the packaging and pack-ins were just junk. and while I'm still storing a fair amount of it, I haven't played those games in 20 years - I should probably just write down the CD keys and throw everything else away.
  - maroonblazer 5y ago
    There was a flight sim for the Mac (F/A 18, I think) that I played in the mid-90's that came with a thick paperback book. It included all the different flight envelopes and even a primer on the concept of "lift" and how it keeps planes in the air.
    - symfoniq 5y ago
      The manual included with Microsoft Flight Simulator (4.0 maybe?) in the early 90’s was thick and dense. I remember using it to learn how to navigate using VOR stations. They don’t make them like they used to.
  - mysterydip 5y ago
    I heard an interview with Bill Roper (of Blizzard fame back in the day), and he said they included junk on purpose to make the box heavier. If people were choosing between new games A and B, some chose based on which box was heavier as they thought they were getting more for their money.
    - bombcar 5y ago
LAC-Tech 5y ago
I'm mainly just depressed at how slow games are now. There's an official steam version of the Risk boardgame and it spins my fans like crazy. I used to play versions of Risk in the 2000s that barely registered on my 600mhz, 64mb RAM machine. I am shocked at how things got so slow. It must take a lot of hard work to make a simple game run slowly on modern hardware.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  I feel like computer versions of board games are done terribly. I don't want a realistic 3d scene with 30 second animations of each move. I want a 2d (maybe basic 3d for some games, but a view of the board, not a first person view) board, with pretty graphics matching the offline version and excellent multiplayer capability for playing my friends online.
  - redisman 5y ago
    We play on boardgame arena and it’s very minimalist but with good online multiplayer. It all runs in your browser and doesn’t do any fancy processing or rendering
  - a_f 5y ago
    I've been playing the digital version of Terraforming Mars recently (as well as the physical copy). I cannot attest to the multiplayer aspect; but the local play against the AI is good and fits your requirements. Worth checking out.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    3D can be nice if done well and the animations are good. Monopoly on mobile has good really fast animations and a game can be played in like 30 min against AI. Monopoly on Switch is terrible as you have to watch each literal slow dice roll, piece movement, etc. at normal speed. It takes FOREVER.
- sgillen 5y ago
  Maybe the problem is that it’s much easier to make a game now than it was back then. But as a result people who maybe don’t really know what they are doing can make games using huge tech stack.
javajosh 5y ago
I remember that Ultima III for the Apple IIe (apart from a fondness for Roman numerals) had a cloth map of Brittania. I remember this because I wanted to start a small business copying the game, and the map, and distributing in repurposed shoe-boxes. The box art was copied by hand and glued on. Note that I was like 9, and neither myself nor my parents were aware of the (il)legality of this. I also never got further than making my prototype, which objectively sucked, so I never pursued it.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  One of my first major creative endeavors was that I wanted to design the successor to SNES. Not like… games. I mean games were my motivation! But hardware was how my brain interfaced with that as a smol. In perhaps (absolutely) my most commanding leadership role ever, I rallied anyone in earshot to spec out SNES (physical dimensions and inputs, we had no idea what the actual electronics did) and dream bigger. Obviously I wasn’t creating anything new at the time, but it’s wild how much I look back to that as the moment I started finding my footing.
  - javajosh 5y ago
    Upvoted, but I don't get it. What, exactly, were you doing?
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      Me and a bunch of 7-8 year olds traced the physical contours of an SNES console and then furiously drew our imagined version of what would make games more fun.
      - eyelidlessness 5y ago
        If it helps: I was strongly discouraged and guided away from actually being a nerd throughout my upbringing. I found my way to nerdy interests and footnotes I’d visit later on my own from creative pursuits that were less discouraged.
filmgirlcw 5y ago
My very first job was at the Electronics Boutique (now GameStop) at the local mall. I was 15 (too young to be legally hired but corporate turned a blind eye) and worked there the summer of 1999, when Pokémon cards were at their apex, the Dreamcast was about to come out, and the PlayStation was truly at its peak. Aside from some sexual harassment from the cliental for being the only girl who worked there (I was the first female that store had ever even hired and it had been there for 7 or 8 years), it really was such a perfect first job. We had a policy at the time where people could returned open copies of most games (Microsoft productivity software or anything else with a license key was often an exception), provided it was still in sellable condition and employees got to “check stuff out” for a day or two to test/play at home. As a result, the recommendations we could make were much better and people trusted us and our opinions, which was important when gaming segments on TV were nascent, YouTube didn’t exist, and glossy magazines and the IGN websites were where you would get your game news/reviews. At least at our mall, we had regulars who lived closer to another location but came to our store because of the staff and because of our selection. I almost never buy games in retail stores these days — buying digitally or buying physical copies online is just more convenient — but it makes me sad that my favorite places as a kid/teenager: video/DVD stores, music stores, video games stores, and toy stores, have all basically gone extinct. At least Best Buy is still a thing, I guess. And the Apple Store. But as convenient as it is to buy stuff online, there is something special about getting to touch/feel/listen/play with stuff before you buy it and something cool about being amongst a community of people as passionate about your interests.
- azemetre 5y ago
  I'm going to date myself but I remember when I was a kid and my Mom took me to a game store. I wanted to get Grand Theft Auto 3 but she wouldn't let me because of the crime, bad violence, drugs, prostitution, etc. I remember giving one of the workers there massive puppy eyes. I think he absolutely knew my Mom didn't want me playing violent video games without a good reason. He spoke to us and started talking to my mom about other games like Metal Gear Solid 2 "where you fight terrorists" (this was a few months after 9/11) or Red Faction "you get to lead a revolution." He made many statements like this about a few games. As a pre-teen I was able to quench my lust for fabricated violence. I don't know why I vividly remember this, nearly 20 years ago, but I do. A very short simple conversation that left me a happy kid. I'm sure you gave many people fond memories.

46 points by indigodaddy 5y ago

Perhaps the author never went to a game store that specialized in customer service, or never thought to ask for any. While there are some benefits to a purely digital market place, our current offerings seem to leave this particular part of the business in limbo. I'm not exactly excited for the middle future we're going to have to get through.

baby 5y ago
What kind of customer service do you get from a game store? Most of the time your gripes are with nintendo, sony, etc. directly.
- akira2501 5y ago
  Demo units. Demo consoles. Video displays. Staff that knows their inventory and their customers well and can help you find the purchases that will be most valuable to you. Sure, but those companies do not have brick and mortar stores where they sell inventory. It's always been a distributors market, shouldn't the distributor service you? What else is their cut for?
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Demos became obsoleted somewhat by refunds and youtube gameplay. You can buy any game on steam, play it for less than two hours, and if you don't like it, you can refund it. Using the refund process as a trial/demo method is explicitly allowed by valve. Having a retail person give game recommendations has kind of been obsoleted by youtube and the wider internet. "top 10" lists do a good job of showing you what the hottest stuff in each category is.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Using the refund process as a trial/demo method is explicitly allowed by valve. Where does it say that? The best quote I could find from them: >Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games. If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you. We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
        I've never heard of anyone having their ability to get steam refunds curtailed. I've personally refunded dozens of games without an issue.
      - SilverRed 5y ago
        I was actually thinking of that last line about refunding for a sale but that doesn't quite apply. But if you read in to the first line about removing risk, that would imply trying it out with the intent of purchasing if you like it which is the purpose of a demo. I have refunded about 40 purchases on steam and never had them denied if you fit in the 2 hours / 2 weeks rule.
      - void_mint 5y ago
        > Where does it say that? Literally the first paragraph on the refunds page. > You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it. https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/ https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      Honestly games are so damned cheap these days I don't know why most people (that is, not the desperately poor) would even bother refunding them unless they're completely broken or they're being a dick. $60 is an expensive AAA game by Steam standards and almost certainly comes with entirely too much content to appease people who think they need a lot of content to justify paying $60. $60 is also what your average NES game retailed for, which would in today's money be over $200. And most of them were complete garbage. Most games today that aren't AAA titles, which is to say the actually interesting games, go for a lot less than $60 anyway. A $20 game is the cost of one decent meal out.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    Logistics, risk management, and customer acquisition mostly. The latter is less of a thing nowadays with digital distribution but was a bigger deal when people would go to local game store to find something new to play. It’s so much cheaper to ship units to a few central warehouses of your distributors and then let them handle getting it in the shelves into 100,000+ stores nationwide. And your distributor handles all the retail risk for you, you don’t have to figure out where to build stores, how many to have, how to attract customers, worry about real-estate or rents.
  - gjs278 5y ago
    wait until you find out about the internet
- emsy 5y ago
  Think of parents buying "Gameboys" for their children for example ;)
- yellow_lead 5y ago
  Kid wants the new XYZ game, mother doesn't know what to get him. Clerk helps deduce the game name, console, etc. Or they recommend games.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    In 2021 the kid shows mum the steam store page and asks for permission to buy the game right there and then. Or the child is given a steam gift card and allowed to get whatever they want. Your method has caused a lot of upset when the parent comes back with the wrong game or for the wrong console.
    - allturtles 5y ago
      It has also caused a lot of joy when a game arrives unexpectedly and unasked for. I still clearly remember the day decades ago when my father drove up next to me and my friends while we were riding bikes with 3 computer games for me on his passenger seat.
      - crocodiletears 5y ago
        The value of the spontaneity in this can't be overstated. The modern method feels so much more transactional because we've optimized it away.
      - PebblesRox 5y ago
        My little brother took over my Steam account. He kept my email address on file and I'd occasionally get emails about games on his wishlist going on sale. It was fun to buy those games sometimes as a little gift out of the blue :)
      - boomboomsubban 5y ago
        You can still do that with steam, just randomly buy a game for your child. Only now you can see their wishlist or recommended based on what they play or many other methods. Much better for the child than a parent going to the store and saying "well they liked this movie, let's get them the cash grab game."
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Some brick and mortar shops can turn into some kind of club. The owner tries to federate people around the shop, and sell his stuff along the way. In the case of a game store, he may organize tournaments, special events around the release of a game, help discover some obscure games, hunt down rare items and imports, and of course give competent advise.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  In the classic formulation, a “shopkeeper” is not only an expert in the product, but also in matching product to people. Someone can come in and say “I played Grim Fandango and Monkey Island when I was a kid and I want something like that for my kid but with modern graphics” and they can say “Have you tried Machinarium?” But this cant exist without some business model for the shopkeeper.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  This is not a new debate by any stretch, there always was a slice of gamers that didn't rely on any specific shop, got their info through magazines/events etc. and didn't need any support outside of returns and repairs. But as in the olden days, store staff have a role in solving "I wish I knew X or Y" kind of issues: basically the less verse a user is in the field the more the store can step in and help. There's recommendations, but there also will be small info that is not obvious, like Switch's dock needing special USB chargers, or how language switch works, or what kind of violence there actually is in a game etc. All that info is available somewhere online, but for people who didn't/don't want to spend the time to get up to speed, knowledgeable staff is a boon.
acdha 5y ago
I bet this follows the same difference we saw with books, music, videos, etc.: when you had a great store conveniently located, the experience is better with knowledgeable staff, a good selection, and better support. The average, however, wasn’t so great and probably had issues with location/hours/atmosphere which turned off many people (e.g. how many women avoided certain shops due to common behaviors of male clerks?) so there was a large enough underserved market for online stores to tap into.
smolder 5y ago
I don't know of a games store doing this, but there are other retail startups working on putting experts in touch with buyers, such that experts can earn commission for reviewing & recommending items. It seems like a good development to me that can be applied across many areas of online retail.
- im_down_w_otp 5y ago
  What you're describing sounds an awful lot like paid shills, unless I'm misinterpreting the thesis.
  - smolder 5y ago
    That would be the case if they took money from the brands they're recommending, which isn't the model. They get money from the retailer instead, who isn't supposed to take sides. It does seem pretty corruptible, though, to your point. How do we stop corruption if there is a never ending supply of people willing to use deceit to get ahead? Fake reviews, shills, politicians for sale... on what front are people willing to be principled? I think they need to have something at stake, like reputation, at least. Back to the customer service at games retailers thing, do you think they were ever pure in motive, as far as helping the customer? It was probably a choice that some made, but sales people often have incentives to mislead. I'm sure sometimes the employees were pressured to push certain products, like how warranties get pushed at some retailers.

smoldesu 5y ago

Some fun supplementary reading is the multicart catalog [0]Tom Fulp (yes that Tom Fulp) acquired and donated to the Video Game History Foundation. [0] https://twitter.com/GameHistoryOrg/status/1408092554818695169 https://twitter.com/GameHistoryOrg/status/140809255481869516...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Aeolun 5y ago

What I miss about physical games is the full box, the small collectors items inside and reading through the richly illustrated manual. Ever since games became a disk inside a cheap plastic box buying games in stores lost all magic for me.

NickNameNick 5y ago
I do miss the manuals, particularly the simulation games that had technical references, historical information and stories. The art-books that came with some games were pretty cool too. But for the most part, the packaging and pack-ins were just junk. and while I'm still storing a fair amount of it, I haven't played those games in 20 years - I should probably just write down the CD keys and throw everything else away.
- maroonblazer 5y ago
  There was a flight sim for the Mac (F/A 18, I think) that I played in the mid-90's that came with a thick paperback book. It included all the different flight envelopes and even a primer on the concept of "lift" and how it keeps planes in the air.
  - symfoniq 5y ago
    The manual included with Microsoft Flight Simulator (4.0 maybe?) in the early 90’s was thick and dense. I remember using it to learn how to navigate using VOR stations. They don’t make them like they used to.
- mysterydip 5y ago
  I heard an interview with Bill Roper (of Blizzard fame back in the day), and he said they included junk on purpose to make the box heavier. If people were choosing between new games A and B, some chose based on which box was heavier as they thought they were getting more for their money.
  - bombcar 5y ago

LAC-Tech 5y ago

I'm mainly just depressed at how slow games are now. There's an official steam version of the Risk boardgame and it spins my fans like crazy. I used to play versions of Risk in the 2000s that barely registered on my 600mhz, 64mb RAM machine. I am shocked at how things got so slow. It must take a lot of hard work to make a simple game run slowly on modern hardware.

nicoburns 5y ago
I feel like computer versions of board games are done terribly. I don't want a realistic 3d scene with 30 second animations of each move. I want a 2d (maybe basic 3d for some games, but a view of the board, not a first person view) board, with pretty graphics matching the offline version and excellent multiplayer capability for playing my friends online.
- redisman 5y ago
  We play on boardgame arena and it’s very minimalist but with good online multiplayer. It all runs in your browser and doesn’t do any fancy processing or rendering
- a_f 5y ago
  I've been playing the digital version of Terraforming Mars recently (as well as the physical copy). I cannot attest to the multiplayer aspect; but the local play against the AI is good and fits your requirements. Worth checking out.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  3D can be nice if done well and the animations are good. Monopoly on mobile has good really fast animations and a game can be played in like 30 min against AI. Monopoly on Switch is terrible as you have to watch each literal slow dice roll, piece movement, etc. at normal speed. It takes FOREVER.
sgillen 5y ago
Maybe the problem is that it’s much easier to make a game now than it was back then. But as a result people who maybe don’t really know what they are doing can make games using huge tech stack.

javajosh 5y ago

I remember that Ultima III for the Apple IIe (apart from a fondness for Roman numerals) had a cloth map of Brittania. I remember this because I wanted to start a small business copying the game, and the map, and distributing in repurposed shoe-boxes. The box art was copied by hand and glued on. Note that I was like 9, and neither myself nor my parents were aware of the (il)legality of this. I also never got further than making my prototype, which objectively sucked, so I never pursued it.

eyelidlessness 5y ago
One of my first major creative endeavors was that I wanted to design the successor to SNES. Not like… games. I mean games were my motivation! But hardware was how my brain interfaced with that as a smol. In perhaps (absolutely) my most commanding leadership role ever, I rallied anyone in earshot to spec out SNES (physical dimensions and inputs, we had no idea what the actual electronics did) and dream bigger. Obviously I wasn’t creating anything new at the time, but it’s wild how much I look back to that as the moment I started finding my footing.
- javajosh 5y ago
  Upvoted, but I don't get it. What, exactly, were you doing?
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Me and a bunch of 7-8 year olds traced the physical contours of an SNES console and then furiously drew our imagined version of what would make games more fun.
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      If it helps: I was strongly discouraged and guided away from actually being a nerd throughout my upbringing. I found my way to nerdy interests and footnotes I’d visit later on my own from creative pursuits that were less discouraged.

filmgirlcw 5y ago

My very first job was at the Electronics Boutique (now GameStop) at the local mall. I was 15 (too young to be legally hired but corporate turned a blind eye) and worked there the summer of 1999, when Pokémon cards were at their apex, the Dreamcast was about to come out, and the PlayStation was truly at its peak. Aside from some sexual harassment from the cliental for being the only girl who worked there (I was the first female that store had ever even hired and it had been there for 7 or 8 years), it really was such a perfect first job. We had a policy at the time where people could returned open copies of most games (Microsoft productivity software or anything else with a license key was often an exception), provided it was still in sellable condition and employees got to “check stuff out” for a day or two to test/play at home. As a result, the recommendations we could make were much better and people trusted us and our opinions, which was important when gaming segments on TV were nascent, YouTube didn’t exist, and glossy magazines and the IGN websites were where you would get your game news/reviews. At least at our mall, we had regulars who lived closer to another location but came to our store because of the staff and because of our selection. I almost never buy games in retail stores these days — buying digitally or buying physical copies online is just more convenient — but it makes me sad that my favorite places as a kid/teenager: video/DVD stores, music stores, video games stores, and toy stores, have all basically gone extinct. At least Best Buy is still a thing, I guess. And the Apple Store. But as convenient as it is to buy stuff online, there is something special about getting to touch/feel/listen/play with stuff before you buy it and something cool about being amongst a community of people as passionate about your interests.

azemetre 5y ago
I'm going to date myself but I remember when I was a kid and my Mom took me to a game store. I wanted to get Grand Theft Auto 3 but she wouldn't let me because of the crime, bad violence, drugs, prostitution, etc. I remember giving one of the workers there massive puppy eyes. I think he absolutely knew my Mom didn't want me playing violent video games without a good reason. He spoke to us and started talking to my mom about other games like Metal Gear Solid 2 "where you fight terrorists" (this was a few months after 9/11) or Red Faction "you get to lead a revolution." He made many statements like this about a few games. As a pre-teen I was able to quench my lust for fabricated violence. I don't know why I vividly remember this, nearly 20 years ago, but I do. A very short simple conversation that left me a happy kid. I'm sure you gave many people fond memories.