(wind blowing)
(gentle music)
- So, I'm walking down the video game isle
at Toys R Us, there's the glass next to me
with all their games behind in and I remember
walking and seeing the GhostBusters logo
on the little placard, stopping, turning
and slamming my finger on the glass going
"What is THAT?"
My mom was like, "That's a video game."
And I was like "What's a video game?"
- The first time I bought a game
with my own money it was Donkey Kong
for Atari 2600, and I saved up pennies... in penny rolls.
Although, I remember the game was so hard
I was crying because I had spent my money
on this and the game was too hard.
(laughing)
- I don't remember the specific first game that I bought,
but I remember really looking at digital as a platform
with the Xbox Live Arcade.
- Technology is one aspect of why it took so long
for digital adoption to be a thing, but I think
that if you were to examine other media
that you'd see a similar story, which is
that digital scares the old dinosaurs
who are in charge and they don't know how to do it,
and at first they freak out over piracy,
but then Napster gets bought by Best Buy or whatever.
- I opened in November of 2005,
the day after Black Friday that year.
I actually had the Clifton police call me
one morning, 5 o'clock in the morning,
are you the owner of this store front?
I'm like, yes I am. I haven't opened yet.
He was like well, it's a good thing 'cause there's a car lodged in the front of your store.
I'm like 'ha ha, who is this?'
I come down here and there's a giant, gaping hole
in the storefront.
The car was gone, but it had left
a hole that you could literally
just humpty dum, just walk straight through,
and that was about three weeks
before I was ready to open.
- I've been here about nine and a half years.
I got hired as a mechanic to fix PS2s and PSPs,
at the time they were hot.
We had coffee shops on both ends
and in between, middle of the block,
there's a motorcycle club.
I don't necessarily wanna mention the motorcycle club
by name, but they were kinda messin' with us at first
when we moved in.
I guess tryin' to see what we were doing,
but now they know we sell fun, they're one
of our good customers as well.
- Yeah, well when we first opened it was kinda unique
because there's bars across the street
and we would be here til like two, three,
in the morning, just gettin' the place in order,
workin' in the back fixin' stuff
and people would roll in super drunk
from all the bars.
- He never wanted to close the store, ever,
and we have bars across the street.
You can't physically, mentally be open 24 hours a day
and be there all the time.
- My wife worked up an off sheet.
We were sleeping here actually most nights.
Don't tell the landlord that.
- I'd been a cook my whole life.
The reason I got here is because my last job,
after 16 years, got new owners and they fired me,
and to start over in that industry at my age sounded crudy
so we took a chance and did this.
I tell people all the time, if I sold socks
I'd have gone crazy a long time ago,
so if you're gonna do somethin' that's gonna take
all your time, you might as well do somethin'
enjoyable and it helps that it's a fun industry to be in.
- The name, Thrillhouse Games, comes from The Simpsons
episode, the one where everyone wants this game,
Bonestorm and Milhouse is like, oh man!
It's so awesome and I've only entered my name:
- Thrillhouse.
- When somebody calls and is like, hey,
do you have an XBox One?
Yeah, I've got a 24k gold plated one
and it's like $700.
They're like, you're outta your damn mind.
(laughing)
- When is was 15 or 16, everyone was going
to career days and everyone knew what they wanted
to do exactly and I was like, I'm gonna move
to California and start a video game store.
- Pink Gorilla is one of Seattle's oldest retro game stores.
It's 13 years old.
I've been here for about seven years now
at this point, and owned it for about two and a half.
It's been really rewarding.
I didn't think I wanted to be a business owner,
but I love it.
I don't think I could go back now.
- Attention gamers.
Rent, buy, sell and trade at Game Zone.
Trade in or sell your old games and systems for cash.
Game Zone is your headquarters for PlayStation 2 ,
XBox, Nintendo, GameCube, GameBoy SP and more.
Check out our selection of popular titles
as well as hard to find games.
Don't throw away your old game system.
Game Zone can fix it.
We're the area's only shop to specialize and repair
a PlayStation 2 and we could restore
your scratched game CDs and DVDs.
Be sure to visit our new location
at 270 Essex Street in Salem, Massachusetts.
Game Zone, we've GOT game!
- $25,000 for 30 days to advertise.
You know how many games I can buy for $25,000?
Do people watch TV anymore?
I opened this store just 25 years ago
because I had so many people knocking at my mail order business.
I had a mail order business called Master the Game
in the back of... EGM and Game Pro.
This was like in 1989.
I had my address up here, which is required.
I started to get people knocking at my warehouse
saying, we saw your ad, we drove up from Beverly,
we drove up from Salem, we wanna buy these games
that aren't at Child's World or Toys R Us.
These people, they were in my warehouse
and they're climbin' ladders to get stuff
and I'm sayin', I'm gonna have a lawsuit on me.
Most of the customers were coming from this area...
So, I figured I'd bring the games to them.
Game Zone is right in the heart of downtown Salem,
right in the middle of all the tourist attractions
and we get quite a bit of people enjoying Salem
for their holiday, their vacation, and they pop in
and just admire our... museum.
Salem does a great job of doin' festivals
and poet readings and restaurant weeks
and parades and marketing that get people
into Salem on a regular basis.
When I first opened up it was just Halloween.
Now, it's pretty much year round.
It's pretty cool to have seen it over that 26 years
blossom to a full year round attraction.
- This building has, including me,
there's three retail locations.
There's a hairdresser and a tailor
and upstairs there's a internet company.
So I've been a tenant here for 14 years now
and before I moved in it was a jewelry store.
And actually the previous tenant died here.
So, the jeweler would hang out back here,
have his lunch.
He had a one-way mirror, a nice little seat here,
set up a counter and he could sit back here,
relax, keep an eye on his store.
The UPS driver came in and found the store empty,
walked back here and found him dead
while he was having his lunch
right here in this spot, right where I keep the vacuum.
Now I have a vacuum in this poor bastard's place.
(gentle music)
When we picked this store, one of the things we liked
about it is that the chandaliers is fit in with Salem
and video games and Resident Evil.
Some of these cases are left over
from when it was a jewelry store
and then we were able to buy some of our own.
We lucked out and got some Nintendo
store fixtures from Lechmere.
Everybody that grew up in this area remembers Lechmere.
They were a small region electronic store
here in the New England area.
Best Buy has actually taken over their spot.
I was lucky enough to be over there
when they were moving 'em out and I inquired
about what they were gonna do with them
and they offered 'em to me.
When I opened up, 26 years ago, my store was called,
Master the Game, because I had a mail order business
by the same name, so I stuck with that name
for about seven, nine years.
My wife didn't like Master the Game name
and we were driving down Route One,
there was a billboard and it had like this
neon green hurricane and it said, "get in the zone"
and she said, you gotta name the store Game Zone
and that's gonna be your logo.
So, kept the wife happy.
(gentle music)
When my wife passed away the first week or so
I didn't even come into the store, it was so brutal,
and I found sympathy and companionship with Corky.
On the way down we'd talk out
a lotta the issues and problems.
He was like my security blanket.
He just showed up all the time and wanted
to come to work.
The people like him and the kids would like him
and he kept the girlfriends busy
while the boyfriends were browsing for video games.
(gentle music)
- As a predominantly console gamer Xbox Live Arcade
was really kind of like the window like oh yeah,
I can download this game.
The seven generation of consoles was really
the rise of XBox 360 PS3 and Wii.
- Certainly, Steam existed before that,
but I'd argue that was more of a niche market
for a while.
The first game I bought digitally was Snood
back in college.
It was sort of a big deal to throw in that $2
or $5 or whatever it was and upgrade from trial to pro
or whatever the terminology was.
- Digital marketplaces couldn't succeed
before that time period because the technology
just wasn't there yet.
If you think about the hard drives
that you used to use, like pre 2005, I mean,
getting something that was over 64 gigabytes
was outrageously expensive
and games are large files.
The idea that you could have a digital marketplace
was just not feasible because these boxes
didn't have the hard drive space to store
all this information.
- You could buy video games on your XBox
over the internet.
That was just a new concept for a long time.
I think it took a long time for people
to wrap their heads around the idea
of paying money to download a game
in the same way it was, and I'd argue
until the iPhone, that people wrapped
their heads around paying money for a song.
- iTunes and digital games for Apple didn't really
come about until around 2009, 2010, when the iPad
debuted on the market.
Mobile would never be where it is today
if you had to go to a store and buy
a physical copy.
That's why mobile is huge.
- It used to be like a one gigabyte download
was an incredible, incredible amount of time
and effort and you could probably pop down
to the Best Buy and buy the game
before you could finish downloading it at home.
- Yeah, you just put your fingerprint down
and you just keep spending the money.
It's super easy.
Digital stores are all about convenience
and that is awesome for gamers
who have families, who have jobs,
who are in school.
Maybe you don't have time to go down
to the local store and pick up a game.
But, you're sitting on the couch,
it's Friday night.
You've got the weekend.
You're like hmmm, what am I gonna play?
You can just go to the digital marketplace and browse
and who knows, maybe you'll discover a game,
a developer or a publisher that you've
never heard of before and that's
what's awesome about digital.
- So, let me set the stage a little bit.
It's the mid 1980s, Nintendo comes outta nowhere,
at least to us Americans.
While they're at the height of their power,
there is a video game shortage.
There is a chip shortage in 1988.
There's a great Chicago Tribune article
that called it the oil crisis for computers.
I remember Peter Main, the Senior Vice President
of Sales and Marketing at Nintendo, he had
this big announcement where he said
that Nintendo was not gonna be able to meet
10%, 15% of their demand that year.
One of the benefits today of digital distribution
and the way that video games are made and sold
is that you are not going to have a situation like
the chip shortage in 1988.
For the first time, people are making games
for Nintendo systems out of their homes now.
That is huge.
Minecraft would not have been possible
in a physical only realm.
What Walmart buyer would've seen Minecraft
in like 2003 or whatever, and gone like yeah,
we'll order a million units of that.
No, absolutely not.
Now that we're able to communicate directly
with the player, we're able to experiment
and do much more interesting things
and things are better than they've ever been
right now and don't let anyone say otherwise.
(gentle music)
- I think there's no way you can say
that games aren't more varied right now than ever before.
Digital distribution plays into the fact that we're so varied
and so diverse right now in the fact that anyone can make anything.
If you have an idea for a video game, if you have something you enjoy,
chances are there's another person out there
who's gonna enjoy it, too.
So, you can sit there and you can spend six months on it,
you can spend six years on it.
You can make this game that you think's
gonna be amazing and you can get it out to the people.
There is no longer a Nintendo seal of approval
to worry about.
You can make this game and you can put it out as an app.
You can put it up on Steam.
You can go and put it on ID and XBox.
You can get this game out there to people.
PAX originally, right, was such a community thing
of, cool, we're gonna go there and we're
gonna play Mario Kart Double Dash.
We're gonna go there and we're gonna play
Smash Brothers and now you go to PAX East right now
you go around this and what is it?
It's all indie games.
- Horizon Chase Turbo is a throwback to arcade
racing games from the '90s.
So, it basically it brings back the feeling
of playing a racing game with your friends
on the couch.
- Floor Kids is a break dance battle game
and it also kinda has some fighting game components
where you got combos and you gotta learn those combos
and who has strengths.
- Hitch Hiker is a narrative PC/console game...
It's an inner journey about relationships,
It's an adventure game, a narrative driven adventure game.
We're started from a team of four people...
to around 15 people at the end of the development.
- There's four co-founders of the company,
animation, music, programming.
- It's five people, like one and a half coders,
like two artists, one author for the story,
he's actually American, and me.
- Oh I mean, the move to digital has just opened
so many doors.
It's way more good than bad.
When games were retail only, that was
a significant barrier of entry for anyone
who actually wanted to make it sell games.
- A lot of new delves now go to digital marketplaces
with foregoing the physical copy 'cause it could mean
it's a lot easier to do.
- Okay, I need to talk to a manufacturer
about making the discs and making the cases
and getting the artwork for the pamphlets.
Then I need to talk to the platform holders
about distribution.
Like, all of those steps are something
that's super daunting to somebody
who just has a really amazing creative idea for a game.
- You gotta worry about stealth space, right.
You gotta worry about what is Walmart
actually gonna stock.
That space is limited and expensive, so a lotta AndiDevs
don't have the money they need to be there.
- We also envision a digital copy, but it's much
more complicated.
They need to be at least 25 to 30 bucks.
If not, you don't have a viable business.
- We're really a small team and we have
a limited amount of resources, so when we have
those resources we wanna put 'em all
to the most exciting new feature or new modes
or DLC, we'll see.
- We could only be able to develop games
because of the digital distribution.
It's way more expensive to distribute a game physically
and it's way more accessible for independent developers
like us who are basically starting to understand
the market and developing our first game.
So, probably Horizon Chase would not exist
without digital distribution.
(soft music)
- How long have you been collecting Sega Saturn?
- A couple years.
- Did you have a Saturn when the Saturn was popular?
- I did not, but my cousin did, so I played
a lot of the stuff that they had,
especially like virtual Saturn.
It's probably one of the most played ones they had.
- But you started the collecting more years afterwards?
- A couple years after.
Going through all the stuff, flea markets, eBay,
everything, to kinda get the best deals.
- Do you care to share why you're trading
your collection in at this point?
- I haven't played them in a while
and also it's the next stage in my life.
I'm getting married, gotta find my own place, so.
- Well, congratulations.
If I haven't congratulated you before.
When you did your appraisal, personal appraisal
for the value of the system, did you come up with a number?
- Between like 11 and a half and 12 of the whole thing,
but being realistic I know that you have to make
your own money and everything, so I was thinking
more like six and a half to seven,
a little bit around half.
I would throw these two in 'cause I'm getting rid
of all the now link stuff whatever
and there's also this virtual vital remix
which a lot of people don't know,
was also a long version and worth somethings.
And I also have the Knights with 3D controller,
which is also--
- Right, you have the--
- No Knights log there.
- Yeah, that's great.
Okay, well I think we've got a deal.
We can do it.
Thank you, thanks for bringing it in.
(guitar music)
How many games do we have in the store?
Well if you were to walk around in this upper level here,
you'd probably find somewhere in the neighborhood,
I'm really just estimating this,
probably about 7,000 games
and I'd say that because there's everything from Pong
to PlayStation four here and in a lot of cases we have
duplicates because some titles are very popular
but if you go into the storage area downstairs,
you're probably in that 25 to 30,000 games area.
All right, watch your step
and watch the air conditioning unit.
I moved in here 11 years ago and I remember in this giant,
empty basement where we have the same amount of space
down here as we have upstairs, I was like, what a steal.
I'm getting all of this extra space
that I'll never even use.
So this was
traded in, we actually had a customer being us a whole
bunch of sealed games, we've put it in a protective case
because people that collect sealed games, they'll look for
things like this T seal.
Don't like, even the plastic on the sealed game to be
messed with so as soon as we get something like this,
we put it in a box protector and
usually we put it on Ebay because
people, like I said, are not going to walk into the store
and just say here's $1,000.
What's the most expensive game you have.
That probably is the most expensive game we have in the
store right now for sale.
(light music)
The world of digital distribution, it's changed the
world of keeping brand new video games in the store,
at least in my store.
I don't really have the same drive or need to keep
those shelves full of today's brand new releases
or this month's brand new releases because
most of these kids are getting their stuff from their couch.
I mean I would say our store is 80% used games and
10% new games and the other 10% is merchandise.
That's a big change from what it was when I opened.
When I opened, I'd say it was probably 40% new games
and 50 to 60% in used games and very, very little
merchandise, I wasn't stocking Plushies and board games
and comic books and things at that time.
I would say that we get more traded in than we sell.
I could never possibly keep up with the inflow
of trade ins.
During the course of a day,
we'll probably buy anywhere between 500 and
15 hundred dollars worth of stuff from people.
There are days where it's so busy, the island where we do
our sales just looks like Fred Sanford's backyard.
It's just a heap of boxes and controllers and dirty wires
and things.
The trade ins here are, I wanna say mostly cash trade ins
and I think it's because, well, people need cash, right?
If you can find a place like a pawn shop that's going to
give you cash for your items, that's always the first place
you wanna go.
They don't get as much in cash as they would for credit.
I'm sure most of the game stores you've talked to do the
same thing but if it brings in more trade ins,
it's good for us.
Ultimately, a business like this can't survive without
a constant influx of product and it's gotta be new stuff.
I can't keep the same games in the display cases for too
long or people that are here just to shop are gonna get
tired of looking at it.
I like being able to have a constant influx and then
being able to rotate all of those items for my customers
who, you know, wanna spend the cash instead of take it.
Before I opened the store, lots of people were collecting,
that Atari generation, Atari and Caleco,
up to the NES.
Those guys,
as they got older, stopped being interested in it
or stopped collecting, now this group of people
is interested in NES up to SNES
but this group of people is not at all interested in that.
I think this stops and I think it goes
(fart noise)
like that and at some point, you're not collecting
'cause there's nothing to collect and the generation
that you played didn't have physical media.
There's nobody that's going to be collecting
Xbox One S games.
90% of that is going to be digital, right?
There's no
collecting, there's nothing to collect.
It certainly, my game store gets nothing from that, right?
There's nothing to sell them.
It's done so,
I wouldn't say it's peaked
but I would say that there's an end to where it can go
and that the base of collectors that have something to
collect is getting too old to care and there's less and
less of them of it to care about.
(light music)
- When I first started buying digital games, I always
felt like, what am I actually buying?
It's just rights to use software, really.
- To me, I don't really see that many benefits.
The biggest benefit is that you don't have to get up off
your couch
and that's sort of where it ends for me.
- I would never buy a movie on cable on demand but it
always comes up.
I have a daughter so I always wanna like show her some of
the classic Disney movies but you can't rent the Disney
movies because they're always buy, like,
Beauty and the Beast, the original, buy only for 25 bucks
or whatever it is.
Well, if I buy it, what happens?
Do I just have it on my cable box?
How long can you really watch that for?
What do you own?
That's one of the reasons why I like physical copies
of things because it's like, okay I know this is my copy.
I can watch it whenever I want, like, I don't wanna copy it,
I don't wanna like distribute it, you know, or anything.
I just wanna be able to watch it.
- It's becoming increasingly obvious to me that the
definition of ownership is changing.
Owning something digitally doesn't feel really like
ownership but it definitely feels
much more like a timeshare.
- I think when you buy digital, there's always,
at least for me, a little bit of hesitation, I'm like,
well, okay, if I buy this now and I delete it, am I gonna,
am I gonna get it back?
Am I gonna be able to download it again?
Is that license still gonna be mine?
- As a fairly young person, I never was hesitant to put
my credit card information into a storefront.
You know, I knew what a secure storefront
was versus unsecure, you know, I knew not to, like,
reply to emails with my personal info or whatever.
- When you buy a digital game,
you're just buying a license to use that digital game.
You are not buying the game itself.
I was one of the dumb people who bought,
I think it was Pac-Man,
on the original Xbox.
They shut original Xbox servers down in like, 2007.
You can't access that content anymore, you can't even
re-download the $10 copy of Pac-Man
that you bought back then.
I didn't own Pac-Man.
Microsoft gave me permission to download Pac-Man
and they had the rights to pull that whenever they wanted.
- I sell gift cards, I don't know why the hell I do.
There's no money in it.
I literally make a dollar, two dollars a card.
Some day I'll probably come to my senses.
These gift cards for the younger kids is their copy
of the video game.
They've been just conditioned.
Is their N64 game, their PlayStation 2 disc.
Even though when you try to educate 'em and say,
you know, hey kid, I've been doing this for 26 years.
You're gonna grow out of it, you're gonna get interested
in cars, women, you're gonna come in here and wanna
sell me a system and I'm gonna ask you,
where are all your games?
You know, and you're not gonna have any games to sell.
- Say you make a, say you buy a game and you figure out
after two days, wow, I made a mistake.
If it's on a disc, you can trade that game in to Gamestop
or a mom and pop shop or trade it to someone
or put it on Ebay and get maybe 80 to 90% of the
purchase price back if you do it quick enough.
There's a lot less flexibility with digital media
'cause it's attached to either the physical system itself
or your account.
- Very often, people, when trading in their games will,
you know, say enthusiastically that, it's like,
oh, I have this game and this game
on the system and
that doesn't really add tangible value to the thing.
Those digital downloads are tied to some account.
It's not a licensing that's transferrable.
It's not an artifact that can be passed from one hand
to the other.
Yes, you have those things but now no one else can.
- Downloading has no value.
They bring in systems and they're like, I have 50 games
on this, how much you gonna give me?
Nothing, I'm gonna give you the same price as if you had
nothing on it.
- I just like being in control of when I can play it
and how I can play it.
Let's say, I don't know,
I get the newest generation console and I wanna be nice
to a relative or a friend, it's a lot easier to transfer
your collection to someone else if you have
the physical version.
- It eludes me that people can live their lives buying
simply digital product and never, ever have a manual
or a disc or a case or something to put in a bookshelf
that says that's yours.
Man, remember when video games required a manual?
Remember when you couldn't finish that game,
unless you had the manual because there was a certain
bit of information that was only in the manual.
That's something that I think is not happening so much
in video games these days.
Developing a game or creating a certain special situation
in a game that requires you to think outside of the game
itself is sort of waning a little bit.
- So they have, like, the remake of MGS one
for the Gamecube.
In the game at one point you're asked to call this character
and Snake asks like, how do I know the number?
And the Colonel breaks the fourth wall by telling you to
look at the back of the case.
- I've had a fear for a long time that the youth of today
would not be exposed to things
outside of their comfort zone.
That they would only interact with the media that was
algorithmically pushed to them or marketed to them.
I try really hard not to be, you know,
an old person who thinks that something was better
in the old days but the one concession I give myself
is that I don't think that young people are being
forced to expose themselves to media that maybe isn't
their first choice anymore.
When I was growing up, you know, I didn't have cable TV.
We had, like, five channels and I might watch some bad
TV show that wasn't necessarily my first choice but
I would get something out of it or I would discover
something that was older or weirder.
I think that you become a more well rounded, interesting,
creative person if you're exposed to media that isn't
pushed on to you necessarily by
people with corporate interests.
- Video games are always going to be taking up more space
and more space and more space
and internet speeds are never gonna catch up to them.
You're gonna be spending more and more on internet just to
download games and at some point you're gonna say, hey,
this is too much.
I'm just gonna go buy the physical copy again.
- We still have developing nations
where internet connections might be iffy
or not even nationwide.
What about the military?
If you're in a fort operating base in Afghanistan,
internet might not be the best to get a new game.
There's parts of the US, in the sticks that don't have
the best internet.
You might be pro digital distribution living
in silicon valley,
maybe not somewhere in West Virginia.
- I have a lot of people that still don't have internet.
They live in an area that just can't get
high speed internet.
It's not fast enough, it cuts out.
I live in a valley and there's no signal.
I take this issue kind of personally 'cause I can't get
high speed internet where I live.
My house is on a double yellow line and so it's not
like I'm on a gravel road or single lane little dirt road
out in the country, you know.
I've had so many people say, that don't have internet,
that they need to update their console and things like that,
that I actually have a TV set up here.
I had this extra space here, had an extra TV, I was like,
let's put this up here for people that need to update
their console if they don't have access to high speed
internet, they can update, download their DLC.
Some people will bring their Xbox in, set it up,
start the updates, hand me the controller
behind the counter, hey, I'll be back,
I'm going to Wal-Mart.
- I honestly still get a lot of customers that don't have
solid internet at home so even selling an Xbox One console
for instance, you actually need the internet initially
to set up the system at all so we'll actually do a lot of
set ups here in the store for the customer so they can get
their system ready to play whenever they get home
instead of being frustrated that they can't set it up at all
because they don't have, you know,
a good internet connection.
- People will call me and be like, is the TV open so I can
update and yeah, yeah, it's open, come on down.
This has gotten a lot of use in that aspect.
(light music)
- I think what's missing from digital storefronts versus
like a mom and pop shop is human curation.
The current curation system that we have is
not working.
- It's so incredibly difficult for some of these indie devs
to get people to just see their game.
It could be the most amazing indie darling game ever
but if all you get is one feature article on a blog
that specializes in indie games, you're never gonna
make your money back and then you might not ever be able
to make another game again.
- On PlayStation, every week, tons of games
with absurd names that have no business being there
and sure, a lot of them are gonna be great.
There's gonna be a lot of ones that are terrible.
That aren't, that are just rip off, that are just trying to
get your money.
There are so much there, somebody has to separate the
wheat from the chaff.
- Steam, much like YouTube, much like most of the internet
right now is skewed toward popularity as opposed to
actually understanding the user, that has just kind of
resulted in popular people continuing to be popular.
Whereas if I go into a mom and pop store and
the person behind the counter is like, well versed in
a lot of titles, you know, I might be able to mention
a game that I like and they'll be like, oh man, have you
tried this one.
- Usually the people who are running, especially independent
stores, you know, they are running it because it's what
they're passionate about, it's something that they have
you know, their deep knowledge of.
All the algorithms in the world on the internet
saying like, hey, if you like this, you'll probably like
this too, I mean, it can't really replace someone who really
knows you and knows, you know, what you're interested in.
- You wanna talk to the person, ask them their opinion
of the game, try to find out like a face to face.
If you could build a trust with the customer that says,
I'm not gonna tell you this is good just for you to buy it.
You know with the internet, it's like, if you've ever gone
across a message board, it's either super angry or super
in love, there's no in between but if you go and talk to
real people in a social environment where you're just
knockin' ideas back and forth, sometimes you get a better
read on what it is that you want.
If I'm talkin' to you, you're probably way more likely to
be honest with me talking like this than if you were online,
you could say whatever you want behind a keyboard with a
blank face, you're gonna be more passionate online and
say things that, just to get your point across
and lotta more hyperbole.
- My name's Frank Stancheck, I'm the owner at Classic
Game Junkie at 111 Southeastern road in
Glenside, Pennsylvania.
We're located just outside of northeast Philadelphia.
We opened in 2010 and it was very stressful.
We actually hit the ground running because we were already
doing business out of a shed in the back of my house
when we first started.
- They spent about three years out here.
You would see him out here, two, three, four, five o'clock
in the morning just workin', workin', workin'
and trying to get things goin'.
- In the shed it was cars coming up all the time,
people in and out all in the hours of the night
and in a suburban area, you don't do that.
- Well, yeah, the neighbors basically reported us because
we had a bunch of people comin' in to the back of the shed.
The cops came, they came up back in it and all they see
is a shed filled with Nintendo games and stuff
and essentially they said, look, we understand you're trying
to make ends meet, everybody's trying to run a business
but you're gonna have to find a place to actually do this.
You should get a shop.
- But it wasn't until that day we got the letter from
the township saying you had to cease and desist.
But we kept goin' anyway, you know.
- I found them a spot in an area that I liked.
I like Glenside.
- Everything in the whole place was yellow.
It was yellow because it was old, it was yellow because
it was yellow, it was yellow because it smelled like yellow.
So the whole place was just like fallin' apart.
- It was just overwhelming on him.
He was in a car accident, Francis was in a car accident
and he developed a degenerative disorder.
Every one of his discs came out slightly.
His lower spine was pressing on a sciatica really bad.
He couldn't physically walk and I was pregnant
with my son and I had my son in September, he had surgery
in November and it still hurt really bad.
He was going to be put on disability.
- I got herniated discs up and down and,
yeah, can't use my left hand some days.
- He could go on total disability
which he elected not to do and it was already done deal
with his back and all.
- Opening a business was pretty much the only option.
You don't have to be sitting in a chair all day.
He was on the ground a lot and he was suffering a lot.
It was a whole family effort, it wasn't just me and his dad.
It was mom, dad, brothers, cousins, family friends,
everyone was helping.
- Well I came, what, 'bout,
two years later, year later?
- Yeah, that's when, you know, we decided we needed the
extra help because we were really gettin' kinda bigger
than we expected.
- I kinda had to beg to get in here.
- I was a Assistant Manager, I was a Supervisor.
Okay, I had a lot of people under me
and I had a lot of equipment that I was responsible for.
I didn't know all that when I got to those places.
I don't firmly believe you have to know everything about
a industry or a business to work it, you know?
If you just have the common sense for it, that's all.
It's a learning experience every day.
Even to today, you know, I been there like five years.
I know games, you know, you gotta listen
and things like that and you'll get the just of it.
- I said, well, you know, it's a super charity case here
and you're--
- Well pretty much got one foot in the grave already
but you know, we'll let you come up here and help out.
- He keeps telling me I'm about 80.
- Yes, he is technically my boss.
We kinda like don't think of it that way.
You know what I mean, it's not like that.
- So I had my guy make me a Nintendo Ice Hockey
figurine guys and all the tape deck glory
and he made some orange and black.
- Actually when he was a baby, not even a couple months old,
I used to lay on the floor in front of the television
with him and watch Flyers constantly
then he would cry and I would get angry because I
couldn't hear the game, you know?
(laughter)
I don't think he can do anything without the family.
We kinda hold it together and he knows that.
We're all a viral part of his, you know, operation.
Anybody could tell if you come into the store.
We're very close.
- We get tons of people from out of state, out of country,
as a matter of fact.
People from Germany, Britain,
some people from, surprisingly, India, which was a real
shocker to me.
A lot of people from the UK.
A lot of customers from there and they're usually pretty
happy and they say they don't have too much stuff like
this back home for some reason.
That always surprises me, I thought this was kind of
everywhere right now, I thought retro was pretty big, so.
(light music)
- Well the creation of Rocket League really depends on how
far back you want to consider the genesis of the game.
Technically you could look back at 2008 as really
the beginning of Rocket League and before.
- We built the company by working on
other people's projects.
They would hire us to work on parts of their games
and in the meantime we were always working on our own
products 'cause we wanted to have that independence of
owning something that we've created and it was also very
important for us to self publish and have the independence
of being able to do that.
- Rocket League is actually a sequel to a game
called Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Pog Battle Cars.
- We shortened the Rocket League,
really good move.
- I was working on Unreal Tournament 2004 with Epic Games.
We were playing around with cars that can jump
and we didn't really know what we were gonna make out of
cars that can jump and fly.
(laughs)
Someone threw a ball in the game and we just couldn't
stop playing it after that.
It was gonna be a combat game before that and we were like,
no, this is the game, this is so much fun, we couldn't
stop playing it.
- It's a fantasy sport game.
It's like a fun game that doesn't take itself too seriously.
It's kinda like Remote Control Car Soccer.
- That's really at its core what Rocket League is now.
It's also soccer based video game, it was physics based,
it was multiplayer.
- We looked at having a publisher work with us.
It would've been nice to go retail even then 'cause
retail was very strong, this is 2008.
The game was just such a crazy idea that
no one was interested in picking it up.
They didn't even have a genre for it.
So we self published and the only way to do that was
through digital.
That game did very well amongst the people that found it.
One of the problems, especially in the early days of digital
was discoverability.
It's easy to get buried in the store.
We obviously didn't do it right, like,
no one is saying it's a bad game, they're just not being
able to find it that well.
- We learned a lot about what that game meant to people
who played it religiously and realized what elements of the
game didn't get people interested.
- Seven years later we started to get serious again.
Let's build this again, let's do it right.
A lot of things in the world were changing as well,
the landscape.
Store fronts were getting better at advertising what
products are on there and we had this game we already knew
was good so all we had to do was take advantage of the
change in society's view on digital games and really
quirky indie games.
The launch of the game was insane.
We broke every PlayStation Plus download record
in the book immediately.
That kind of immediate access to the game as is a result of
digital distribution was very overwhelming.
We launched Rocket League with a development team
dedicated to only Rocket League, fewer than 15 people
and now practically our entire studio is dedicated to
the game and we're almost at 100 people now.
Now being just a digital only game didn't necessarily
stamp us as being a small, low quality product.
There's some really amazing games out there that have,
you know, kind of come out of nowhere and didn't have a
major team or push and only distributing digitally and
was a massive success.
It really gave us some advantages that we didn't have
the first time.
(guitar music)
- So basically, the library's mission is to have a record of
the creative output of the United States.
The important cultural, historical,
creative record of what's been generated by the
citizens of the United States.
This building was designed to essentially serve as a
preservation factory.
To digitize older analog formats and to bring in
new born digital formats which we would then ingest into
our digital repositories.
So I work in the moving image section of the Motion Picture
Broadcast and Recorded Sound Division.
We are tasked with collecting moving image in various
formats from 35 millimeter film
to video broadcast formats.
Really old formats such as paper prints which is basically
like an old silent film printed on a roll of contact paper.
When silent films were being submitted for copyright,
the library wasn't accepting film so they would send in
these rolls of paper.
Here we have some consoles that have been gifted to us.
You know, we have our classic Nintendo zapper.
The federal government's own zapper.
We got three boxes worth of Nintendo Power.
The complete run, starting actually with Nintendo
Fan Club news.
When the games come into the library, it's
where they end up.
Somewhat temperature and humidity controlled here.
It's better than a basement.
The Library of Congress has a video game collection
because video games are one of the most powerful,
modern testaments to American creativity.
I mean, video games are hugely influential.
Certainly, on moving images and film and television.
I think any modern blockbuster that you see has, you know,
direct references to video games.
We really need to have some kind of a record of what
video games are, what video games were
and how it informs everything from film to politics.
How we interact with each other, how we interact with
our environment, I mean, Pokemon Go, for example,
it gave people the ability to sort of get out and explore
their town or their community through the means of
essentially playing a video game
and actually, you know, this building, the Packard campus
was a big Pokemon Go site.
People were just driving up into our parking lot
trying to capture Pokemon because they were hanging out
in front of the front door of this building.
You know, games, just from the fact that they're sort of
like ever changing, ever developing, it's nothing that
you can really like latch on to and say like, this is
the definitive thing, it's like ever changing.
- Things like Inkarus and Pokemon Go
are just straight up impossible to preserve
in their original form.
You can preserve the fact that this world is here
and that there are these things that can happen but you
can't preserve the interactions between people or the
events or that sort of thing.
You can record them and that's about as good as you can get.
- Games have all kinds of different functions.
It's not just telling a narrative story.
You know, trying to put it all back together to show
like a library researcher in a hundred years,
this is what Pokemon Go was,
gets a little more complicated.
There are gonna be questions that can only really be
answered by the collecting community and the
gaming community and people who are passionate
about that content.
- My name is Frank Cephaldi, I'm the founder
of the Video Game History Foundation.
We're a 501C3 nonprofit that's dedicated to,
well, preserving video game history, but really more
specifically in making sure that researchers,
both professional and amateur have access to the materials
they would need to tell the story of video game history.
Things like behind the scenes materials, you know,
design document, even the source code itself for some
of these games, the marketing material,
the surround in it, you can't tell the complete story
of a game unless you have all that surrounding materials.
So we're doing what we can to address that 'cause
movie historians have it easy.
There are film archives that have this kind of thing
but there's not really much in the way of accessible
video game stuff right now.
I like to call myself an archivist and a historian
with a game dev day job 'cause it turns out
that's not really a job that pays bills or anything.
On Mega Man Legacy collection, I was the producer and
the director and I did all the UI and stuff.
Sorry it's not better.
Really my focus on that project was contextualizing
the games beyond just playing them.
- Their approach to it was like, okay we're gonna basically
approach this like the Criterion Collection of this,
you know, the Criterion Collection, we're going to put out
a video game like, that's what we want this to be.
We want it to have the game,
we want you to be able to play the game like you
could on an old tube TV, we wanna have as much
contextual artwork and packaging and everything.
- I always liked the idea of, you know, having a library
of the stuff I've worked on on a bookshelf
just a proud trophy case.
For Mega Man Legacy Collection, I just went all in and
tried to get as much of the material that existed
that I could just to put it on my shelf.
I just wanted some representation of this work that I'm
incredibly proud of and the
biggest win for that is here's the actual game.
I've only ever done one physical game.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is also the last game
that's physical that I've worked on.
There was a follow up, I would say, to Mega Man Legacy
called the Disney Afternoon Collection, similar collection
with Disney themed games from Capcom.
There's no physical version
of that game so the only thing I have is
this slap bracelet that was given out as a promotional
item in storage which is the only thing I know of for
the game so you know, slap bracelet.
If you remember those.
- We currently have about 35 hundred games in our
collection here at the Library of Congress.
I think in 2016 we got
about 50 games out of 750 titles released.
We aren't getting any games that are just digitally
distributed, we're only getting games that are physically
available, so.
I mean we have hundreds of film negatives from the
Disney collection and Disney comes to us all the time
saying like, hey we're doing a 4K release of Snow White
or we're doing, you know, a Blu-Ray of the original
Cinderella, we need that original camera negative that
we have deposited with you for safekeeping.
They know that they can rely on us to sort of like be
the keepers of that thing that they're gonna eventually need
so that they can then make more money.
(laughs)
- You know, we should be treating video games the way that
way that we treat film.
We should be restoring video games from their source
material and keeping them in print.
The film foundation has a stat, I think it's 80% of
American cinema made before 1930 is gone
and I don't mean like, you can't buy it on DVD,
I mean it does not exist in this world anymore.
- While I was still in college in 2008 I got a job at
Epic Games working as a tester on Gears of War two.
After that, around 2010, I was in my senior year in college,
I started Mighty Rabbit Studios.
I was paying the people that would work with me
very, very, very little for the first two years until
we got our first game Saturday Morning RPG onto the market.
I'm Josh Furst and this is Mighty Rabbit Studios.
We made Saturday Morning RPG for the Uvio.
We wanna show you our office.
After that came out, I was able to boost money a little
bit but not much 'cause the game didn't really make
anywhere what it needed to be considered a success.
It really bothered me as a developer that the games
that I had poured all this time and effort into making
were only available digitally.
Any of the services that were hosting these things,
I mean the original IOS version of Saturday Morning RPG
is gone, it doesn't exist anymore, you cant get it.
I can still go into a Gamestop right now,
I can pull out Gears of War two, I can take the manual out
and I can flip to the size four font of my name in the
back of that manual that says I worked
on this physical thing.
It just really makes the thing that you've worked on real.
It's so hard to like, you know, make a plea toward
video game rights holders to hold on to their stuff
because it's like, hey, can you
spend significant money and resources on something
that you don't see the value in yet?
It's really the responsibility, I think, if you're working
on art like games or whatever that, like,
you take things home and you put 'em in a shoebox under your
bed or whatever you need to do.
What you should do if you work on games is just start
a box and just put everything in the box.
That's the best thing you can do.
Steal from work, that's how things get saved
is you steal them from work.
- For us, releasing Rocket League as a digital only
product was a no brainer.
We actually never imagined, in the beginning, that it
would be available physically at all.
The reason we decided to do the retail copy of Rocket
League is because digital distribution is taking over
but there's still a massive amount of people out there
that don't have the things necessary to make access
to the game possible.
- There's a lot of people that just miss physicality
in games, there's a lot of people that want that box,
that want to know that they own that thing because
in 10, 20 years, PSN might go down and they won't have
access to that 10 or 15 dollar game that
they purchased anymore.
I don't wanna be disrespectful to the games but there's a
lot of bad games that reach retail.
There's going to be people that want to go back and play
your game in a legitimate manner and they're not
going to be able to and it sucks that they're gonna
be able to play some really bad games in a legitimate
manner but not a really great game
and I just think that from a preservation standpoint,
that's just a little irresponsible.
- Well I think for a lot of companies, you know that you
have this percentage of the population, percentage of
gamers who are really, really loyal to physical media.
They know that there's gonna be this loyal population
that's gonna buy it either for the second time or
will finally put, you know, push this final whatever
it is, 20% or so on board.
- Many physical stores, depending how long they've been in
business, have very strong customer bases and are able
to reach out to those people and recommend that game
to someone who may have been reluctant to do so online.
We actually have customers that refuse to connect to the
internet for their gaming.
They prefer to support local brick and mortar shops.
- When you're on a display stand inside of a retail store,
you have the opportunity to sell your product to somebody
who maybe doesn't live in the digital ecosystem at all
and there are still millions of those video game consumers
out there and Sionix knows this, they're not stupid
and they're like, well we have a massive audience here
but we could have an even bigger audience if we're at
retail and that's why you sometimes see games that are
successful on digital finally take the leap to retail
once they have a critical mass.
- The latest figures I've heard, it's still 70%
of all game owners still buy some form of
video games physically.
That's still a lot of people when you consider just how many
hundreds of millions of people out there are playing
video games in some form or another be they on mobile
phones or consoles or PCs.
It's like a rite of passage almost to get that
physical copy out.
A manual we can read, you know, something we can touch.
Just giving people something that they can have and do with
as they please, not something that can be taken away.
- I do think that the physical game
and I think this is gonna change very soon
but I think it adds legitimacy to a title
which is strange because you think like, okay well
physical is sort of in the past and not what,
and not where we're going but I do still think that
there's some kind of, you know,
this is legitimizing this title, this is saying like,
it's worthy of a physical release.
- When I got into games, in the beginning there wasn't
really a digital channel.
I mean when I was dreaming about, oh I'd like to have
a game company, my dreams were walking in to a store
and seeing it on a shelf and that's what I dream,
like, I want my game to be on the shelf one day
and it's funny 'cause by the time I got to where we
were actually shipping our own games, it was like,
okay we should do this all digitally.
So it was a very proud moment when I was able to put it
out retail because I finally got that moment of being able
to walk in the store and see my game on the shelf and that
was very, very important to me, specifically.
(light music)
(laughter)
- You kinda forget how cool of a town you have until
you're flooded, inundated by tourists or Halloween.
It's like Mardis Gras but everyone has costumes on.
You know, they're here, they want somethin' to remember
Salem by, I have customers that come in every year
religiously and one customer told me, every time he plays
the game, that music comes on,
not only does he remember Salem during Halloween,
but he remembers our game store.
Other people buy a game when they hear that music,
they remember they were in Johnny's Basement,
you know, when mom was cookin' spaghetti, it all
comes as a flashback.
The whole memory of the first time playing it,
their childhood, it all flashes in front of 'em.
I really don't sell video games, I sell memories.
Or I sell your childhood back to you.
- Yeah a lot of the carts come with their own markings,
usually names and phone numbers.
I did get a copy of Qix that had written on it:
"This game sucks."
I'm like, but I like Qix, I found that kind of offensive.
I'm guilty of sometimes, I guess, being a little jaded
'cause I see this stuff everyday.
People are jumping into collecting, oh I want this top
10 list, I want to experience these things, these are
supposed to be the best.
You have other people who want the game that they played
with their brother and it's not necessarily even a good game
but that was the goofy game that they rented from the game
store this one memorable weekend, that was the experience.
They see some game they haven't seen in years, decades,
it triggers a waterfall of remembrance in their mind of
playing this at this time in this place with this person
and they typically can't help but exclaim it,
you know, it's like, oh look at this, oh the game!
You know, that's great, I mean that's
so gratifying 'cause that's really what it's all about.
The joys of remembrance.
- Yeah, I mean, I see almost everyday somebody walk into
the store and they're blasted with this nostalgic,
you know, image of things that they still haven't,
they say, I haven't played a Nintendo game since I was,
you know, 13 but there it is, I have Mike Tyson's
Punch Out sitting right in front of me, I can buy it.
They discover, wow, these video games have really touched
my life in a way that I didn't realize, you know?
I remember that when I was a kid, I played that with my
buddy in college, we drank way too much while playing that
game one night, who could forget?
So you kinda get to come back and relive those moments.
Sometimes, and for many of us, times that were a little
less stressful than they are today.
- People wanna come in and browse, they really don't know
what they're looking for.
Half the fun for the retro video game collectors
is the hunt.
The coolest stories that these guys tell me,
'cause they gotta tell somebody, is, oh I was at this
yard sale or this flea market, it's not about the game,
it's about how they came across the game.
I come across that gem that I had as a kid
that I didn't even remember
until the label jumped out at me.
That's the stories that people share with me.
- 10 years ago and I'm still in New Jersey
when I tried unsuccessfully to date some girls,
not one thought that retro game collecting was cool
or that it was something that they
would be comfortable with.
Like, you always hear people say, oh I remember playing
Duck Hunt, that's fine
to remember that game to them but it's weird
having a wall of those games.
I remember one girl walking in
to my apartment on a second date
and seeing my retro video games, she said to me,
oh this is 40 year old virgin stuff.
Never saw her again.
It's just interesting to finally be around people that
are in your world that love what you love and I think
that's one of the draws of the retro game store still
is that you can talk to the shop owner, you can talk
to other people walking in and there's a camaraderie
there, you commiserate on a hobby that you love and
you're passionate about because retro video games
is such a small minority of the overall video game market
share, it's probably five percent
and if they put out a new NES cart, they'd sell like
a thousand of 'em.
The Call of Duty sells a million, Madden sells
millions of 'em.
The scales are just totally different.
Everyone wants what's new and what's best and
the weirdos like me want the games that are 30 years old.
(electronic music)
- I think my first console was Nintendo 64
and I'm here to find more games and controllers for it.
I wanted to come and check out the culture and like
the panels and some of the events going on.
I think it'll be real fun to see some of the museum stuff.
There was a panel coming up about having more female
voices in the game world and I thought
that one looked interesting.
We also wanna see peanut butter gamer.
(laughs)
I come here for the little accessories and collectible
type things like Ameebo cards, shirts, art and that
sort of thing.
If you're here you can examine the object, you can see
exactly what's wrong with it, you know from the person
selling it, hey, it's missing this component.
You don't have to open a dispute or email back and forth.
It's a more immediate transaction and
that is very appealing.
- I just really just love being around a large amount of people
passionate about the same things I'm passionate about.
I mean really that's all conventions are
at their core, right?
- We see a lot of young people in the store and they
absolutely do buy stuff and it's funny because sometimes
they buy things that maybe us veterans might
consider kinda silly.
They want to buy a copy of E.T. because they've heard it's
a terrible game and so they don't have an Atari yet
but they wanna buy this seven dollar copy of E.T.
because they've heard it's so terrible and it's only
seven dollars so they take steps, baby steps to get there
but I've definitely seen a lot of kids come in and buy
like an NES.
- I absolutely feel like internet culture is driving,
you know, a resurgent interest even amongst young kids
in the old stuff that they never even
experienced themselves.
It's funny, kids come in and like, do you have this game
for Nintendo, like I'm really nostalgic for it,
I'm like, I don't think you know what that means.
- I've seen something happen and a place like Portland
is a great example where you see the next generation
after me, 16, 17 year old, they love
retro video games, they love the franchises.
They love Mario, they love Legend of Zelda.
They love Sonic.
That doesn't necessarily mean they love the original
media in form that video game was originally was
released on.
They'll adore that franchise 30 years from now.
Doesn't necessarily mean they have to go
own the original cartridge.
- I think I mostly, other than buying things for older
consoles, which obviously then you've got to go to a
store or a collector or someone online and like buy the
physical things, I think I mostly download games now.
Most of my recent games have been downloads.
- We care about physical media because we grew up with it
and that's why we are passionate about it because it
connects them to our childhood.
You know, we remember blowing off that NES cartridge
and putting it into the system or Atari
or taking a disc and putting it into a PlayStation.
I think the younger, younger generation,
I have a son that's nine,
I don't know if they're gonna care as much because
what do they grow up with, you know?
They grew up with an iPad, you know, iPhone.
I think that ingrains into people's memory and I think
they're gonna care less about it.
People that loved Elvis when he was big in the 60s
and 70s and he died in the late 70s,
maybe that original RCA Elvis record was worth $100
20 years ago, maybe it's worth $20 now, maybe it's worth
10 because there aren't the same amount of new Elvis
collectors come in and replace the ones that are either
selling off their collection, getting out of it or
literally dying off.
The rarity of the media is only one factor.
There has to be interest in it.
- I worked at Luna Video Games
kind of as a General Manager and we see a lot of young
people there as well just like we're seeing here.
I think a lot of them do wanna immerse themselves
in the culture, they wanna be part of it but because
of things like digital releases, they don't necessarily
need to own those cartridges and those games but a lot
of young people come here and they buy shirts or prints
or things that are recognizable to them and they feel like
they're part of that community, that's how they express
it as opposed to starting these massive collections
that are now out of the price range of, well frankly,
a lot of people.
- I prefer to get my games on a digital medium 'cause
I typically play them on my computer now or on my 3DS
and it's just significantly more convenient.
I can download a multi-gigabyte game in like, five minutes.
- Buying physical copies is definitely a little bit more
nostalgic for me, I love having the physical copy so I
bought like a physical copy of Horizon and Sky Rim when
it came out remastered
but if the deal's a little bit better online,
I will usually download it.
- I think the future of conventions in game stores
in general in my opinion will depend upon
how many generations does it get passed down to?
Like you said, you do see 12 and 13 year olds buying it.
They probably had their parents that grew up with a NES.
What happens next?
- Yeah, what happens when they have kids?
How much do they hold on to this things that their
parents passed on to them?
A good comparison, though, might be like, I love 80s music.
I was not alive in the 80s but I love 80s music and I
can't see myself just forgetting that I like 80s music.
Maybe I don't play nearly as much 80s music as my parents
did, so if I have children, they get a little bit of that
and maybe it just sort of passes down in like a slower
and slower stream but I don't see it just stopping
after the next generation.
- To your point though, 80s music,
how are you listening to that?
Digitally, YouTube, Pandora, or the original cassette?
- You know what, that's a great point actually
'cause I do all my music through streaming so
that's a great point.
- So if I wanna listen to Tiffany, I love Tiffany,
if I wanna listen to Tiffany 20 years from now,
I probably won't get that old cassette that my sister had.
Or that Whitney Houston tape, I'll just stream it.
So that's the thing, Super Mario Brothers, 20 years
from now, again, there'll be 20 ways to play it and the
cartridge will be the least convenient way to play it.
- There are plenty of people who are totally willing to
spend five dollars on Super Mario Brothers again
but the issue is, and they've already spent that
five dollars four different times.
So the streaming service is a way for them to be like,
look, we get it, you want this game still and you bought
it a bunch of times already,
you don't have to do that anymore.
You can just have all of them and just pay,
you know, like a Netflix model.
- And it follows the movie path, right?
It's like, I bought it on VHS, I bought it on DVD,
I might've even gotten it on Blue-Ray.
I don't wanna touch the thing and I don't wanna buy it
anymore. - Right.
- But like, I will pay for a subscription service
that has it.
- When you get older your priorities change.
Maybe you don't wanna own all these pieces of plastic
and paper, maybe it's not a priority so you get rid of
those games.
Will there be a generation behind me that will step in
and collect these games and wanna preserve them to the
same extent that I wanted to do that?
My head says no because it's like any other hobby
and sometimes some hobbies die out.
(light piano music)
- I spent my whole life collecting video games
from pack ratting them away when I was young
to trying to fill up every little possible gap
in every single possible collection.
I have every physical game that Sega ever made in the
United States, every one.
Every master system, Sega Genesis, Saturn,
Game Gear, Dreamcast,
Peko, Sega CD, 32X, all of 'em, every single one.
I think about physical media probably more than most people
do I think more than most people do and that's the
reason why I opened a museum.
(ambient music)
The end goal of the museum, it would be a be all,
end all of the industry so it would have an archive
of every game and console and accessory that ever came out.
Where industry people could come out and give lectures and
teach you about the industry.
The National Video Game Museum is the country's first
dedicated video game museum.
It's not part of a wing of other things,
it's not a section of video games,
it is the all inclusive history of video games
specifically devoted to that industry.
Well, it's the National Video Game Museum so it's
about what you would expect which is a physical museum
that has displays that teach you about the history of
video games.
- When we founded our first convention in 1999,
the museum was a part of that and the museum was simply
pieces of a collection, maybe 30 pieces.
- They used to tour it around at like, E3, CES.
We're talking like, one of a kind items,
original developer notes from Atari, prototypes of games.
You know, these are guys who were among the earliest
video game collectors and had been collecting not just the
games but the material and things like that.
I mean John Hardy has told me stories of actually
dumpster diving at Atari, not just saying that but like
actually going to Atari's office and
going in their dumpsters.
- It certainly was a project of passion.
All the years of collecting and then traveling with our
things, that just suddenly became a museum on the road.
What finally made me say,
I wanna open a museum was getting old, time is running short,
and we need to find a place to put all of these
things and keep them so that people can enjoy them
every day as opposed to whenever we happen to be at a
specific event once a year or whenever.
(chatter)
- One of the reasons that we decided that we needed to
build a video game museum is nobody else had.
- For years we wondered why hasn't somebody done this
before, right?
Sean will often cite that there are two carrot museums
in the United States dedicated to carrots
but there was not one video game museum dedicated
to video games.
You know, like, the Smithsonian has their section
of video games, the Strum Museum of Play up in Rochester
which we went to, it was a beautiful museum
but it's a toy museum and they have a floor that's
dedicated to video games but you don't go there just
to see video games.
It shouldn't just be a timeline.
It shouldn't just be why is Nintendo important.
It really needs to be a full thing so that no matter
how old you are, no matter what piece of video gaming
has touched your life, you can learn way more about that
than anything else that you can think of.
Let's put the exhibits that we think will have the most
impact, the ones where we can teach people something
and also allow them to sort of enjoy themselves.
So you're not just sitting there learning about it
but you actually get to experience it.
We have a 1985 replica bedroom.
You can go in, you can jump on the bed,
you can use the zapper to play Duck Hunt, you know,
you can rummage through the drawers and find baseball cards
from the 80s or look through the vinyl albums or
pick up the skateboard, you know, the concept of
everything in the museum is to make it as visceral
as the feeling of playing video games themselves.
And the reason why that setting is important is because
what you're playing is something nobody would be playing
anymore either, you know, playing on this giant
console that takes cartridges and has a joystick with
just one button on it kind of puts you in that frame of
mind like, okay well, if this is what they were playing with
and I look around, now I got a kind of a better
understanding of what the world was like at that time.
Similarly we have an 80s arcade and the 80s arcade
is meant to look like the arcade that you would've
seen in 1983.
It's playing 80s music, it's neon black lights,
that you know, you would never see anymore
and the whole idea is to put you there.
You've seen Frogger, you've see Donkey Kong,
you know everything about Mario
but now you're standing where those characters
were first introduced.
This is exactly what it was like for people that
got to see it for the first time.
It would be easy to say well couldn't I have a 3D model
of something like that where you could kind of move through
it but there's just something about the feel of those things
and the smell of those things and the sound that you have
to be standing there to really get it.
That was the whole point.
- You can see pictures all day long of something but to
see it up close, maybe even get to interact with it
is a huge part of it.
There's so much back story to the industry with the people
who created the industry and the games.
It's important to get that out there.
- The store is a little bit like a museum and I would
imagine most game store owners feel that way especially
if your stocking used products.
If you have products that are 20 or 30 years ago sitting
on a shelf,
guaranteed someone's gonna look at it and go, I had
that when I was a kid, you know, and they wanna
talk about it.
We've sometimes turned into curators
while we're on a sales floor.
I have the same conversations here with customers that
I have with people that are visiting the museum.
Very similar conversations.
Typically what you would see in a museum are priceless
works of art or one of a kind pieces that have some
kind of artistic significance that you want to make sure
that is preserved and shared to the public so that everyone
can experience witnessing that on their own.
They're looking at the before times, you know,
things that existed in a time before I was born or a time
that my parents were playing games or a time that
no longer exist again and they're extinct.
(ambient music)
(chatter)
(guitar music)
It's on everybody's mind and no matter what they tell you,
you are now where Barnes and Noble is or
Blockbuster was just a couple years ago.
Where Sam Goody was 10 years ago.
You're there now, what are you gonna do?
Are you going to stop selling games and sell something else?
Or are you gonna try to hang in there with what's left?
And I think if you're trying to hang in there with
what's left,
(exhales)
lots of us are gonna go away in five years.
- I've had people ask me for advice for opening up their
own game store and in general
my advice to people when they ask me that is just don't.
- I would open up a coffee shop before opening up a
retro game store at this point in time.
The amount of people interested in the original media
form of retro games is growing smaller year by year
and plus some of us already got it, we got most of what
we're gonna want so what am I gonna buy from you?
- When I lived in Los Angeles, I went to smaller,
locally owned stores all the time.
Unfortunately I haven't found one here in my current
neighborhood because, sadly, they're going away because
they're getting either, you know, dominated by the other
retailers or like all retail, it's getting dominated
by online shopping.
- If I see a mom and pop store for games, yeah I would be
incredibly interested in looking at that.
To me it's almost like going into a vintage music shop,
though, you know, it's a reminder of the old way of doing
things and it's nostalgic more than anything.
- It's tough, things have dried up and the customer base
is much more savvy now than it was five or 10 years ago.
The world has moved on and doesn't need
this anymore, you know, I
just don't need it,
you know, everybody's living in a world now where
it's on their computer or it's, I don't need that piece.
- I think the desire's always going to be there
but it is receding from the mainstream because,
more and more there's people who it's just not a priority
for them and that's okay but it's sort of sad to see
because it is frustrating when games that I really love
don't have something I can hold on to.
- I don't understand why there are still physical movies
but I think games are different because I think games are
a much more personal experiences and I think people
want to have a physical remnant of the time that they
spent in that world.
The equivalent of your vacation photos or whatever.
I think people want a physical reminder of that time.
As opposed to the two hours they spend in the theater
or whatever, you know, the 40 hours they spent in this
game's world that, you know, probably affected them a lot
more than most movies do.
Looking around at all the physical media, there's a lot
more exciting than just browsing on your computer screen
even though it may be more efficient on the computer,
there's somethin' cool about just getting like,
sidetracked, getting lost, like I compare it with video
stores, that was the entertaining part, it was kind of
more fun than even watching the movie sometimes, it was
just be able to just walk around and look at all the movies
that you could watch.
- My personal plan here is to continue to do that
community type of a thing where we just keep having
more and more events, I try to do as many things as I can
with the space to keep people coming.
Again, it's just, it's always gonna be a smaller and
smaller base and the great ones, I'm sure like record
stores now, the great record stores, there's probably,
maybe there's 50 of 'em in the country, maybe every state
has one that everybody knows about that they go to
but you can't have three or four in the same town.
- Running a game store or any sort of like small business
in a niche market is not a way to get fabulously wealthy.
It's something you do not because you're an entrepreneur
but because you're an enthusiast.
(guitar music)
(footsteps)
(door creaks)
(machine whirs)
(door creaks)
- I couldn't take half the merchandise in if we didn't
have this machine, they're so scratched up.
It takes out the scratches, it buffs out the scratches,
so to speak.
You can resurface a disc, three, four times and at that
point it's not gonna do any good.
It's just really thin.
It's like a wafer, you can just see it thinnin'
out each time.
But if people take care of their disc then they don't
need this machine.
(ambient music)
As long as I'm havin' fun, I don't think I'll retire.
You know, I won't be buyin' a Lamborghini anytime soon
but I didn't get into this to make a lot of money,
it's a fun business, it's actually an addictive business.
The thing that I like about being in business, it allows
you to have the lifestyle that you want.
Bringing my dog to work, making the decisions,
even though they're small decisions, but I'm in charge
of my own destiny.
I'm a skier, I have an RV and my girlfriend and I
with our two dogs travel around the east coast, just
skiing, sleeping in ski resort's parking lots,
gettin' up the next day, gettin' first tracks,
we're hitting every mountain on the east coast
that has three chairlifts or more.
That's what I'd be doing full time if I didn't have
a retro video game store.
As long as there's snow on the ground.
I would ski in dirt.
- My mother thought I spent too much, she was really right,
I spent way too much money in my college years on video
game stuff when it should've been spent towards, you know,
tuition for example.
She was the,
sort of the final gate for me in opening the store.
So I went through all the checks, I went through my wife.
I checked our finances but I had to finally get through
my mom, if my mom said, you have my blessing to do this,
I was gonna do it.
Both my mom and dad were very proud when I opened
the store and it had been open for a while
and they both lived just long enough to see the museum
open which was important to me
and I know that they were really proud of that too.
- There's been nothing like this, being able to wake
up every day, know I'm goin' to a place to share my
store with other people who share the same interests as me.
I mean, it's amazing, the sights, the sounds, the video
game music playing in the store, all that stuff
makes me excited to be able to wake up and know I get to
go to that place every morning.
I mean, granted, any work becomes work for everybody but
I can't think of a better place and as long as I can make
it last I'm gonna continue to wake up and go there
and really enjoy what I get to do every day.
I get to spend time with my family everyday, for better
or for worse, this is a
once in a lifetime opportunity for most people,
to get to live their actual dream that they had
when they were a kid and if it lasts 10 more years,
great, if it lasts 20, amazing, if it lasts one,
then I had a hell of a good time doing it.
(ambient music)
(machine whirs)
(light music)
♪ Fighting the war ♪
♪ We can never win ♪
♪ Trying to flee ♪
♪ The pain that's within ♪
♪ Still hanging on ♪
♪ To hold what is lost ♪
♪ Trying to carry on ♪
♪ No matter the cost ♪
♪ There's one thing ♪
♪ That makes me come alive ♪
♪ When you're by my side ♪
♪ To get everything ♪
♪ Together with me ♪
♪ When I'm weary take the road ♪
♪ Play that movie ♪
♪ I want you to smile ♪
♪ Shut out all the worries ♪
♪ Stream away for a while ♪
♪ The look you had ♪
♪ In your eyes back then, We'll pretend ♪
♪ It's 85 again Play that tape ♪
♪ Make me feel like I'm whole ♪
♪ Take me back again to see the look of that chrome ♪
♪ The power of love is back on the screen ♪
♪ And we'll have ♪
♪ 85 again ♪
(synth music)
- The reason we love something has to do with something
more than sheer technical achievement or historical
significance, it has to do with how fun it is and that's a
very nebulous quality.
It's hard to define but it's very fun to try
and grapple with.
- I think there's something about a physical copy,
like being able to pick it up and look at it,
it's like a snapshot of the time it was released, you know,
especially if you grew up with that, like whenever I see
a stack of NES games come in, I can get like an idea
of this person and how their life was almost, like he was
playing Batman just like me, you know, we were both
into Battle Toads probably at the same time.
I wonder what makes people sell it in the first place,
like what makes you move on from it, that's the
bigger question to me.
- We all love experiencing games with other people.
If you are like, hey I can't afford to buy this game
and I'm like, but I want you to try it, I can loan
you my disc and then you can give it back to me.
- I literally have video games sitting in a bank
vault right now.
How is that good for humanity?
What does that serve?
Literally locking away video game history.
It doesn't make any sense, it doesn't make any sense.
- I think the industry's gonna change a little bit in the
next 10 years, I think we're gonna see maybe less of a
focus on newer games having physical media but you know,
that's why we don't sell only video games.
We sell lots of video game merchandise 'cause the game
community's not going anywhere, people are always gonna
be into video games and I'm not looking
for global domination.
(laughs)
- This is a personal anecdote, so I don't know how many
had this experience also but my wife and I,
I wanted to show her a Miyazaki movie.
"My Neighbor Totoro," she had never seen it.
We went on Amazon, it's like, oh you can't rent
"My Neighbor Totoro."
I looked and there's one local video store left in
the east bay, they have every Miyuzaki movie there
and like, we now have a video membership and we rent
a movie every week from humans.
- I had a paper route, my parents were like this,
they liked gamin' but I think they thought I was gonna
like rot my brain, so as a rule of thumb, I might get
two games on Christmas and like one for my birthday
but that was clearly not enough.
Street Fighter Two, I like literally, was like,
the day it comes out, I'm gonna have the money with
my parent's help or not
and I think that's where I got most of my like, work
ethic from, like, I don't need you for my hobby.
It was fun.
(laughs)
(synth music)