Thursday, July 17, 2025

Memories of Game Stores Past (Part III)

I'm old, old enough to remember a time when the local game store was not merely a place to buy things. It was a crossroads, a hub for roleplayers, wargamers, and fans of genre fiction of all stripes. In those days, game stores felt weird in the best possible way: crammed with strange titles, eccentric proprietors, and regulars who treated the place like a second home. They were cluttered, often a bit dingy, and absolutely magical.

I spent countless hours in such stores. I remember walking through their doors and being hit by the smell of old cardboard and newsprint and the sight of wooden shelves bowed under the weight of too many Avalon Hill and SPI boxed wargames. You could browse freely, picking up games you’d never heard of, flipping through rulebooks that transported you to strange new worlds. If you were lucky, someone might be running a game in the back room – and if you hung around long enough, you might even get asked to join.

That’s how I discovered many of the games that shaped my tastes and interests. This was long before carefully curated social media feeds or electronic publisher newsletters, when sheer chance might introduce you to a captivating cover, a staff recommendation, or a game in progress that caught your attention. The old game store was a vehicle for discovery. It introduced me to lots of games I might never have found otherwise.

That kind of store, the kind I knew in my youth, is largely gone.

Certainly, there are still game stores out there, some of them excellent in their own way – but they’re not the same. Most of them survive today by focusing on collectible card games, miniatures wargaming like Warhammer, and modern boardgames. Roleplaying games, if present at all, are often confined to a few shelves of familiar titles from major publishers. The walls of obscure and idiosyncratic RPGs I once browsed for hours have mostly vanished.

The reasons aren’t mysterious. The Internet changed everything. Online retailers offer discounts and immediate availability that physical stores can’t hope to match. Digital publishing has displaced print in many cases. Perhaps most significantly, online play, something I myself participate in weekly, has made many of the accessories that once sustained game stores obsolete. Why buy dice, for example, when a VTT takes care of it?

None of this is inherently bad. In fact, I think it's great that it’s never been easier to find people with whom to play, no matter where you live. As regular readers know, I referee or play in several weekly online campaigns with friends scattered across the world. Likewise, the indie RPG scene is thriving in ways that would been nigh impossible back in the 1980s. Yet, despite all this richness, I can’t shake the feeling that something important has been lost.

Serendipity. That’s what’s missing.

In my experience, the Internet is great at showing us more of what we already like. It’s less good at surprising us. In the absence of physical spaces where different genres, systems, and subcultures once collided, the RPG hobby has become more siloed. It’s entirely possible now to spend years playing RPGs and never stray beyond a handful of familiar games. That wasn’t the case when every trip to the store might reveal something you’d never seen before.

Back then, I had a much more eclectic gaming diet and not just because I was young and had more free time, though that’s certainly part of it. No, the environment encouraged it. Game stores were chaos. They were cluttered with possibilities and they invited you to take risks, to try something new. They were social, too, places where you talked with strangers, traded recommendations, maybe even rolled some dice together.

Today, many of the stores that still exist feel lonelier, at least to me. They’re quieter, more sterile, less open to chance. They sell games, but they rarely feel like places to do anything else.

I don’t say this to complain about change for its own sake. Much as I dislike it, change is inevitable and not all of it is unwelcome. However, I do think we’ve lost something intangible but important. The video rental store analogy fits here. It's true that streaming services offer more movies than any Blockbuster ever did, but no algorithm has ever replicated the joy of stumbling across something unexpected on the shelf or the spontaneous conversation with a fellow customer that convinced you to give it a try.

I miss that. I suspect I’m not alone in doing so. We may well be richer in options than ever before, but in some that I think matter, we are also poorer.

36 comments:

  1. I agree entirely.

    But I will also offer the following adjacent pseudo-counterpoint.

    When my family moved to San Diego in 1984, I repeatedly asked my parents to drive me to a game store there called Game Towne. It advertised in "Dragon" magazine at the time. So I envisioned some glamorous, modern, spacious glass-and -steel space. Instead, it was actually a run-down, 1950s era, one-story home on the edge of a tourist area that had been converted into a game store. And when you walked in, 100% of the time, whether it was summer or winter, every customer would be confronted with this 'wall of stench' that was a mixture of carpet mould, Body Odor, a primar y employee who worked the cash register and who seemed to have a perpetual, year-round cold (even in sunny southern California), and still air with no open windows or air conditioning. It was brutal. And, with the benefit of hindsight, clearly an unhealthy environment, bordering on Lovecraftian in that way.

    My parents would drive me there and stay in the car and ask me to please go in and browse and buy what I wanted within 10 minutes.

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    1. To counter the counter, they had those problems fixed by 1990 when I moved to San Diego. I hadn’t realized they were a staunch Dragon advertiser when I moved there. All I knew was that they had countertops filled with dice, and long drawers of inexpensive, often outright weird, games. To add to James’s lament, “I was young and had more free time…” and less money. The weird stuff was less expensive, so I scoured the weird stuff for something that was also playable.

      And everyone in the store was talking. And they were talking about games. My friends and I would drive down there every couple of months and wander, and browse, and buy too much (even of the new stuff).

      Game Towne lasted well into this century, but they dropped out of the wider roleplaying market long before they finally closed for good.

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    2. I can top that. One of our old stores in the 90s turned out to be a front for (at the time) the largest pot-growing operation our county had ever seen. The store owner theoretically owned the building, which was a two-story that had once been a small bowling alley. Downstairs hosted the store - a grimy pit with minimal stock and sales but the best array of miniatures tables I've ever seen. Upstairs was supposedly rented by an Asian import business, and they basically paid for the building's taxes, utilities, etc. It wasn't until the police got a tip that anyone suspected anything - the growers weren't selling anywhere nearby or anything, and most of their customers had no idea where they were. The owner went to jail still swearing he didn't know anything and his father (a lifer in federal prison as we later discovered) had set the whole thing up and told him not to ask any questions.

      Might almost have been plausible if they hadn't discovered the power tap down in the basement that kept all the draw from those growing lights off the meter. The basement that only the owner could access. Who had electrician's training to do that sort of work.

      There was also one place up near Buffalo where the owner couldn't afford to pay his utility bills all the time but opened regardless. You'd go in and discover the heat was off, or even the electricity in a few cases. And you couldn't call to see first, because the phone was almost always dead. Never understood why that one kept trying, but he did a better job of getting new stock than the pot-grower did.

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    3. It's funny, I was going to get on here and write about Game Towne but you all beat me too it. I'm from Michigan but was stationed in San Diego from 1986-1988 and I loved Game Towne! It was there that I rediscovered Traveller with Megatraveller and a long with that discovered Digest Group and Challenge Magazine. I purchased Shadowrun the week it debuted and found my copy of the Ringworld RPG there. They'd have gaming weekends where they setup a small pavilion in their little yard and play games outside in the dependable Southern California weather. And best of all, they were a small distributor and offered a flat 20% off just about everything. I still have my Game Towne d6!

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  2. If you're ever in town, you'll have to stop by my shop -- I've tried very hard to make it a "destination" rather than a glorified Magic card vending machine. I stock racks and shelves of odd third-party RPGs (heck, hook me up with wholesale terms and I'll stock Thousand Suns in a heartbeat), and that's not because they generate any huge amount of sales, but because that's the kind of store I want to be. :-)

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    1. Where is your game store? Sounds like a great place to visit.

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    2. Right in the heart of metropolitan Wasilla, Alaska -- literally thousands of miles from absolutely anywhere. :-)

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  3. I’m old enough now to have the money to buy all those games and miniatures I lusted after as a kid but could rarely afford. However now I am too wise (tight?) to pay collectors prices for those things.

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  4. It’s true. Sadly, those great retail game stores of our youth are all gone now, exterminated by market forces.

    As a tween in the early 80s, my friends and I would take a monthly hike to Craft Corner (well lit, properly ventilated, and clean) in Dale City VA. We’d read the front and back of TSR modules sealed in glossy shrink wrap but could actually flip through the pages of some Judges Guild products. Someone would buy a die or two with his lawn mowing proceeds. Another might buy the latest copy of Dragon Magazine. That’s where we acquired the now infamous, allegedly IP-violating, first print run of Deities and Demigods. And they had wargames too. When I bought Avalon Hill’s Stalingrad, the cashier, a non-gamer who also sold yarn, model trains, and balsa wood planes, asked me what it was. At the time, games were just another profitable product line mixed in with all the other hobby goodness. That’s all changed.
    Craft Corner is now an ethnic grocery store.

    A similar fate befell the last true game store I visited, Campaign Headquarters in Norfolk VA, which faded in the late 90s as the mall stores too were selling the last of their Avalon Hill stock. Soon after I found a WoTC store in Springfield Mall and discovered Hack Master, but they closed soon after. War Hammer and similar minis had a brief mall moment, but now those places are “game” stores that sell mostly calendars and various flavors of monopoly.

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  5. I've worked in multiple game stores from the 80s through to the early 2000s, and still keep up with the retail side of the industry through contacts and the FLGS today. Watching multiple former employers drive what should have been flourishing businesses into the ground for various reasons has left me with no desire to ever get into that field again. I do miss the sense of community and opportunities to socialize with fellow gamers outside of actually gaming with them though.

    One thing not mentioned above - every store I know of personally in the 2020s has been forced to dedicated floor space to in-store gaming, usually in the form of scheduled tournaments and/or organized play events. I haven't seen "dingy back room play" since the 1990s, and the most successful of our local stores came out of the Lockdown and immediately rented a second, much larger building specifically for gaming space, with the store now reserved solely for stock and shopping. With no big community center gaming clubs left, it's doing gangbusters for them.

    We did much the same thing in one of the stores I worked for in the late 90s, renting a second storefront in the dying mall we were in. That worked very well - the space was dirt cheap, separating players from stick cut shoplifting by 90% despite understaffing, and there were days toward the end of my time there when our gamer traffic for events and casual play must have been more than half the total foot traffic in that corpse of a shopping center. If the owner had listed to - well, everyone, including mall management - and found another space to relocate to he'd probably still be doing well. Instead, he refused to accept reality and went under when the mall finally threw him out three days before the bulldozers came for it.

    As you said, the internet is a better actual retailer than any physical shop can hope to be. To stay open you have to offer something it can't, and so far in-store gaming seems to be the solution. You do have to wonder how long that will hold as it becomes easier and easier to game online, though. Eventually the current generation of gamers will see online play - in any form save perhaps miniatures gaming - as the norm and gathering in person as something aberrant.

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  6. RPGs have simply experienced an alignment change: from Chaotic Good to Lawful Neutral. One's comfort with the change depends entirely on the alignment of his own.

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  7. I have a similar experience with physical bookstores (and libraries). I could freely wander through them (the larger ones, at least) for hours, being enchanted by all the books on offer, and every so often picking one up to read the blurb on the cover (and a few pages within) to see if I might find it interesting enough to buy or borrow to read in it's entirety. That magic has entirely gone; browsing through books at an online bookstore just isn't anything like the same experience.

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  8. I grew up in suburban Boston, and the great games mecca for me was The Name of the Game, a location in Quincy Market (downtown Boston), which was up two flights of stairs in a small but clean and immaculate storefront…and it was packed to the rafters with wargames, board games, weird games, ancillary stuff like magazines and newsletters…and all the RPG treasures I could wish for. From ages 12 to 17, this was the place I would escape to in my dreams.

    The gaming store closest to me was my local Hobbytown, a pleasant chain that specialized in model planes and trains and such, and a small RPG and gaming section that the older model guys eyed sketchily. I bought the Holmes box set there—and Gettysburg—and would visit monthly. But it was Name of the Game that gave me shivers.

    I will never understand people who think of the old shops as just dirty and grimy, best replaced by Amazon and drones. There will never be anything like the tactile joy of exploring shelves—whether they are games or books or music. I will always miss the real, even the random, over algorithms for something like discovery and art. Of course the convenience is wonderful…but convenience alone comes at a cost that seems awfully high to me. Just my opinion.

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  9. I'm from Calgary, my FLGS is still pretty good. It's been around maybe 45ish years, I think with the same owners. It has a lot of space for gaming, although I'm not sure how much it gets used anymore. Although they are doing renos to the area right now, so I'm not sure if that space will be there after the work is complete.

    Someone did a documentary about it a few years ago.

    Clip, talking about "pilgrimages" to Sentry Box: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2Y8hIg06foM

    Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seREqdX75lk&t=216s

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  10. The only one I knew of nearby was in Boise, The Dark Horse. I was almost never close enough to go, and I only went a couple times. I remember finding the OD&D books on display there, esp. one with a transgressive cover, and I felt like I was in some forbidden shrine of occult knowledge. The original AD&D hardbacks were there too, making their contribution.to the atmosphere.

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  11. I have hardly set foot in a game store in the last 10ish years...

    When we go to Powell's Books (Portland OR), I do still browse the game section, but the used game market has diminished quite a bit and the prices have gone up. From 2002 through 2010 or so, I used to get a lot of used stuff there. Not much of a game store feel though.

    Growing up outside Boston, I started with war gaming, and had several shops I would frequent and one in West Concord, one in Bedford (a combination toy/sporting/hobby store), plus Woolworths and other shops for 1/72 model kits. After I got into RPGs, I started frequenting Excalibre Hobbies, The Games People Play, and The Compleat Strategist (plus there was a an F&SF bookstore in the Harvard Square area).

    The browsing was definitely great for finding odd things to buy and just making sure I wanted the latest D&D module (ultimately yes...). The loss of browsing as mentioned above is a huge loss. Fortunately my interest in new stuff is extremely limited and word of mouth recommendations suffice.

    When I first moved to Portland in 2002 there were some great stores that sold a lot of used stuff besides just Powell's. One had a huge selection of used stuff, but other stores did also. Some stores would open shrink wrap to let you peruse something.

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    1. Another shout for Games People Play! Yes

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    2. I never bough many RPG titles there though due to their markup. I did by some 18xx games there (the owner imported early ones from the UK, and probably my Sorcerer's Cave and Mystic Wood games, also imported from the UK).

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    3. What decade are we talking about for these? The 90s?

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    4. More likely the 80s now that I reflect. I dod not know there was a steep markup…they were just cheap enough for a teenager to buy something now and then. Lots of looking though…

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    5. Mostly from 1979 through the 80s. By 1990 I had moved to North Carolina but did still stop in when I was home for Christmas.

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  12. I think a lot of people got into the hobby without ever having a dedicated rpg store to go to; while game stores today cater to a more diverse audience of gamers, I think there are probably more of them now that are primarily devoted to some type of table-top gaming than ever. I mean, my early days in the hobby the only places where I could find RPG material was supplied by local comic book shops plus some things at places like Waldenbooks or B.Dalton. (my earliest and best option was a place that was baseball cards, comic books, plus some rpg & miniatures stuff. but at least they'd try and order things for you)

    To get to a store that was just gaming, meant a long car ride, and some of those stores were dominated by miniatures much more than RPGs. Diversification has helped a lot of stores stay viable against the discounts of the internet, and offering play events of various stripes keeps foot traffic coming in. But I think the store that was primarily or solely RPGs was always much more the exception than the rule.

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    1. Yes, even in the early days, I have never seen a store dedicated to only RPGs. They always at least also catered to board games (and not strictly just war games). Many of the stores at least also catered to miniatures and plastic model kits.

      The first store that I encountered with general gaming tables (Excalibre Hobbies DID have a table in the basement, I was invited once to watch naval miniatures), was in college and their primary purpose for the tables was Bridge, but they also did have some times for other games.

      In college I did start shopping occasionally at a comic store that also sold games (I think that's where I completed my Different Worlds collection with the last few issues after my subscription had run out). There were a couple dedicated game stores in the later 80s, and a toy store with a good RPG selection as well as a few other stores.

      In the 90s in Raleigh, one haunt was primarily a comic shop, but I did play a 7th Sea demo there. Another shop was run by a father/son team, dad did RC airplanes, son did RPGs, board games, and miniatures.

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    2. Yes. I grew up in a very rural, very small town. I don’t think there were RPG books in any of the stores we went to, and only barely in the larger towns where we’d go shopping every few months. I don’t remember where I picked up my first game book, which I think was a PHB. For that first Christmas after discovering gaming, my parents bought me Moldvay Basic, and for the subsequent birthday several months later, the matching Expert, probably at something like a Meier Thrifty Acres (this was Michigan).

      Where we eventually started getting our gaming supplies regularly were my cousins. Their parents ran a five and dime one town over, and after we introduced them to D&D, they convinced their parents to put in a spinner rack and a wall display of mostly TSR stuff (I don’t think there were any non-TSR games, but there might have been non-TSR supplies such as dice). So whenever we went to visit my grandmother, I’d walk over to their store and usually pick up at least one book. I’m sure that’s where I got my DMG and Monster Manual, as well as several adventures.

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  13. There were no small gaming stores near me in the 80’s, so most of my gaming purchases were made at the popular toy and book stores of the time. I do remember, however, spending a lot of time on our annual summer vacation to Sea Isle City, NJ, playing skee-ball at one of the arcades at the boardwalk and winning enough tickets (I got to be pretty good) to get a couple of Avalon Hill games each year.

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  14. Part of the problem based on my personal observations is that roleplayers buy much less product than wargamers, cardgamers, or boardgames. Most I know stick to a few systems, buy the core rulebooks or just the PHB, and maybe pick up a supplement with more player options once a year. They also have very little loyalty to the store, even if they use the space for gaming. We had a local store open in the 2010s that was quiet, clean and stocked a ton of RPG product. Week after week my group and some others would use the space, buy the token soda or snack or miniature and play for hours. It was no surprise to me that after 6 months they cleared out most of the bookcases of RPGs, installed some glass cases for CCG singles, and started running leagues and booster drafts of Magic, Pokemon, etc. The store quickly became loud, dirty, but profitable. We decamped for another location soon after.

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  15. My own experience was that the game store (local or involving a quest to reach) in those days was not especially likely to be a welcoming environment to non-white gamers, and could be counted on to be a predatory environment to female ones. I don't miss them at all. Obviously -- it's not that they were ever "for" me to begin with.

    Regarding the used bookstore selections of old RPG materials, I wonder ~ suspect that the slim pickings might be down to the fan base being especially into collecting and into the internet. So that the materials flowing into used bookstores were thoroughly and quickly picked through and ended up on eBay, or found their way into specialist online RPG resellers. Does that make any sense to anyone else?

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    1. On the used material, oh for sure. That which does show up in used book stores often is priced based on eBay and other sales they can pull up. Many years ago when dumping a lot of my collection, the book buyer at Powells actually recommended a few titles that I try and sell on my own (probably should have just taken what they offered, I still have those titles...).

      Not sure what to say about diversity, though I would guess that The Games People Play would have at least been a safe place for women to shop. But yea, not being a white male shopper was likely to be a problem.

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    2. I won’t attempt to invalidate your experience, but in all of my dozens of years gaming, I have never witnessed anyone being unwelcoming to non-whites or females. Quite the contrary.

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    3. Powell's is such an unusual used bookstore, even in its modern corporate guise :) How many used booksellers, that sly and hustling tribe, recommend customers try to get a better deal elsewhere???

      A datestamp on my first paragraph might have been in order: I was referring to experiences in the '80s and '90s. Since then I don't think I've been in a gaming shop -- partially from those experiences, yes, but also I'd found that I could find all the gaming publications I wanted elsewhere, and also all the gaming groups too. They just seemed unnecessary/an extra step to get my RPG fix. I like the idea of them though.

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    4. As a teen I GM I created an unwelcome environment for a couple girls that posted once. Not my best self…

      As to people of color, I had the occasional player of color but I’m not confident I offered the most welcoming environment.

      In college I did once observe a group of people of color playing D&D that never joined the games club. At the time I had mixed feelings about that but came to the understanding that it made sense. People of color weren’t fully welcome so they made their own space.

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    5. That last one was me…

      And yea as to dates, I dunno what things are like today but a lot of my experiences were from the 70s and 80s, but also more recently. More recently than that things were probably better.

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  16. Growing up in a remote rural community, the only place to purchase gaming items was Wendy’s Hallmark at the Green Mountain Mall in St. Johnsbury Vermont. it was mostly a stationary and office supply store, so had a strong smell of paper dust. That smell still brings me back to buying my first Dragon magazine there in the early 80’s. I used to read longingly the advertisements for game stores in the back of Dragon, but my first actually experience on going to one was on a French class trip to Paris in ‘87 or ‘88! I bought “The egg of the Pheonix” there, which sadly I no longer have.

    After college in the Boston area, I was looking around for a new hobby and was thinking of painting some miniatures. I’d had a few but had no idea where to buy them. A friend suggested I visit “The Wizard’s tower” in Nashua NH. That visit changed my life. It was an eclectic store, to say the least. Musty, clutter, but full of treasures around every corner. The manager convinced me to buy a Warhammer army (around ‘95), and I’ve now been painting lead for 30 years. Many modern stores just don’t have the soul that places like The Wizards Tower had….

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