GAME (The Shop): The Definitive Review

Retail Receivership Relays Rare Rewarding Remembrances

When I was lucky enough to enjoy a curry with Jeff Minter, I knew I had to ask him about the time that only the rarefied demographic of late-Boomer gamers can recall, where there weren’t any computers in popular culture or everyday life. Being born in 1962, just two years after the production of the first viable integrated circuit, Jeff’s childhood took place in a world where computers were as distant as nuclear reactors and orbital launch vehicles. As such, they were techno-exotica to be admired from afar, and from that one can easily understand the wild fervour of homebrew in the 1970s once microprocessors brought computing costs within the price range of a car, rather than a house.¹ While not quite as seismic perhaps, Gen-X gamers join the Boomers when it comes to experiencing a time before home computers. Electronics shops existed before we were born, but much like home video rentals, shops specialising in videogames did not. Hence by knowing a time before they were commonplace, we have a different understanding to those brought up with games being easily accessible on the high street. In the UK, there’s a curious twist in the tale, wherein the independent enthusiast shop enjoys a brief moment of exclusivity in the very early 80s. This was before high-street brands hoover up the market, only for them to eventually abandon videogames in the 90s as specialist shops enter the mainstream. It’s here that GAME enters the chat, muscling itself to ascendency to the point where it extinguishes its various competitors, leaving tiny cadres of disparate independents in its wake.

Thus the story of GAME and its final, whimpering demise closes a particular circle, one which the Boomers and Gen-X can claim full experience of. But for me, the nostalgia of 80s game retail is absolutely about the romance of that era and the coalescence of a social phenomenon, whereas the death of GAME feels more like a slow-motion tragedy with grave implications for the future of that very same culture. The dissolution of high-street videogame retail reminds me of the morbidity of the physical videogame itself, for surely its death is closer than we’d perhaps like to imagine. And yet, we allowed single brands to monopolise the high street² in much the same manner as platform holders have steadily monopolised the supply of content for their own domains. Looking ahead, particularly at Microsoft’s thawing of relations with Sony, I find a distinct and almost cruel comedy in deciding to buy Forza Horizon 6 for the PlayStation 5 instead of getting it ‘for free’ on my Series S, but I utterly despise the naked profiteering on digital, seeing prices go up even though costs to distribute have almost disappeared, relatively speaking. Likewise, pointing out the absolute madness of paying top-whack for five-year-old games³ because they’re suddenly on Switch 2 feels like screaming into the void as a mad old man, surrounded by happy consumers consuming things they’ve already consumed, just because it’s on a smaller, newer screen. It highlights the idea that videogame retail coming under the total and complete control of the platform holders is building virtual Palaces of Versailles, a testament to the decadence of the wealthy providers and the fealty of the sycophants blindly and deferently supporting them with day-one purchases at maximum cost for maximum convenience. In essence, a near-perfect capitalist machine. If the platform holders could just AI-generate the games, it’d be game over, so to speak. In this sense, the lone corridor of legal retail resistance is to only buy pre-owned, an act of defiance that itself faces the same erasure should physical media cease to exist.⁴ There’s something of an absurdist joke in CeX becoming the sole videogame retailer on the highstreet, and entirely thanks to it being a reseller. There’s what, Argos? Currys? Places where you, yes you, have the honour and privilege to pay just £90 to preorder yet another fucking set of fucking Resident Evil remakes.

There’s a CeX that I visit weekly and as with most, it’s a place haunted by the implicit misery of the pawn shop and the challenges of the financially-deprived. You have to wonder how much of the stock is there because of lifestyle choices and co-morbidities that represent grand failings of society, of a welfare state retooled into a silent hand of oppression to force the weak, abused and under-supported into zero-hours purgatories, perpetually failing side-hustles and petty crime. The retail palaces of old had none of this, but there’s a flat honesty in CeX that can’t be ignored or denied. You can divine the state of the market by what’s on the shelves. The games that people keep, the games they dump after a week. It’s all there, and in a kind of stark objectivity that no industry news site or retail association report can improve upon. Current-gen Xbox games in the single digits, shelf after shelf of PlayStation 5 tells the stark story of this generation. Switch 2 games in a cabinet, Breath of The Wild still over £35 for Switch 1. The history of the 21st Century is there: the blocks and blocks of PlayStation 2 crowding out the single shelf shared by GameCube and XBox. The dizzying shovelware of the Wii section, the almost 1:1 parity of X360 and PlayStation 3, and the obvious dominance of PlayStation 4 over Xbox One. And also the DVDs, which persist as much the same call to resistance over digital distribution and its hegemonic monopolies in the post-Netflix era. CeX is perhaps the endpoint of retail when platform holders jettison their obligations to long-standing bricks and mortar. Once the discs and carts stop, CeX will still remain, precisely because it relies on the old and discounted instead of the current and premium.

As I mentioned earlier, the almost comedic nature of UK videogames retail being dominated by a newsagent and a chemist in the 1980s⁵ conjures nostalgia of extraordinary romance for me, but it’s not what the death of GAME signifies. It instead reminds me of a second golden age when living in London, single and carefree. Working in the centre, I had a glorious hunting ground that could be covered in a lunchbreak or a brief sojourn on Friday evenings. This is between 2004-2012, from the end of PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox, through to the era of 360 and PlayStation 3. GAME was a bastion of the videogamer’s life, a regular haunt. Earlier in the 2000s, GAME had become the place to go for those Friday releases, to inspect the shelves, look at the newly discounted stuff, then flick through the preowned bins. I’ll forever associate the 90s with Electronics Boutique and our local Software Plus quasi-indie, but the 21st Century was GAME, HMV and Gamestation. From my office in Covent Garden, it was a quick hop to Oxford Street to tour the giant Zavvi and HMV megastores with a reasonably-sized GAME in between them. You could then nip up a sidestreet to one of the original CeX shops, and then off to Game Focus on Goodge Street for imports and even more preowned. This circuit could be bolstered with trips to Piccadilly for the GAME in the basement of Hamley’s and a quick tour of the Trocadero’s arcade, or running the gauntlet of street-hawking Scientologists to reach the basement of Casino, where I spent many a quid being spanked by uprights of Muchi Muchi Pork!, Ibara and Mushihimesama, all to the soundtrack of teenagers trash-talking through Streetfighter Third Strike and Guilty Gear X battles. The death of GAME is the grim end of that glorious era. There’s no Casino anymore, there are no Virtua Fighter cabs at the Trocadero. There are no 2-for-£30 videogame deals in the modern HMV.⁶ ⁷And now I’ve done my latest pre-owned trawl at GAME without ever realising it was actually my last. But then, I don’t recall my final lunchtime purchase of the latest X360 release I wanted, or my eager dash home to marathon the fuck out of it over the proceeding weekend.

If you haven’t noticed, it’s about videogames being part of the outside world, of participating in offline society, and of them having a geographical location that wasn’t your machine’s storage or an anonymous data centre, and the fact that you could find out about them, see them even, without a screen or an internet connection. This was a time when videogames felt integrated into your life just as food was, or clothes, or books and movies. It was about how browsing for videogames was part of the overall experience of leisurely wandering around the shops, which in itself could be a lovely social pursuit with like-minded friends. And it was in that kind of experience where the eternal golden braid back to the 80s held its link. There were times with the 8-bits where I’d do just the same on occasional Saturday mornings when I’d saved up the pocket money, bussing into town to pick up a new arcade conversion, or a Last Ninja, or some grand compilation, to blow the whole weekend playing. That cycle, that specific ramp of anticipation, acquisition, access was the behavioural loop I enjoyed for decades, and one that now seems to be gone without any of us really noticing. In its extinction lies an inevitable change in the culture itself, much like how the death of the videogame magazine and more recently, the videogame website, has fundamentally altered the culture of anticipation, confirmation, reflection and critique. There was an interplay between media and retail that mutually funded and supported each other, and for the consumer, it provided the skeleton upon which a culture could thrive. None of this is to paint GAME as some kind of heroic good in the machine of the videogames industry. It was as nakedly capitalist and exploitational as the platform holders, but by virtue of its existence it at least held particular balances in place. There are plenty of stories of greed, weirdness,⁸ stupidity⁹ and incompetence to contrast the passionate ambassadorial assistants that introduced naïve kids to superb games, or informed parents wisely, or kept some pre-owned gem under the counter for you. But all in all, the mere existence of GAME as a place for people to go to because of games contributes to the culture in ways we’ll only be able to estimate once the full repercussions of its loss can be felt. Already in this post-retail, post-print wasteland, we have morally-questionable, affluence-baiting boutiques like Limited Run Games. Concerns whose largesse and ostentation matches the coffee-table journals that while delightful and meaningful, are nonetheless luxury items for those privileged enough to afford them. Great and valuable as the output may be, they can never redress the social loss the culture has already had to bear.

The populist democratisation of videogaming, which high street retail fostered for 40 years, seems under a new kind of threat as physical sinks into a luxury pursuit for those who have enough disposable income to participate. That failed Service Game push by Sony and the likes of Ubisoft et cetera was the harbinger of what corporate wants for the masses, and perhaps will rise again - F2P platforms that can be microtransacted for decades are actually what the profit motive would prefer. Under the constraints of late-late-stage capitalism and fascistic governments serving billionaire oligarchies, perhaps a mild investment in some Service Game or other will be all that the populace at large may be able to afford. As such, our last line of resistance is to abandon the day-one digital download and just frequent CeX until what you want emerges on its shelves. But, of course, the size of the modern AAA biggies often outstrips BluRay capacities, and that’s not a trend that’s likely to reverse. Even though flash storage is demonstrably cheap enough to be economically viable at scale for physical console games, the fact that the PlayStation 5 generation was still on disc shows how much Sony is milking the last drops of its investment in BluRay plants, rather than how eager it is to transition to solid-state storage for individual releases. With the next generation’s storage options still unclear,¹⁰ we can perhaps begin to prepare for CeX’s grand unified catalogue of possible purchases to move closer to the finite, closed list. The fact that of the approximately 62 available titles from this list of the Switch 2 catalogue, only 19 - a third - have the full game on the cart should be a sobering realisation, particularly as it unfolds in cohort with collapses of videogame retail and media. Even though it laboured too long as a comatose brand under the Mike Ashley zombie universe umbrella, the final nail hits with real resonance. The death of GAME is an omen of a fundamental change in terms of consumer freedom, just as much as it marks the death of a long-beloved part of our videogaming culture.

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1. Interestingly, a similar drop in expense happened in the 1980s with music technology. Cheaper, digital synths like the Yamaha DX-7 and samplers like the Ensoniq Mirage and Akai S900 fell into the car price range and as a result, changed music forever.

2. More accurately, we allowed online retail and supermarkets to leapfrog the specialist videogame shops. The watchword being convenience, namely that which sees digital rise to prominence over physical. I can’t forgive myself for buying too much from Tesco because it was easier and quicker than going into town, so I accept having Tesco pull away the videogame rug as a fitting punishment. (Also Tesco sold me Ghost Recon Breakpoint for like a tenner or something so I got plenty of fucking value out of the bargain).

3. Cyberpunk 2077 debuting at £69.99 on Switch 2 should be considered an outrage. And yet people fucking bought it. At that fucking price. We all deserve this fate, together.

4. There remains, as always, the forbidden path of piracy. If things get much worse, then the moral imperative will be to jailbreak your machines, pirate the games and demand that every single developer has a Ko-fi account. Then an aggregating app can take your payment and distribute it directly and fairly to the people who made the game. The fact that is technology exists and can be implemented right fucking now, and yet we don’t actually do this instead of paying assholes to eventually fire those developers after years of work, should outrage you as much as Switch 2 Cyberpunk 2077 being SEVENTY FUCKING QUID.

5. Not kidding - Boots, a pharmacy and WH Smith, a magazine, books and stationary supplier were the two best UK shops for videogames in the 1980s. In those days, I longed for Boots and WH Smith vouchers for Christmas and birthday presents, as £10 was a ticket to joy and discovery, with added comics and Airfix kits.

6. A truly legendary tradition of the Merrineum (ref. Cabourn-Smith, Margaret) between Christmas and New Year was the HMV 2-for-£30 deal. HMV would update the stock for the Boxing Day sale, and with a week off to indulge, this was how I got through Resident Evil 4, Metal Gear Solid 3, Borderlands, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, Project Sylpheed, Project Gotham Racing 4 and a host of other hugely significant games. A glorious time to be a gamer.

7. Incidentally, there is something faintly miraculous in HMV's rebirth by surfing the wave of goodwill for physical media, but there's a sense of far too much stock and far too few customers for it to feel like it can genuinely last. And there aren’t anywhere near enough videogames there. Are there more gaming t-shirts than actual games? I THINK SO.

8. Of particular note is this anecdote, by one J. Richardson, London : “I sold a Wii U and later a 3DS to finance my PSVR one purchase once I’d found the charger for the latter. They took the Wii U straight off me and just plugged it into a TV to make sure it worked and gave me store credit. When I took the 3DS in I was expecting them to check it on the spot and the guy was like “no, it takes 48 hours to test it” or something and stressed that the last guy shouldn’t have done what he did and he was going to have to report him to the manager and I was like “there’s no need for that, it’s all good” and he was really insistent and suggested he was somehow doing me a favour by grassing up his colleague. I said “don’t be a dick, there’s no harm done” and he said “you can’t call me that” and I said “I didn’t, I said not to be one” and he was like “well I’m doing it so you have” and then we stared at each other for a moment and I left. Went back into get my PSVR a couple of days later.”

9. once bought a copy of Ico from the preowned bin, only to find out once I got home that some dick had scrawled "PREOWNED" in permanent marker across the back cover. It was the uncoated cardboard box version.

10. Let’s be clear here. Flash storage can go as low as £1.20 for 64GB micro-SD cards at wholesale, so for platform holders they’re absolutely viable as storage media. Particularly now flash can be found in the 1TB range. The use of discs is absolutely a choice forced upon us, as is the conceit of demanding discs be in the drive. The more we surrender to platform holder monopolies, the less control we have. There was a time when legislation and retail could have forced platform holders into a fairer deal for all of us, but that time is now truly gone.