Tag / Shops

by Moreau Vazh

SWR: Games People Play

Shrink-Wrapped Recall – An occasional series about memories of old game shops. The rest of the series can be found here.

Tip of the hat to the Duke Mitchell Film Club for sharing this image.

It is fascinating how some memories rise effortlessly to the surface while others lay buried.

One of the reasons why I decided to start writing about old game shops was that I have a very clear memory of the first time I visited the Virgin Game Centre on New Oxford Street. I can remember getting the bus all the way along Oxford Street, I can remember wondering why all the interesting games were hidden on a mezzanine, and I can remember the face of the friend who took me there as I headed back home. I would say that I was probably around 14 when this happened.

Having written about all of the game shops I visited most frequently, I started casting my mind around for other places I happen to have bought games. I can remember visiting a horrible shop in Paris, a lovely shop in a shopping centre in Brussels, and a shop in Lausanne by a set of steps that seemed to appear just as I thought ‘wow… this would be a great place for a game shop’. I would love to write about these places as I do have some memories of them but I can’t quite remember their names. Then I was struck by another memory, a memory of being taken to a game shop in Notting Hill years before I had ever encountered even the concept of an RPG. I pulled on the thread and yanked free a number of images but I couldn’t remember when or why I had been to this place.

Then it started to fall back into place.

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by Moreau Vazh

SWR: Orcs Nest

Shrink-Wrapped Recall – An occasional series about memories of old game shops. The rest of the series can be found here.

One of the nicer things about living with the internet is that it is now a lot easier to work out how to get to someplace new. For example, I recently learned of the existence of a game shop about thirty five minutes from my home and the first thing I did was to get on Google Maps and have a look at the address on street view. Does it still exist? Is there nearby parking? Is it accessible by road? Would it take me the best part of a day to get there? Yes, Yes, Yes, and No.

Before the arrival of the internet, it was almost impossible to answer any of these questions before setting out. If you were well-organised and careful, you might track down a map of the local area or look into the public transport routes , but more often than not you would just get yourself to someplace close to your destination and then wander around until you encountered either a map or someone who knew the location of the shop. I remember once learning of the existence of a game shop in Hammersmith and spending about three hours looking for the place only to discover that, while it had once been ‘around the corner’ from the original Games Workshop offices, its relationship to the gaming hobby had become somewhat attenuated over the passage of time.

This is why, despite becoming a regular visitor to the Virgin Game Centre within months of getting into RPGs, it took me literally years to find my way around the corner to Orcs Nest on Cambridge Circus.

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by Moreau Vazh

SWR: Virgin Games Centre

Shrink-Wrapped Recall – An occasional series about memories of old game shops.

(Tip of the hat to the Duke Mitchell Film Club for unearthing this advert)

The history of roleplaying games is inescapably post-apocalyptic. Anyone who knows anything about the origins of the hobby will have heard about early editions of D&D breaking through to the mainstream, becoming a fad, finding their way into every American shop, and eventually turning up in the opening scene to ET. We all know this history, we carry it within us.

The strange thing is that (despite dealing with different people, different places, different times, and different economic conditions) every subsequent popular history of RPGs seems to have maintained that post-apocalyptic vibe. We are always surveying the ruins of a collapsed empire or an imploded boom.

That post-apocalyptic vibe was also present the first time I went to a shop to buy an actual RPG. The shop in question was a local chain bookstore and while they did carry a load of gaming materials, they were all stacked on top of a shelving unit and you had to borrow a stool to get anywhere near them. I remember my friend scratching his head and muttering that the last time he had been there, the D&D books had had an entire section to themselves.

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