God have mercy on your soul, for business has no mercy or soul.

– Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr (to a friend when he mentioned the idea of buying a business.)

The SkinnyGeek is no longer the head guy of Gamer Zone.  That job has moved to me.  He’s now supposed to be the Manager.  This moves the headaches of dealing with employees to The SkinnyGeek, and operations and strategic planning falls on me.  This, by the way, is probably the first time ever that I made use of appropriate division of labor.  Most of the time I’ve got a very “I’ll do it myself” attitude, but this isn’t a contracting business or video game development project – this is a public facing business with employees, restocking, and a million and one details.

I have a couple of unconventional beliefs in business I’d like to share.  These are how I look at things, not how most managers look at things:

Success is a team effort.

Failure is a one man job.

Too often people want to take credit for the successes, but place blame for failures on other people in the team.  I mention this for a couple of reasons.  First, when reading through all of this, you should realize that when someone else does fuck up, it’s still my fault.  My job is top man – the people that make mistakes from time to time are there because I haven’t changed their position.  Humans make mistakes.  That’s unavoidable.  The part where humans make mistakes that cost the company money, that was avoidable.

I also mention it because many of the changes aren’t my idea.  But it is my job to act as a filter – the team acts as the US Congress, discussing the idea and potentially passing it on to be signed in for law.  I’m the President – I get to veto the idea, or sign it into law.

This results in a fairly good working system.  Not every idea is generated by the team – lots of them come from me too.  But since we all discuss it, the details get hammered out and more often than not things just one person wouldn’t have considered are discovered and fixed before the plan is ever implemented.

It doesn’t quite make the business a democracy.  If necessary, I can design, implement, and release a new idea / rule without discussing it with anyone.  But it decreases the value of Gamer Zone to the others who have put work into it too.  So when you look at the moves and ideas behind Gamer Zone – realize that sometimes they are solely mine, sometimes they are the teams, and sometimes it’s just one person in the team that comes up with the idea.  But in the end, if an idea is a dud, it’s my fault for letting it through my filters.

I’ve introduced The SkinnyGeek, The Backer, and Myself.  Now it’s time to introduce the fourth and final member of the partnership (for the next year or so – it does end up with a change later).  As mentioned before, The Redhead was my wife at the time.  She slowly evolved into a team member, and at some point that I can’t remember, it became an official thing.

I was VERY happy to have a female on board.  Gamer Zone was a very male dominated setup – the employees, owners, and customers up to this point are ALL male.  The only females that step into the place are mothers dropping off their kids, and The Redhead.

It’s an over generalization to say that all women are detail oriented.  But in business, it really does seem that way sometimes.  The Redhead brought a good eye for detail and appearance to the place.  There’s a lot that we’d miss that she would bring to our attention.

She was at the time working towards her degrees in Industrial Psychology and Sociology – yes, double majoring.  Her psychology of motivation classes came in handy more than once during Gamer Zone.  I mentioned in The Storyteller that I was a speaker at IndieGamesCon ‘02, ‘03, and ‘04.  Well, she almost ended up being a speaker too!  Me, The Redhead, Tom (who’s last name I will hash up horribly, so I’m not going to try.  He, in my opinion, is the smartest person in game development I’ve ever met.  Oddly enough, he’s a lawyer.), and a few others stood around chatting about game development for quite a while, listening to her explain the psychology of motivation stuff in relevance to game development.  She sat in on an informal roundtable on psychology and video games for must have been two hours.  Tom had suggested that the next year she needed to put in a proposal to speak on the psychology of motivation in video games.  Unfortunately, it never happened.

Oh, and by the way – did I happen to mention The Redhead was a GAMER?  Yes, I had landed a beautiful redhead who was smart, funny, AND a gamer.  Yes, you are welcome to call me a dumbass later in the story.  Enough people have already

So the ownership team has changed a bit, and the management structure has changed – 2/3rds of the reason why I considered it to be Gamer Zone 1.1.  The last part was the best thing that happens during this chapter:  we changed the pricing.

It took us a while, but we worked out what we felt would be a better pricing structure.  I can’t say enough about the important of the right price for a product or service.  Too cheap, and you loose money not just because people pay less, but because less people pay for it – it’s perceived to be a service or product of little or no value.  While speaking at IGC ‘02, I told a tale about my pricing on Boulder Panic! 2.  The game started out selling fort $9.00.  I did some upgrades, and re-released it for $12.00.  Sales went up.  I upgraded a little more, and re-released it for $15.00.  Sales went up again.  I upgraded it yet again, and released it for $19.00.  Sales went up again.  Simply put, when it was cheap, people perceived it to be a cheap game.  When it was more expensive, it was perceived as a higher quality title.  Go fig.

On the other hand, charge too much and people don’t see the value in it.  That one’s simple to understand

Gamer Zone was $5.00 / hour with membership, $6.00 / hour without a membership.  Memberships were $15 for 3 months, $20 for 6 months, and $30 for one year.  We had a slowly growing membership base, but man was it agonizing watching it grow like moss on a rock.  And the place was empty frequently – not a good thing.

An empty club or restaurant is a BAD thing.  People step in, see there’s no one there, so it must not be any good.  It’s just how we often think.  The restaurant is a perception of quality, but for a club it’s a perception of excitement.  An empty club is a boring club – why would anyone want to be at a boring club?  And, well, while it’s gaming, Gamer Zone is really just another club with a different focus.

The idea was we could probably grow faster if we always had more people in all the time to drive up the excitement levels.

So we dropped the price to $1.50 / hour for members.  That’s 1/3rd of our original price.  Non-members paid $5 / hour, which gave a way to give a good value to memberships.  We dropped the price, and cringed at what was about to happen – a huge loss in profitability.  We believed the idea was right, but it would have to grow for a while.

We dropped the price by 2/3rds, but no lie, in the first two weeks our profit levels only dropped by a 1/3rd.  People weren’t just staying longer, they were spending more and coming back more frequently.  Within a month we had already returned to our previous profit levels.

That doesn’t mean we were out of the woods yet – we’re back to the point where we’re not breaking even.  But the excitement level went up in the place.   And oh what a difference that made.

I mentioned before that one of the problems that we had from the start was issues with licensing.  Simply put, at that point we were running lots of software in violation of copyright laws.

Most people think “hey, if you bought it, you can put it in the LAN center, right?”  Wrong.  Commercial Exploitation is the term here.  Kind of like a radio station doesn’t just go out and buy a copy of CD to play over the air, and movie theaters don’t go down to Blockbuster to rent or buy a DVD to project on film, we had to be aware of the rights of game developers and publishers.

This required quite a bit of research on some products.  Some were easy.  The first stop for anyone looking at opening a LAN center is a place called iGames.  Ya see, there is no standard for licensing a game to use it at a LAN center. 

How bad is that “no standard” thing?  Well… some games could be installed without any extra work for licensing.  It was part of the package, or only required a letter from the publisher.  Those were few and far between (and often sucked anyways.)  Some wanted a small amount of money per copy up front.  One big name developer at the time wanted basically 10% of EVERYTHING the LAN center did (regardless if we made money on THEIR product or someone else’s product.)  One publisher wanted $5k per game title, plus $20 per copy running on the network.  Per year.  Those last two?  Ha – fuck that shit.  We just didn’t carry them. 

Then there was stuff that sort of fell in the middle.  While people tend to vilify Microsoft, they were one of the better licensing partners – basically, you licensed the XBox, and any Microsoft published title could be purchased from any store and used.  Easy.

iGames rocked.  It was like Christmas around Gamer Zone about once every two months when we finally got copies of long awaited licensed titles like Dungeon Siege II.  Mass installs were done, and we released ‘em for the customers to check out.

Even using iGames, details of each license agreement was different.  The Microsoft license, for instance, was provided to us through iGames.  If I remember correctly, it cost us a whopping $25 for a year of Microsoft XBox licensing, and another $25 for Microsoft PC Games & Operating System licensing.  EA didn’t have a blanket licensing scheme, so you had to license Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Vietnam, Battlefield 2, Madden 2005, etc. all separately, each with different varying costs and rules.  While that might sound like it devalues the position of iGames in licensing, it doesn’t.  It gives you a single point of contact to license items, no need to go into negotiations, and a schedule for when publishers plan on releasing things to licensees.

iGames it’s self of course had a licensing fee.  But you got a lot for your money – sometimes you ended up with promotional materials for free, or some really off beat promotions.  But it’s still more money out the door – $125 / year if I remember right, plus a per month fee.

There was a second licensing option that became available while we were doing our thing:  Steam.  Valve’s CyberCafe program was undergoing changes when we started looking into them (Steam delivered games really don’t appear until later in the story, but, it’s covered here as a way to handle most of this topic all in one area.)  Eventually it settled down – it was a per-machine basis (you created one CyberCafe program account per machine).  If iGames was kind like Christmas, I can’t even describe what holiday Steam was like.  Some days we fired up Steam, and new stuff just showed up.  Sometimes it was scheduled, and we waited, dying to see the game (Half Life 2: Episode 2 for instance).  Steam just ROCKED.  No CD installs, no license keys, no agreements, no extra bills – just the per machine licensing fee, which was paid either quarterly or yearly.  And really, it was fairly cheap.  Something like $20 per license for 3 months (which, with 12 machines, still added over $700 every quarter for us to pay out.)

Valve doesn’t have a whole lot of games – so they also offered stuff from other publishers, including some independent game development efforts like Darwinia (which I played the heck out of.)  And we got, I think, On the average about three new games a month out of Steam towards the end of things.  That’s great – new content is part of what keeps LAN centers alive.

There were three more licensing options.  Since I was an independent game developer myself, I had friends and people I knew in the industry.  Garage Games provided 12 copies of Zap!, and some other game developers provided me with free copies of their stuff.  This of course made me feel good, since I was supporting people I knew personally, rather than just the corporate developed games.  I suppose this is like a radio DJ finding a chance to slip in a tune from a local independent band rather than just the corporate stuff he’s paid to shill.

MMO’s like World of Warcraft added a huge amount of player retention to Gamer Zone, and the licensing was pretty good.  World of Warcraft boiled down to “buy a copy, and install it on all of your machines, BUT – don’t provide accounts for players to play on.  They have to bring their own.”  People played the shit outta World of Warcraft.  I’m not sure how much money Blizzard made just because of us (of course, that would be a drop in the bucket compared to the money they make from the current 10.5 million users they have as I write this section.)  Oddly enough, not all MMO’s were kind to centers licensing – some of them were greedy as hell.  They wanted a piece of the action, no matter if the players are already paying for the accounts.  And some simply wouldn’t allow you to use them at all.  We never had Everquest, Everquest II, Star Wars Galaxies, or a number of others because their licensing terms just didn’t compare to World of Warcraft’s.

There were also some oddball “free to play” MMO’s that we used.  Most tanked at the site.  Two of them stood out though – Gunz Online and Gunbound managed to get a lot of play time on them.  Others… well, yeah, I said it before:  most tanked.

The final licensing bit was free and Open Source games.  Really this ended up be kinda crappy.  I thought adding even more variety to the mix would be a good idea.  It’s not that Open Source / Free Software stuff sucks – I use Joomla and Wordpress for a lot of websites, my FTP program is CyberDuck, and I prefer Open Source software development tools most of the time.  But whenever we added free game to the mix, it tanked.  There was no excitement.  Users had a hard time navigating the often poorly designed interfaces.  They had very little flash compared to the other stuff running at the site.  Yet another idea that tanked.

Ok, to be fair, there was one more licensing choice.  Which was, fuck it, we’re gonna use it anyway.  We owned two Playstation 2’s, and well… we had them, we were going to use them and the games we had.  Unfortunately, Sony didn’t have a licensing method.  Their policy was “screw you, you can’t play with our toys.”  There was some big debate on this – I was against using pretty much anything without a license.  The Backer said if someone did bust us for it, he’d pay the fee.  Nice idea, but, copyright cases are interesting:  public performance can cost $10,000 easily in court, not including the lawyer and court fees.  But, he took the responsibility, and we used ‘em.

Licensing wasn’t a one shot purchase.  It was a gradual whittling away of resources – around $5,000 a year easily.  For a place clearing as little as we did, that’s not a small number.

It also burned a lot of research time towards the beginning, and the team often talked about what we should and shouldn’t bother to license from iGames.

I did… not quite break the rules, but bend the shit out of them at one point.  But I’m not going to get into The Loaner Pile just yet – that’s basically it’s own little special thing that comes up later on, along with it’s own headaches when the place closes down!

I’ve mentioned the neighborhood a bit before in The Story, but I’m going to dive into it again because of some things it sets up for in the future.

Harry & Broadway in Wichita, Kansas is a bit of a slum area.   Far from being the worst or most crime ridden area in Wichita, it’s still a bit rough at times.

I’ve mentioned the Methadone Clinic that was on one side of us, and Junkies on the other side of us.  Across the street is an old strip mall with a Dillions in it and a pre-Vatican II Catholic Church in it.  On the west side of the street there’s a Walgreens and another crappy old strip mall.  Then there’s across the parking lot a restaurant (Don’s – not too bad of stuff) and… a bar.

That’s right, not only is there a meth clinic on one side of us, there’s also a bar right behind us.  The only way it could have gotten worse was if the place was situation right beside a crack house.  But the meth clinic ran on hours that were very compatible with ours – the parking lot wasn’t very large, but, most of their business was between 11 AM and 1 PM, and we weren’t open until after that.  So there wasn’t much interaction between the folks who were trying to reform themselves, and the kids who populated Gamer Zone.  The nice thing was the Methadone Clinic wasn’t labeled as such – parents never knew what was next door.

That brings us to Junkies.  This was a combination second hand store and art gallery.  If by art you mean some sort of pseudo-Native American merchandise.  Things like dream catchers, walking sticks, and painted crafts that were… well, they WERE painted.  There’s no requirement that they be painted well I suppose.

The proprietors of Junkies were some odd folk.  We saw them pretty often unfortunately, especially the daughter (who looked exactly 0% Native American, but tried to act the part anyway.  She’ll also end up showing up in another chapter – I haven’t found a name I like to use for her yet  While we had two bays, Junkies had three bays – so they payed a bit more rent than we did.  

Junkies also showed the sort of craftsman ship you’ll see in the neighborhood – they pained their windows with their hours and marketing stuff.  Hand painted extremely poorly, and I don’t think any of us ever bothered to point out that they misspelled a word.  We just let it go.

Inside was just as much of a winner as the hand painted windows.  Junk piled all over, and sometimes a dog  in the place.  Which resulted in an interesting mix of smells – junk, paint, and dog piss.  Good God.  If you are going to own a business, please for the love of God, take care of it and present it well.  If you’re going to paint the windows, do it well.  Use a spell checker.  Keep the inside of the place CLEAN, and clean smelling.  

We ate at Don’s A LOT, and had meetings over there.  Since Gamer Zone didn’t serve food beyond chips, we  did the obvious and snagged food from the closest place.  Which got us to thinking… maybe we should do something about serving real food?  Hmmm… yeah, I’ll be coming back to this later in the story (in Gamer Zone 2.0)

But the bar… unlike everything else that let us keep a relatively peaceful existence, the bar caused us problems about once a month.  Originally, we were open until Midnight.  Then until 2 AM when the bar closed.  Then we moved it to 4 AM.

When we were open until Midnight, we didn’t run into the bar patrons very often.  Now, I’ll say this – I’ve drank in that bar, and the people that work there are very nice folks.  The gal behind the counter is in her 50’s, but, damn – it’s amazing to see a gal in her 50’s that hot (of course, this was 4 years ago, so, she may no longer work there or be nearly as well preserved.)    But the patrons… sheesh.  No one ever claimed drunk people were geniuses.  

When we moved our hours to 2 AM, we still didn’t really have many problems. The thing was, when we were open until 2 AM, we were still Gamer Zone 1.0 / 1.1 era – honestly, at night it was hard to tell that there was anything back there that was open for business.  But when we moved to 4 AM it was after the Gamer Zone 2.0 era (which, yes, we haven’t gotten to yet – it’s coming.  Next chapter is Gamer Zone 2.0), then we started having problems.

There’s something magical that happens at 1:45 AM – the bars kick out the patrons.  The patrons, of course, are still thirsty.  Now, all bars in Wichita, Kansas close at the same time.  But somehow the patrons hold out hope that there must be SOME place still open at that time.

So they wander into Gamer Zone.  And the question, almost to the last drunken syllable was the same:

“Is this a bar?”

If there was any question that would cause me to totally vapor lock, that one was it.  See, I’ve got a million smart ass answers to questions.  And while serving at the counter at Gamer Zone, I used a lot of ‘em.  Problem is when I’m behind the counter, I’ve got to deal with a drunk person with the minimum of problems.  My job isn’t to be witty then – my just is to just get them the fuck out before they cause problems.

So I’d usually just sigh, and say “No sir, the bar is across the parking lot behind us.”  Of course, that’s where they just came from.  They look at me, kinda waver back and forth on their feet (I’m surprised I never had to call the ambulance because they’ve fallen over and knocked themselves out), and their eyes narrow.  Then they look around, and see people in front of computers.

“What do you do here?”

“We play video games.  Computers, XBoxes, that sort of thing.”

At this point part of them would get bored and wander back out.  Some however, would ask the next stupid question:  ”Got any beer?”

“No, no sir we don’t serve beer.”

At this point, all but the drunkest would have wandered out in complete boredom.  We never ended up with a fight – but there were a few times people had to be escorted out.  I never had too – all it took was to point at the back door, and say “Leave.”  If I use “that tone of voice” people tend to comply.  I don’t think I particularly intimidating, but The Plumber and my niece have both made comments about me being scary looking, and well… if I get stern with someone, they do what I want, so I suppose there has to be some truth to it.

The Dude In The Hat (don’t worry – you didn’t miss anything.  He’s about to be introduced here shortly) had to physically escort some folks out.  

The other problem with an economically depressed area is theft.  We had small amounts of theft from time to time, but, we did our best to stay on top of things – if they guy behind the counter is being observant, theft is minimal.  The BaldGeek and the SkinnyGeek did a pretty good job of keeping their eyes open.  The EmoGeek on the other hand had focus issues.  He’s be so zoned in on a game, I’m surprised that the whole place didn’t turn up missing one day with him still playing Unreal Tournament behind the counter.

Gamer Zone it’s self wasn’t the only target of thieves.  Three customer cars were broken into one night.  The normal things were stolen – you know, pool sticks, stereos, that sort of thing.  The funniest thing was when the BaldGeek gets in his car, and notices the can of deodorant in the middle of the parking lot.  That’s right – the thief stole his deodorant and used it, then dropped it in the middle of the parking lot!  Bizarre!

One night I’m outside smoking a cigarette when I hear a crashing noise from beside the building.  I go around the corner and there’s a guy half in, half out of a window at Junkies shop.  ”Sir.”  He jerked out so fast I was surprised he didn’t cut himself on the broken glass in the window frame.

Now, if you’re a thief, what would you steal?  I mean, there’s a meth clinic on one side of us.  A bar next door.  A Dillions grocery store.  A Walgreens.  Heck, Gamer Zone has thousands of dollars of equipment.  But he broke into Junkies.  

To steal a fucking rainstick.  I’m not lying – he pulls out of Junkies with a rainstick.  An item that is constructed from at most $5 in parts, and sells for $50 new.  You can’t take it to a pawn shop (of which there’s one two blocks away), it’s a RAINSTICK.

He looks at me.  I frown at him.  He looks at the window, then at me.  My frown deepens.  He looks at the rainstick in his hand, then at the window, then at me.  I tensed and ready – his only three choices are stay right there, run like hell, or have a go at me.  That last option?  Yeah, not a wise choice – he was a bit taller than I was, which meant he was going to look like a rag doll as I flung him around the parking lot.

He holds the rainstick out, points at it, and says “Ok, I’m going to put this down…”  Cool – he’s going to go for option number one – stay right there.  I reached in my pocket, and pull out my cell phone.  I finally took my eyes off of him to dial 911.  I could tell he changed his mind from option number one to option number two at that point, as he made a somewhat comical noise as his feet tore out on the parking lot – he ran like hell.

While we were in a bad area of town we did have on cool advantage; if you had to call the cops, response time could be measured in SECONDS.  The patrol base was only 6 blocks away, and they knew we were open until very late at night, so we tended to have officers drive past extremely often.  

In less than a minute the first cop was there.  In less than 15 minutes, they had caught him and were asking me to identify him.  

Yep, for $5 in wood, paint, and nails, the drunk went to jail.

One would think that would have put us on extremely good standing with the Junkies crew.  But ya know what?  It never really changed much of anything, and we barely even got a thank you over defending their property.  I’m quite literally a country boy – born and raised near Cheney Lake.  Neighbors defend and help each other.  And ya also say thank you in the most sincere possible fashion.  People like Junkies are just another reason why someday I’m going to make enough money to buy me 20 acres in the country and move outta the city.

I’ve mentioned it before – Gamer Zone is like the dream job for any gamer (or so they think.  They miss that part where there’s work involved.)  So we had applicants all the time.  Heck, the entire customer base for Gamer Zone wanted a job there.  Most applicants weren’t what we considered to be Gamer Zone material.

Now, I mentioned at the beginning that I wouldn’t have hired a single one of the starting lineup.  But that doesn’t mean I would have kicked them to the curb either.  Good or bad, they put effort into getting Gamer Zone up and running – some more than others.

The only one that had much real potential was BaldGeek – he was handy because he was very anti-authoritarian.  That might not sound like a good idea, but trust me, if you want a good business you don’t want a team of yes men.  You want a couple of people who will execute the idea, and at least one fucker who looks at ya and says “Why should I do that?”  It makes you think a little harder.  It also comes with the downside that sometimes they don’t follow orders when they should – it’s OK to question orders, but it’s not OK to fail to follow them.

EmoGeek… well, he stayed employed for other reasons.  He had focus problems, and failed to think things through quite often.  Under normal circumstances I would have been casting my vote to get him off the island from the very beginning.  But he had an odd sort of handicap - Disorganizational  Schizophrenia.  While you might hear the word Schizophrenia and think he’s some sort of psychotic guy, don’t.  Actually, EmoGeek is a hell of a nice guy for the most part.  It’s just that the disorder cause problems with how he lives and thinks.  He’s not gonna snap and kill someone.

OK, well, probably not.  There was this one time that The Plumber, the constant ass he is, decided to screw with EmoGeek.  Remember, The Plumber is 6′ 4″ and buff as hell.  Not a guy most people want to mess with.  EmoGeek was behind the counter playing Unreal Tournament, and The Plumber reaches across the counter and hits a couple of keys.  

The EmoGeek EXPLODES!  I mean, he went off bad enough that The Plumber was absolutely sure there was gonna be a nice knock down drag out fight in the middle of Gamer Zone.  Yeah… that’s not a good thing.  But that was pretty much the extent of the EmoGeek’s violence – I don’t think he ever did anything like that again.

But because of his disorder, it leaves him in a position where he has a damned hard time getting a job, and an even harder time keeping one.  And he loved the job at Gamer Zone.  While I wasn’t getting the attention to detail that I would have liked, I kept him there.  Everyone should have the opportunity to feel like they are contributing to something, and as a part of Gamer Zone, EmoGeek was doing just that.  And since he’d be hard pressed to find another place to get that feeling, I honestly feel it’s my job as a business owner to give those sort of chances to someone.  He was a friend of the SkinnyGeek, so SkinnyGeek was good with keeping him, and The Redhead held a view similar to mine (though she had a slightly shorter fuse at times, and really wanted to fire him and strangle him.  Or strangle him and fire him.  I forget which order.  But she wouldn’t – she’d talk to me or the SkinnyGeek so that she blew off the steam, and we all took a shot at talking to him again about whatever behavior was inappropriate.)

While we had people working the counter, you’d be surprised how hard it is to cover roughly 12 – 14 hours of open time seven days a week with just four people.  The SkinnyGeek and I took the majority of the hours, but we can’t be there all the time.  So working around people’s schedules to get the counter ran was difficult.

We started keeping our eyes open for people who might be good candidates for Gamer Zone employees.  Most of the time the people who applied for the position just walking in off the street were HORRIBLE choices.  They knew nothing about computers or video games, looked unkempt, smelled bad, or any other number of things.

OK, now, if you’re going to apply for a job, lemmie give you some hints:

1)  Make you application legible.  You’d be surprised how many times we got applications that were illegible.  Heck, even if we liked the person, we had no way to call them back – we couldn’t read the phone number.

2)  At least have a passing interest or knowledge of the job you’re applying for.  If it’s called Gamer Zone, wouldn’t it be a good idea to, I dunno, know SOMETHING about games?

3)  Dress nice.  Shave. And for God’s sake, BATHE.  No really, people had came in and asked for applications that REEKED.  No kidding.

4)  Fill out the application before turning it in.  Another one that I saw more than once – they filled out part of an application, and failed to bother to fill the whole thing out.  Don’t you think a phone number that I can contact you at if I like your application might be a good idea?

5)  Don’t tell me you’re filling this out just to tell your parole officer that your applying for jobs.

So, looking through the list of applicants isn’t really the best choice for finding the right people for the job.  I would have simply taken the application from the applicants hands and dropped it in the trash, but unfortunately there’s a legal requirement that applications that are turned in have to be kept on file for a minimum amount of time.  30 seconds doesn’t count.

When it comes to hiring people, I don’t give a crap about race or sex.  I care about how the person presents themselves.  What sort of worker do I think they are going to be based on that presentation? 

The other thing is what sort of person would round out the team the best?  I’ve said before that you don’t want a team of yes men.  Nor do you want an entire team of contrarians.  Skill sets need to be rounded out – computer people, Xbox players, techies, and even possibly some arts types (BaldGeek was also a fairly decent artist, but oddly enough we never used his skills.)

Next up I’ll introduce The Replacements – those people who we brought on that helped make Gamer Zone’s employee team much more rounded.

I’m cheating here a bit – the new team lineup actually happens over the course of about a year and a half.  But they are all being packed into here as as single section of the story, mainly for convenience.  Plus, it helps to show that “rounding out” of skill sets that occurs when we started taking people on.

And it’s probably just a bit funnier this way too

The first replacement was someone who just walked in to the place one day.  The Dude In The Hat walked in with his wife to check the place out.  However, he wasn’t there to play games, he had the idea that maybe there might be some interesting work to churn up in that field.  His goal wasn’t to work behind the counter, but instead to do artwork.  While the BaldGeek was an artist, and I’m a passable artist with some subjects, The Dude In The Hat was a real artist.  He used to work commercial art at a newspaper and at an art place.  He also had a degree in art, with a minor in videography (oh and that’s gonna come in real handy later!)

I could always make use of a good artist back when I was doing video games.  So I gave him a test – I described my concept for a game character, and said bring it back next week to take a look at.

He didn’t bring a sketch, he brought three.  Not bad.  All of them were good, but I told him “I like the hair on this one, the body of that one, and the TShirt that’s on the third.”  I was completely floored – he grabbed the pencil and redid one of the sketches with all the different details I asked for.  In about a minute.

Holy shit.

I took his phone number and all that, and told him I’d get back to him.  Me, The Redhead, and the SkinnyGeek discussed it – I wanted to bring him on as another counter employee so that there was an artist on tap when we needed it, and to keep him close for when I did need an artist for game projects.  

They agreed, and The Dude In The Hat ended up being our first new replacement.  It wasn’t long before he got a promotion to Assistant Manager, much to the dislike of other employees.  Let’s face it – he just got a promotion and all that, and the guys who were there at the beginning got nothing.  I understand their frustration, but, the guy was just honestly better.

Now you might wonder about the name.  No, he’s not a guy in a baseball hat or something.  He was 6′+ with an odd accent, and wore this very tall black top hat on special occasions or when he was working the counter some days.  With a skull in the middle of the hat, just to make it look even odder.

If you ever met the guy, you’d instantly know who I was talking about – he definitely stands out in a crowd.  The downside is a few people thought he was a bit scary looking and possibly unsavory.  But we ended up keeping him on despite the few people – let’s face it, someone who’s a bit scary looking can be handy.

At this point The Redhead and I were talking about the lack of a female presence.  Now, I said before I hire based on the fit with the team, not based on race or sex.  This is a bit of an exception.  The Redhead took the counter from time to time, but it was on an infrequent basis.  She usually just filled in for me if I had something else going on, or if I was in the middle of a programming one on some game development work (which was REALLY handy at times – she was there studying for her college courses, but, would quickly take the time out to take the counter if I needed it for one reason or another.)

We started keeping our eyes open for a female employee.  The problem is, well… we didn’t even have female customers!  That was the motivation for specifying a female employee.  I always feel it’s a bit sexist on my part to specify that I wanted a female employee.  I always felt better because of The Redhead though.  She’s a feminist.  No, not a feminazi, a true feminist.  I supported and attempted to match that point of view as well as possible.  And if she said it’s ok, well fuck it, it’s ok

The Dude In The Hat ended up being the one to find our first female employee.  A friend of his, BubblyGirl, was out of a job.  She was a gamer (mostly table top games, not video games), had a good attitude, and seemed to fit the mold for the type of employee we were looking for.  She wasn’t a full time employee, but, instead was a stand in when we needed someone to fill the schedule.

Unfortunately, BubblyGirl wasn’t highly lucky.  About three months into the job, she hurt her back.  It became painful for her to get up and down, which is something that is required of the job because customers always want something.  We didn’t lay her off, but, she left on her own knowing she wasn’t going to be able to do the job.  Sad too – BubblyGirl really did have a good customer service personality, and wasn’t afraid to work.

We also decided to give a shot at converting some of our customers into employees.  Mr. Attitude was one of our first.  He was a bit of a mixed bag of attributes – on most days he was a good worker.  He had no problem with the work.  He paid attention to customers.  He did OK with introducing new customers to the place. 

But some days… it just seemed to overwhelm him.  He’d loose his temper easily.  This isn’t an attribute that’s good for a business that’s mostly about customer service.  And no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t quite figure out how to help that out (just like EmoGeek, when someone makes it onto the team, I don’t like getting rid of them.  Work with them, help fix the situation, make the situation workable with them.)

DJSlaughter was, well, a part time DJ.  Honestly I can’t say I really knew a whole lot about his musical style, and never saw him doing his thing.  But he was a nice guy, though he started out a bit unsure.  The first couple of times a new customer came in, well, he looked like a scared rabbit answering questions and doing tours of the place.  But he grew in into it after a bit.

And now we get into some of my favorites that we picked up…

At some point we ran an ad in the Wichita State University newspaper for Gamer Zone.  One of the people who showed up to check the place out was a tall geeky dude we’ll call Tallwin.  

Tallwin is a pretty much the ultimate Gamer Zone employee.  Or so I thought until later.  Friendly has hell.  This man has a future in sales and marketing, in my opinion.  He was great at selling the place when people walked in for the first time.  Things rarely went unnoticed.  On rare occasion you’d see him get tired behind the counter, but, even then he tended to perform at almost 100%.  

The dude rocked.  And to top it off, he was an avid gamer – computers, Xbox, and table top gaming, he played a little bit of everything.  He even had a little bit of experience with troubleshooting computer problems (however the SkinnyGeek could beat him with one arm tied behind his back on a hardware problem, and I could beat ‘em both on pretty much anything hardware or software.)  Gamer Zone wasn’t just job for him I think – it was a labor of love.

One day we’re having a employee meeting, and it was mentioned that we’re still looking for another female employee.  He mentions his girlfriend is a gamer too, and he’s see if she was interested.

So he brings along Unbalanced.  Unbalanced was interesting.  Heck, I’m going to just admit this up front:  if I hadn’t have been married, and she wasn’t with Tallwin, I would have so been after her.  Seriously.  She reminded me of The Redhead a bit – pretty, intelligent, fun loving, and a gamer.  I’m about the pickiest guy you’ll meet when it comes to women (well, unless it’s just about sex – the looks are good enough), so it’s a pretty high complement coming from me.

And, just so there’s no question here:  no, the reason I got divorced had nothing to do with having a female I thought was attractive in all the right ways in the same business as me.  I loved The Redhead with all my heart.  You could have thrown Angelina Jolie naked on my lap with every intent of having her way with me, and I would have just told her I was married.  (But, just to be clear, Angelina, if you happen to find yourself naked on my lap now, I’m not married.  Just needed to get that out there, in case the situation ever arose.)  Infidelity was never an issue with The Redhead and I, and never would have been.  And to top it off, even if Unbalanced hadn’t been with Tallwin, she’s respectful enough she wouldn’t have ever tried that sort of stupidity! 

She had a bit less of a computer background than Tallwin did, but was a gamer.  Unfortunately, she had a pretty heavy load with classes and a “real job” (hey, I was the first person to point out to people Gamer Zone wasn’t a Real Job.  Yes, there was a lot of work involved.  But the pay was absolutely crap.)

She was good at the job – good at selling the place, good at the work, and good with the customers.  Another excellent employee choice.

But there’s one more.  This guy is… well, until I met him, I thought Tallwin was the ultimate Gamer Zone employee.  But nothing matches the Token Gay.

Now, I’m sure there’s someone out there that would object to me calling him Token Gay.  Don’t object.  If I remember correctly, HE was the one that coined the term!  Yes, Token Gay was gay.  Without throwing on some makeup and a dress, I can’t imagine someone who more obviously gay.

I was originally a bit concerned about that – sure, we had dealt with racism (not a problem), sexism (a small problem), but how would customers react to a gay?  I mean, gay and faggot are often used as curse words in gaming.  Would he end up offended and quit?  Would customers accept him, or be nervous playing games attempting not to say and act like normal?

Come to find out, it didn’t fucking matter.   The guy was so good at what he did, that difference just sort of disappeared.  That’s not to say that he didn’t get some good natured harassment.  I harassed him from time to time, The Plumber made LOTS of comments, and so did quite a few others.  That’s OK – he accepted it as sparing matches basically.  And, well, if there were only more adult ears nearby, he’d make comments that were guaranteed to make us vomit in our mouths a bit.  

Token Gay played games.  He wasn’t the best at much of anything, gameplay wise.  But he was the best at the customer service aspect.  He’d look around the site to see what people were playing, and jump in and join them while behind the counter.  Doing that meant that players were never stuck playing alone, and were always entertained.  He almost never lost his cool.  And he had more energy than any five other people in the site combined.

He was just impressive to watch.

I’m going to address something here.  You’ll notice something very intentional – all the original team members have “Geek Names”.  None of the Replacements do.  You might assume the originals are getting insulted.  Far from it.

The Geek Name thing was done with an intent – these are the true original members of the team.  Without them, the place wouldn’t have existed long enough for there to be a set of Replacements.  You might notice that one of the original’s didn’t get a Geek Name.  Patch wasn’t there long enough for it to matter, didn’t contribute jack shit really, and doesn’t get to keep that badge of honor.

Sure, that team wasn’t what I would have selected.  But damnit, without them the place wouldn’t have existed.  They are Geeks.  The TRUE Geeks.  If any of ‘em happens to read this, that label isn’t an insult, it’s a badge of honor that should be worn with pride.  Win or loose, they were the core the got Gamer Zone off the ground, and part of them were there till the very end.  If all of them had a choice, they would have been there till the end I think – unfortunately, real life gets the best of us all sometimes.

I’m probably over stating things, but, I’m hoping that no matter where they original team goes, they always remember what sort of work they put into making it happen, and hopefully learned somethings that serve them well later in life.

So there’s the complete team – well, almost complete.  Two more team members show up as time goes on, but they aren’t employees.  They are friends who attempt to be Angels.  

It’s definitely a varied group.  Everyone filled the niches that the other didn’t get – from my overbearing attitude at times, BaldGeek’s anti-authoritarian attitude, Token Gay’s high-speed customer service that makes you tired just watching him, The Redhead’s attention to detail, and all the other little attributes the team as a whole made up.  Even from an age and demographics standpoint we had a good spread from 20 years old to early 30’s, male and female, gay and straight (and even a swinger in the group), from Christian to pagan to agnostic.  I don’t like everyone to be conformists, and this group definitely didn’t conform to a single mold.  They all had two things in common though:  a love of games, and a belief in the concepts of Gamer Zone.

The Plumber and I were chatting a while back about the differences between the different team members and employees at Gamer Zone.  We were talking specifically about stuff like how they handled a rush of customers, and what they did under that pressure.

I kind of find the approaches and differences a bit fascinating.  Maybe it’s just me.  But this is kind of a quick rundown of how all the employees did things.

First off, there was only one they employees had to say to customers that was universal – the first time a customer walked through the doors, they had to say “Welcome to Gamer Zone” in a cheery voice.  After that, each approach for customer service was unique.

There was a reason for that.  Places like phone centers give people a script they have to follow precisely.  So the employee is more worried about the thing being said, not how it’s being said or the effect it’s having on the customer.  We wanted to void that, so things like how to answer the phone was left up to the person working the counter.  All we wanted was the name of the business said, and the name of the person working the counter.  What order, what words, etc. were all up to them.

We also had something I eventually started referring to as The Walkthrough.  When a new potential customer showed up, we didn’t just sit at the counter and tell them about the place.  We walked them through the place and showed them the features.  

Because the team was allowed to use their own words, they tended to tell about things most important to themselves.  Which is good in a way – their passion for the place showed through much better that way.  They didn’t sell people with a script.  They sold it with an honest passion for the place.

My approach was the “Talk Too Much” approach.  I’d talk a potential customer’s ear off most of the time.  I wanted to cram in every little feature about the place.  Not really a great choice, but I also had an excellent record for converting potential customers into customers.

The SkinnyGeek was a bit like me, but, he tended to be a bit unsteady somedays, and then at the other extreme he’d almost sound scripted.  On days that he was in between those two extremes he was a solid seller.

The EmoGeek and Mr Attitude weren’t good at sales.  The EmoGeek was WAY too unsteady with his delivery.  However, if someone asked about a game he was passionate about, suddenly he’d get all animated and do a great job.  Too bad he just couldn’t translate that into being animated about the entire sales process.  And Mr Attitude just sounded like a script. *SIGH*

The Dude In The Hat had a rough delivery.  It always seemed a bit out of his comfort zone.  He was good with questions, but doing The Walkthrough just seemed to never quite be right.

BaldGeek started out sort of sucking at it.  Then later, he got good.  He was animated, he used a completely different tone of voice than his standard speaking voice, and slightly exaggerated part of his speaking and mannerism when giving The Walkthrough.  I’ve always wondered if he didn’t have potential as a radio personality, speaking with that bit of exaggeration.

Tallwin and Token Geek… well, if you didn’t get excited about the place when they did The Walkthrough, you didn’t have a fucking pulse.  No shit, people who weren’t interesting in video games were still excited about the place after talking to one of these two guys – their energy and delivery was really just that damned good.

Unbalanced.  Hm.  I’m trying to put this politely.  She had a really good delivery (though a bit unsteady at times if she had been working the counter for too long), but if you watched, over half the male customers were watching her extremely ample breast line.  I would bitch about this, but, well, it worked – she still sold customers pretty well.

But that’s just The Walkthrough.  The real fun is trying to man the counter.  Most of the time only one person is on duty.  In the early days, that’s no big deal.  As time went on, things got pretty hectic.  It wasn’t uncommon to have to do The Walkthrough for a couple of potential customers, reboot a couple of machines, answer a question about a game, take payments on accounts, sell food and drinks, etc.  And do it all by yourself at high speed, since no one wants to wait on food, you have to take the payment on accounts quickly since people would only go up there when they have two minutes left on their account (and they didn’t want to loose the progress in their game), and you’re doing this while doing The Walkthrough.  It could get challenging.

Each employee had a different approach to handling it when it got hectic.

Myself I made it a challenge to see how much I could pull off at once.  I didn’t hand people their chips – more often than not I did a behind the back pass or something like that (which, unfortunately, only looks good 80% of the time.  The other 20% I either missed the customer completely, or I’d end up smacking them in the face with a bag of chips.  The customer receiving the chips weren’t amused.  I, on the other hand, was highly amused.  Heck, some days they didn’t realize I was AIMING for the face.  Yeah, I’m an asshole.)  Doing that while giving The Walkthrough was just a bonus – because I could pretty much do it all at once.

BaldGeek did pretty well – on rare occasion he’d get overwhelmed.  And if he did, you could see him “reset” – he stopped in his tracks for a split second, closed his eyes, then opened them.  It seemed like he stop and set a priority list in his head, and started executing it.  The only exception to this seemed to be when one of The Plumber’s kids were in the place.  Somehow they managed to annoy the absolute piss outta BaldGeek, and totally throw him off track.  (One of The Plumbers kids not only annoyed BaldGeek, he made a game of it sometimes

The SkinnyGeek could get overwhelmed easily.  He’s a one track guy – he’s gotta get one job done, then move to the next.  And if it gets bad… well, I had people tell me that sometimes he’d just walk away from the counter and go have a cigarette, the come back to deal with customers.  Ug.

EmoGeek couldn’t do multiple requests.  Period.

Mr Attitude got irritated if he got more than two things going on at once (thus, the name MR Attitude).  I’m not sure how many times I saw an employee who was hanging around, but not actually working at the time step up and help him out.

Tallwin and Unbalanced were almost the best at it – throw as much crap at ‘em as you like, and they could handle it fast and efficient.

But Token Gay was the winner here.  I completely expected to get a customer complaint about him disappearing someday – “Davis, I swear – I suddenly saw him at all places in the store at one time, then he disappeared!”  Cause of death:  Occupying all states in the universe at one time while trying to handle customers.  How in the hell that man ended up with that much energy I’ll never know.  And no – he was overweight, so I don’t think he was a meth addict.  

This of course doesn’t detail out everything the employees did.  It’s just an example of how different and varied the team was in their approach to different situations were.  Heck, we haven’t even gotten to the first tournament where we REALLY had to pour on the customer service and pressure!

One of the weak points of Gamer Zone up to that point was marketing.  We didn’t have much in the way for money to work from, so we had to spend very carefully.  We also had to spend some time thinking outside of the normal marketing channels.

When we picked up The Dude In The Hat, his first artistic task with Gamer Zone was to design a logo.  Originally the Gamer Zone logo was pretty blah – it was a grungy Times New Roman for half of it (Gamer) and a Twilight Zone sort of font for the second half (Zone).  This was printed Gamer Zone green (which was basically the color of the green highlights on an XBox) on black.  There was no logo beyond the text.

I explained to The Dude In The Hat my thoughts on the subject, but, it really boiled down to “just make it cool.”

The first draft of the Gamer Zone “GZ” logo was jaw dropping.  Yes, we tweaked it just a bit till it was perfected, but, it was cool.  Gamer Zone was written on it, but what really stuck in people’s minds was “GZ”.  Now we had something we could market with.

Gamer Zone Logo

At this point, most of our marketing was word of mouth, and through the course of the entire business word of mouth advertising was our most powerful marketing tool.  We made sure existing customers were happy, and we made sure that new customers were impressed by the place as much as possible.

We decided that the first use of the new logo would be to utilize the existing word of mouth marketing channel we had and add a little guerilla marketing tactics to it (if your a small business and don’t own a copy of Guerilla Marketing And Tactics, head down to the bookstore immediately and get a copy.  You may never use a single example he gives, but, it will challenge how you think about marketing and your marketing budget.)  

We printed up 3 x 5 sized handouts, black ink on green paper.  BRIGHT green paper.  Don’t look at a flier while standing in sunlight – you’re liable to burn out your retinas.  The first ones were one free hour of gaming for non-members.  Customers were allowed to take these and hand them out to friends.  If the friend came in, played, then bought an account, the person who gave them the flyer also got a free hour on their account.

Since the members loved playing games there, they were pretty motivated to get their friends down there to play – mainly so they got the free hour when they signed up  

For give aways like that, most people think of “free” as in costing us nothing.  Far from it.  The same players that used a free hour would have also happily paid for that hour of the offer wasn’t there.  So in that respect, it cost us $1.50.  Plus, on top of that, no matter if a player played for free or not, we still had to pay the person behind the counter, pay for the electric, licensing, and all those great little things that make business expensive.  So “free” isn’t really free.  But it is effective, since “free” for customers is exciting!

We also had a handout version of the fliers too for people who walked in but didn’t get themselves an account that day.  Just a tangible reminder for later when they are bored – people easily forget things, so we made sure to remind them.

And of course we re-marketed to our existing customer base.  About once every six months or so we send out a mailer to the effect of “Yep, we’re still here.  We’re still open until 4 AM.  And here, have a free hours to come check out what’s new.”  People that were your customer once are easily turned into your customer again if you remind ‘em you’re there.

The Dude In The Hat did all the artwork for all of our marketing efforts.  He’d hand me a set of Photoshop files to approve, I’d check ‘em out, and if all was well, I’d take them down to CopyMax to have them printed.  We always used the same service every time – when I walked in, Eli knew exactly what we expected for quality, what paper to use, everything.  That sort of consistency is great – I didn’t have to explain the whole thing to some random dorky Kinko’s employee who had only been there three months and would only be there another two at max.  

SkinnyGeek pulled out a good idea – he managed to get us in the Diversions section of the Wichita Eagle newspaper.  It never gave us a great amount of exposure, but we probably got a dozen accounts from that little entry over the course of two years (hey, it cost nothing to be in there, so, a dozen accounts for free is a dozen accounts.)

Since we had that success, we thought we’d give a shot at a newspaper ad in the Wichita Eagle.  For $180 a day, we could have a 2″ by 3″ advertisement in the Entertainment section.  Kind of expensive, but, we ran a couple of weeks worth.  Of course, we also put a “bring this ad, get a free hour (new customers only)” line in there so we could gage response.

WOW.  It fucking sucked.  We’re talking close to nothing for response.

Then we tried the same thing in the Sunflower, the Wichita State University school newspaper.  For about the same price, we were printed three times a week with a larger advertisement size.

That’s where we ended up hiring Tallwin, Unbalanced, and Token Gay.  They were all WSU students – Tallwin was one of the first to show up and check the place out, and we got a decent response from the advertisement.

With the Wichita Eagle, we didn’t get our money’s worth I felt.  But with the Sunflower, we made our money back on it.  The reason is obvious – with the Sunflower we got better exposure (it was a smaller paper, with less room for a ad to get lost.  The Wichita Eagle was a shotgun approach, advertising to everyone.  The Sunflower was marketing to a much more narrow focus – basically, the exact group of players we wanted.  20-somethings with a bit of disposable income, the desire to get out and do something social, and a love for video games.

One failing was not doing enough of the advertisements in the Sunflower – we should have been in there every week until the place was dead.  It’s unfortunate but the truth is it’s hard to see where to spend the money properly when rent is coming up due and you’re short.  Often we should have found some way to skimp on a different bill somewhere, or cough up money from my pocket, and kept moving on those advertisements. 

There was one more newspaper that we advertised with on a more frequent basis:  F5.  I met the guy running the show (and we played Halo until way to late one night at Gamer Zone), and we decided to go with it.  F5 was a mixed bag – it was a free newspaper that showed up around town at all the local entertainment places.  Eventually F5 died a slow horrible death – a pity really, since it wasn’t a bad alternative.  I will state though if I ever meet the movie reviewers, there’s one guy who I always just wanted to kick in the balls for his reviews.  A total fuckwit.  

We ran ads in there for quite a while, and we also were one of the places to pick up copies of the paper.  But the results were very slow – we had signed up for like a six month contract with them, and in that six months we probably only got maybe two dozen accounts.  Not enough to really offset the costs of the ads.

EmoGeek also tried to get us a live remote setup, but that’s when we discovered something:  radio is EXPENSIVE.  No, really expensive if you want to do something like that.  So, we ended up passing on that.  We also had a few other local radio stations drop by and try and sell us stuff, showing off all sorts of demographics and such.  We always passed on it because of the cost, but I was impressed by two different groups.  B98 FM stopped by, and so did an urban focused radio station (and I really wish I could remember the name – this guy gets many kudos in my book for what he did.)  B98 had a slick presentation, and tried to be completely honest with us.  The urban radio station look at what we were doing, what our current demographic was, and told us very point blank:  ”We’re not a good match for you.”  

It takes a lot of balls to be a sales person for things like radio stations and be completely honest like that.  I really wish I could remember his name, as I’d love to point him out as a model of what sales people should be.

In Gamer Zone 2.0 we end up having the most fucking genius marketing idea, and in Gamer Zone 3.0 we learn more about connecting with communities.  I mention this not so much as a tease, but to show that even though we found things that worked, we kept trying.  The stuff for GZ 2.0 and GZ 3.0 isn’t discussed here because, well, you’ll see that those marketing changes aren’t just a change in strategy, but a changes in the attitude of the atmosphere of the company it’s self.  Don’t worry – Gamer Zone 2.0 isn’t far away…

During the whole Gamer Zone run, we always had a sense of optimism.  To us, we were right.  We were the Next Big Thing.  Trust me, if you asked anyone inside the company, we were the future.

The Backer was big on it too.  While he didn’t have a lot of money to work with, he had no lack of ideas.  95% of them got shot down quickly – often it was just because it wasn’t the market we were shooting for, or the crowd we were tailoring ourselves to.   The generational gap was just too large – The Backer was in his mid 50’s, we were in our late 20’s to early 30’s.  The ideas and motivations of one generation in business have little in common with the other generation.

That doesn’t mean his ideas were always unpopular with the rest of the team.  One that was popular from the beginning was the idea we needed some sort of real food service.  Sure, we sold bags of chips and soda, but that’s not real food.  Often we lost customers to the idea they had to go eat “real food”.  Damned traitors.

There was more than one problem with this idea though.  The food place needed to be able to serve more than just our customers.  If we only served to just Gamer Zone customers, we wouldn’t have enough demand and income to cover the cost of installation and operation.  So it needed to have a large enough area for seating, and a drive-through window would be a damned good idea.

Secondly, we had no space.  Gamer Zone was crammed into two bays – and crammed was a pretty good term for it.  We were wedged in between Junkies and the Methadone Clinic.  The Backer came up with an idea – why not see about leasing the end bay from Junkies.  Then we would have one more bay for the food place, and drive through access.  Not super convenient – I would have preferred a solution where customers wouldn’t feel like they had exited Gamer Zone to get food.  I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, and The Redhead though we should go even further, where people are served right at the computer or XBox they were at.  That would be awesome.

But we would take what we could get – nothing about Harry & Broadway was idea, so we got used to compromising with reality quite often.

The Backer decided to put forth the idea to Junkies, and see how they felt about it.  At first, the whole idea was completely ignored – they weren’t interested.  But, The Backer was persistent.  He convinced The Redhead she should talk to them.

Much has been said about Junkies already in here that should give you an idea of their character.  The Backer referred to them as “unsophisticated.”  A number of customers referred to them more along the lines of trailer trash.  This meant any idea not their own was pretty much stupid.  Any idea they didn’t understand was pretty much stupid.

Somehow, and I’m no sure how, The Redhead actually got them to listen.  But it gets better than that – not only were they willing to listen, they admitted they would like to cut the cost on their lease.  Instead of just us taking over the last bay, why not completely swap bays?  We get the three at the end, and they get the two in the middle.

Now, one might ask – why do that?  It’s a lot of work.  There’s one of two reasons, and I’ll present the first idea here.  We reconditioned all the Gamer Zone bays before we started – fresh paint, clean carpets, new electrical, that sort of thing.  While it was done for amazingly cheap, it was also was a major improvement over what Junkies had at the time.

There was no way to do this overnight – Junkies area would have to be reconditioned.  So they agreed they would shut down for a month, and we’d recondition their area and we’d move over there, then they would move back into our area.  Simple enough, though getting everything done and looking perfect in a month might be tight.  We weren’t going to recondition all three of the bays though – only two of them, and leave the third one empty for a bit for a food place until after we got done with the Gamer Zone portion.

The Backer has a lot of background in real estate.  One of his habits is to control a piece of real estate as much as possible.  So to make that happen, he talked the landlord into leasing us all five bays, and Junkies just leases their two bays from us.  Pretty simple, and it guaranteed if Junkies left we had access to all five bays – no idea what we’d actually DO with five bays, but it’s not a bad idea.

Remember that whole thing where any idea that wasn’t theirs or they didn’t understand was pretty much stupid?  Yeaahhhh… they threw an absolute fit.  They told the landlord that The Backer was trying to fuck them out of their space.  He was just trying to pull a fast one on ‘em.

From what I understand, the landlord was sympathetic with them at first, and tried to keep the peace as much as possible.  He explained it, explained why, and that, yes, everything is perfectly fine.  

They would have nothing to do with it – they packed up shop, and left.

Remember I said there were two possible reasons?  The second possible reason was so they could break lease without paying a penalty.  It wasn’t until later, when mail for them would show up, you start to realize there were probably tax problems and bill problems it appeared.   We marked the mail for return, but, it sure looked like there had been some sort of problems there.

Well, Junkies was gone – good riddance.

Now Gamer Zone was the proud owner of a lease on all 5 bays at Harry & Broadway.

Wait, what?!  That means twice as much rent, slightly over twice as much electric, gas, and water.  And we still had to afford refurbishing those new bays with our newly increased expenses.  Luckily, we were the next big thing.  We could just make use of all the newly added space.  We could pull this off.  Right?

Oh boy.

So now we had all this kick ass space to work with.  And not much money to do anything with – it was going to have to be done very nicely, but very cheaply.

First rule was everything was built by us.  There’s no way I could do it all by myself, SkinnyGeek had problems with dust mites (and given the condition of Junkies old area, stuff like dust, molds, and mites were plenty), EmoGeek had asthma issues (so did The Redhead, though she tended to work in dusty areas anyway and just worked to keep the asthma issues managed), and BaldGeek rarely had enough time.  Time to introduce a new character:  Heavy Duty.

Heavy Duty and I worked together at my previous “real job” as another computer guy doing AutoCAD, MMI, and tech work.  If there was a job to be done, Heavy Duty didn’t shy away from it.  If there was something in the road of getting a job done, Heavy Duty would figure out how to conquer the problem, or how to work around it.  And he had nearly unstoppable energy once he got rolling.

Heavy Duty was about an inch taller than me, and pretty muscular.  Unlike The Plumber having a combination of muscle and mouth, Heavy Duty didn’t have a big ego.  He’s one of the nicest people you could ever deal with.

It was decided if we were going to refurbish those bays, we were going to do it right.  We needed to address problems we had with the existing bays, like visibility and fairly ghetto looking furniture.  We kept the black interior design, but, we changed the paint from a flat black to a gloss black.  It kept things from looking so… dingy and dirty.

Heavy Duty set out to do the first screwball task.  The ceilings were acoustic lay in ceiling grid tiles – they were white.  So someone had to paint them.  I did part of them, but the bulk of the job was done by Heavy Duty.

NEVER, EVER think “painting ceiling tiles can’t be too bad – we should be able to pull that off with a roller.”  It doesn’t work that way.  The poor bastard probably invested 40 hours in just the ceiling tiles.  We tried one of those Wagner Power Painters, but it was worthless.  Later on in life I did the exact same job doing construction for a friend – and I discovered if you use one of the big commercial paint sprayers, it’s a LOT less painful.

The counter at the running Gamer Zone bays were manned by SkinnyGeek and the rest of the crew.  I took some hours, but, I needed to spend more time over at the new construction side.  We couldn’t possibly afford to pay everyone all the hours that were being worked, so many of the guys did part of their time as volunteers.  We continued to operate normal hours during construction in the next two bays – we needed the income.  It also caused a buzz among the small customer base we had grown – they were all dying to know what was going on over there, and we weren’t talking!

The layout was going to be a bit of an issue – here’s how it existed before we managed to get a solid layout design for it:

If kept all five bays for Gamer Zone, theft was going to be a major issue.  There were 9 doors to the outside world!  Wherever we put the counter at was going to be problematic, since we would have absolutely crap for a view of the rest of the world.

The solution ended up being simple, but labor intensive.  Instead of trying to put the counter in one room, we put it in two rooms at once.  We tore down part of a wall  Well, actually, we tore down more than one wall in the process of it.

Instead of a counter that looked into one room, we planned out a counter that cut in between the rooms, a half circle that had an excellent view of our most expensive equipment, the computer systems.  We also cut off access to one of the doors, and locked all but the front entrance and rear entrance by the counter, which increased security.

Gamer Zone 2.0 Counter setup

Building the counter was an interesting challenge.  The first thing we did was decide to use something completely different style wise:  it’s built out of Diamond Plate.  So the entire thing looks like one big textured chrome circle.

Funny story here… The Plumber and a friend of his, The Painter, stops by and are watching myself and Heavy Duty start building the new round counter system.  The Painter is making fun of us, saying The Painter and himself could build it twice as fast.

I started razzing The Plumber, and for some reason he popped off “I’ll bet you a dollar The Painter and I can build that faster than you two!”

Oh man it was on!  The friggin’ goober was all set to build the thing – someone was going to build the counter system for me!  No kidding, he was getting all worked up to start when Heavy Duty managed to stop him, and point out the reality:  I was about to pull a Tom Sawyer on his ass, and get him to do all the work for me.  To this day, if I want to make The Plumber laugh like hell when he gets wound up about something, I only have to say “I’ll bet you a dollar…”

Not only was the counter made impressive by Diamond Plate, Heavy Duty and I took it way further.  We jacked the floor of the counter up over a foot higher than the rest of the place.  Instead of putting lights above the counter, we put them below the counter using a ton of light rope and under the counter florescent lights.

Then we put more rope light under the bottom lip of the counter to help give it a “hover” effect.  The effect was amazing.  We never had to worry about someone starting a fight with the person working the counter, no matter how big or small they were.  The person behind the counter towered over customers from a chromed metal floating monolith.  And ya know what?  Never once did someone walk in and try and rob the place or fuck with the person behind the counter.  

We didn’t stop there though. Throughout the entire place we used rope lighting to produce a nice diffused lighting level (it was always just a bit too dark, but, it was still good enough.)  In the previous incarnation, we had already started adopting some psychology from casinos – we kept the environment timeless.  There were no clocks on the wall.  The windows were covered during the daytime to prevent any outside light coming in.  Temperature was kept as constant as possible.  Simply put, when you walked into Gamer Zone, time stood still.

In the evenings after the sun went down and night overtook the streets, we raised the curtains so we had almost exactly the same lighting level as outside.  But the world could see in, and tell that something interesting was still happening there at 4 AM.  The presence of customers became part of our marketing, along with all the cool and interesting glows coming from the inside.

Previously we had been using some pretty scruffy looking tables with cinder blocks for legs as the desks for half the computers.  They were shoddy, but they worked.  This time we did it right.  We built long computer tables that floated directly off the walls, supported on the underside.  The cases for the computers where Chenboro Bomb cases with all sorts of cold-cathode tubes and LED’s in them to light them up.  Above the computer desks we built a second shelf that held all the computers above, giving the whole place a very high tech, glowing look.  The computers now were more than just computers, they were a part of the ambiance.  

The computer desks were done in two phases – phase one, in the East computer room, was just sanded wood with black paint.  Functional, but, not quite as nice as I would have liked.  For the West  computer room, I put to use some skills I learned as a kid.  My grandmother owned a small upholstery business, so I had learned a bit about dealing with fabrics, tacking, things like that.  I bought a number of yards of black matte finish textured vinyl that looked a bit like leather, and covered the desktop with it, then used brass tortoise headed tacks to line the whole thing.  It looked like the worlds longest executive desk, and it felt perfect to play on.  We intentionally mounted the two different desk sets at different heights – the ones on the East wall were mounted lower then the ones on the West wall.  That way, we had the right height for any player size.

Snacks were no longer held on a small shelf on the wall.  On the west hand side of the counter, we built a straight section of the counter.  We cut out the front of the Diamond Plating, and put plexiglass with shelving in it.  Instead of a small shelf, we had an entire counter for snacks and drinks to be displayed!  They had to ask the person behind the counter for snacks, and they were all out of reach of customers – which means absolutely zero theft for snacks.

While the rest of the room was kept dark, we did a lot to light up the snack counter so it looked inviting and organized.  The Redhead frequently had to remind people to make sure all the snacks looked neat and organized at all times, so that it looked more like a movie theater’s snack counter.

For a long time we had struggled with our business model when describing it to others.  Some people likened it to a bar, but, that implied the presence of alcohol, of which there was none.  Some tried to compare it to an arcade, but let’s face it – arcades were dead and gone.  Pool halls were even mentioned.  

But a movie theater.  People understood the idea of paying money and being entertained at a movie theater.  The Redhead’s suggestion of making the snack bar look like a theater’s snack bar gave us some focus on our marketing efforts when talking to people.  It still wasn’t perfect, but it was a heck of a lot better description than anything we had to work with before!

We planned out what to do with the other two rooms – the desks would be taken down, and the two big screens would move into the old computer room.  While it sucked that the XBoxes were out of view of the counter, we would probably have considerably less loss issues on the consoles than we would with the computers.  And, just to make sure, we build a lock box system for them – the console went inside, along with the controllers, and the person working the counter slapped a small paddle lock on them.  Easy, and no loss problems – even the controllers couldn’t be stolen.

One of the few mistakes we made was the carpet.  The Redhead and I found this black carpet that looked really cool.  It ended up being a pain to keep it clean, and eventually started falling apart.  We should have just painted the concrete with black garage floor paint instead.  Oh well, live and learn.  If we ever did it again, we’d fix that issue.

Building Gamer Zone 2.0 didn’t take the planned month.  It took a bit short of two months to do, and was a bit over the planned budget.  I was alright with that – it’s hard to construct a place and still operate at the same time.  We took our time, and we did everything as close to perfect as we could get.  The layout left many things to be desired, we still had too much space (we had one extra bay that was completely unused, and one bay that was earmarked for the food services), and we were still in a economically depressed area of town.

But when people walked in, it now looked impressive, like we had something going there.  The ceiling was black tiles with Gamer Zone green painted on the grid that held the tiles up, giving a Tron-esque game grid feel.  The computers glowed.  People could see the person behind the counter immediately, but could also see other customers having fun.

Heavy Duty and I did most of the work (he got the most shit jobs too it seems), but everyone on the team contributed time and ideas to making it happen.  We all beamed with pride.  One last job to do – we painted the rest of the building outside Game Zone green with black trim, except for the section that was to become the restaurant.  

Now we look like we’re really doing something, rather than a cruddy little pit of computers of little note.