Archive for category Chapter 4
1. Gamer Zone 2.1
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 4 on November 28th, 2008
When Gamer Zone started, there were three Captains of the ship. Myself, The SkinnyGeek, and The Backer. Then we added another Captain, The Redhead. Somewhere along the line I promoted myself to Admiral of the ship, and well, no one really resisted.
Yes, I’m a controlling jerk. About any situation I step into I end up promoting myself to whatever Alpha Male position there is, even if it means knocking someone else off. And no one ever really seems to mind. It’s just a thing.
But now the ship as an Admiral, and no Captains – The SkinnyGeek has left to find other seas to plunder, The Redhead has left on a life raft headed for the first safe haven, and The Backer has transfered his attentions to another ship.
It’s time for a some field promotions.
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2. Counter Strike… duuude…
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 4 on November 28th, 2008
When we got our Valve Cyber Cafe license, it expanded the number of games we had considerably. Most of the games didn’t see a whole lot of play time – Half Life was pretty old, Team Fortress was just as ancient, and a ton of the games that shipped on it initially were just modifications of Half Life.
But Counter Strike got popular on the site quickly. And this brought in one of the strangest groups that ever played in Gamer Zone: The Counter Strikers.
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3. A Day In The Counter Life
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 4 on November 28th, 2008
I’ve said a number of times that working behind the Gamer Zone counter wasn’t all fun and games. Some days it was a whole lot of work.
I was at a business meeting recently with a customer, and they had discussing that the solution to their inventory problem was going to be to open a storefront gallery, and store all the inventory in the back. People do that a lot – it’s easy to underestimate how much work goes into something as simple as, in their case, a gallery, and in the case of The Story of Gamer Zone, a LAN gaming center.
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4. Are You Ready For Some (Madden) Football?
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 4 on November 28th, 2008
Big Money wasn’t planning on Halo being his only tournament game – he diversified, both in game style and audience. The second tournament was for Madden 2005.
Once again, Gamer Zone gets a big marketing push from Big Money – this time not only do we get to give away $5,000 and the marketing bump that comes from all the posters and announcements, we also get to go to The Big Boys Toy Show for the finals.
[pay]
Big Money’s first tournament had been a success – but a bigger success than Gamer Zone could handle. There were just too many people there at once, and if this one was any larger than the last we wouldn’t even be able to keep all the players in the building at one time. So this time he did things a little different.
Instead of the tournament being done all in one day, there were three qualifying rounds, each held on a different weekend. That way, as the theory goes, people could come in and qualify on one of the weekends, and the winners went on to play in the final games.
The reality ended up being different. I can’t tell you why the change, but, people just barely trickled in. The turnout for Madden 2005 wasn’t nearly as good as it was for Halo 2. On week one, we had ten players. Week two we had three. Week three we had another fifteen. It probably would have been best to just have two weekends instead of three, but, this was a learning process.
The spreading out of players also helped out Big Money. In the Halo 2 tournaments, he had to rent some equipment (actually, he just got a local rent to own company as a sponsor – but you still had the hassles of delivery and pickup of equipment, and the “what if something happens to the equipment” factor), but without the big crush of people, you could do the tournament all on Gamer Zone’s equipment.
The way things worked out, each week ended up producing three finalists that went on to play at The Big Boy’s Toy Show.
The Big Boy’s Toy Show is one of those public conventions where everyone shows up to look at cool trucks, guns, boats, grills, and all things “manly” that could be purchased on a credit card. It was held at Century II, and the place was huge. Big Money pulled in equipment for that – the two big screens for Gamer Zone wouldn’t have been quite impressive enough, and we wouldn’t have had the ability to run through the tournament as quickly as we wanted to.
It was… anti-climatic. I had really hoped to see some big crowds hanging around, checking out the big screens and watching the games going on. It really wasn’t that way. In fact, playing games at Gamer Zone was a heck of a lot more interesting. It just completely lacked any sort of spark.
We had a table there with Big Money, and handed out fliers and talked with the people who did show up, but, we probably printed 500 fliers, and gave away about 100 of them.
I’m not sure what the magic formula was for the Halo tournament, but the Madden 2005 tournament completely lacked it. I wouldn’t call it a waste of time, but, it sure wasn’t worth the effort that Big Money put into it. For us though, well, it was free exposure, even if it wasn’t to as large of a group as we had hoped.
[pay]
5. Enter The Other Redhead
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 4 on November 28th, 2008
I’m pretty selective about who I call friends. These days I don’t have a ton of friends – I’ve lost touch with a lot of people, but those that I have are the friends I found to be the most faithful, most caring group of people you could ever find. They also tend to be rather… odd.
A good example of this is The Other Redhead. I had known him for years from gaming and parties. This guy, by the way, is the world record holder for “longest backwards drunken stumble”. We could never get it confirmed with Gennis, but, trust me, it was impressive.
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6. Gaining Steam
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 4 on November 28th, 2008
Licensing and getting in new games was always important to the survival of Gamer Zone. We did our best to try and get new games all the time, but we really had to make that balance between getting new stuff just because it was new, and getting new stuff because we would make an appropriate level of profit from it.
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7. Death Of The Competition
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 4 on November 28th, 2008
We had only one competitor in town in the field of LAN gaming. Out side of our direct field, any entertainment business was a competitor – we all worked at gaining access to the same pool of discretionary spending funds that people spent on entertainment.
As a gaming center, CrossFire was the most direct in town for us. The truth is, they really weren’t. While both companies did LAN gaming, we both took very different approaches to the subject.
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8. The Final Tournaments
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 4 on November 28th, 2008
Big Money had spent a lot of money and effort on the first round of tournaments that were held at Gamer Zone, and was already looking at what it was going to take to improve the profitability of the situation. He needed more players, and less expenses.
So, the first thing to change was dropping the prize money – now it was $2,500 grand total in prizes on each tournament, rather than $5,000. And since the Halo tournament went so well the first time, it was time to try it again.
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9. My Building is WHAT?!
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 4 on November 28th, 2008
In stories, people always look for a bad guy. This is a story about business, and the activities that happen between businesses sometimes makes one of the businesses involved look like a bad guy to some people. They aren’t. In business, the only bad guys that truly exist are the individuals that try and intentionally disrupt your business. For instance, the guys who broke into CrossFire and wiped them out? Those were bad guys. The folks that show up later in this story and try and intentionally disrupt Gamer Zone’s business? Those are bad guys.
People forget how business works sometimes. If you own a business, you have a responsibility – you must make money. And just like parents must feed their children, businesses have a responsibility make enough money to pay their employees, so their employees can feed themselves and their children.
There are companies out there that take this too far – sometimes I would consider them bad guys, sometimes not. Some of them fall in the category of people who are out and out thieves, doing everything they can to take what’s yours. Some of them though, take it too far, but only because their situation appears to require it.
Having said that, The Landlord isn’t a bad guy. But if you would have asked me at the time, I would have sincerely told you I wanted to kick his ass up between his shoulder blades.
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10. Changing Again
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 4 on November 28th, 2008
The first time I saw the possible space for Gamer Zone, it was completely trashed. That was the best way to describe it. It was in one of the oldest existing buildings in Wichita, Kansas, and the upstairs hadn’t been maintained at all. Plaster was falling off the ceiling. There was almost no lighting. The floors had a couple of holes large enough to step in. It was dirty. And it was completely filled with someone else’s stuff that was being stored.
I’ll say it again: a sane man would have just closed the doors rather than do what I’m about to do. But the demon that was Gamer Zone had me completely under it’s control.
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11. In For A Penny, In For A Pound
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 4 on November 28th, 2008
Most of the original team is gone now. SkinnyGeek and The Redhead are off elsewhere, and The Backer is distracted with other things. So there wasn’t as large of a planning committee as there would have been had we moved Gamer Zone much earlier in the story. This left most of the planning of Gamer Zone’s new location up to myself and Heavy Duty. By no means was every idea ours – some of it built on previous ideas from the current Gamer Zone incarnation – but the bulk of it falls to the two of us. In fact, Heavy Duty and I worked so much as a team on the design, I really couldn’t tell you which idea was his or mine.
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12. The End of Harry & Broadway
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 4 on November 28th, 2008
As soon as we had a plan, Heavy Duty and I started in on the new location. The Dude In The Hat took over the Harry & Broadway store on a nearly full time basis, and all the employees kicked in to help him out. I didn’t work the counter much – all my focus was on the new place.
The first task was still to get the place clean. The Doctor told us over and over that he was going to get the stuff moved out for us, but nothing ever happened. One day, my patience wore thin – nothing had moved, and I was sick of it. We couldn’t move forward because of that crap. So, we took one of the front rooms that was almost empty, and we packed it as neatly as possible, floor to ceiling on shelves that had been setting in the main room.
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