Archive for category Chapter 5
1. Gamer Zone 3.0
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
The transition from Gamer Zone at Harry & Broadway and the new location on Douglas in the Delano district wasn’t nearly as smooth as it could have been. When the break in occurred, I got a little too freaked out about it, and reacted hastily. Bad idea. Don’t make moves hastily in business. Always follow the following method: Plan, Move, Observe, Plan, React. Repeat as nessisary. If you move too quickly, and without a full plan, you make some seriously stupid mistakes.
Moving from Harry & Broadway wasn’t a mistake, and if moving as quickly as we did was a mistake, I’m not sure. It’s possible it saved the rest of our equipment from being stolen. I don’t really know for sure – there were other options we could have taken in that case, but because I moved hastily I didn’t see them all. It’s amazing I didn’t really fuck things up.
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2. The Neighborhood
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
I said that the people in a business are the personality that people see about a business. Well, the neighborhood determines the personality of the customer base, and personality of government.
Harry & Broadway as an old neighborhood, but by no means the oldest in Wichita. Delano was older, especially the commercial buildings in the area. Wichita, Kansas used to be two cities: Wichita, Kansas was on the East side of the Arkansas River, and Delano, Kansas was on the West side of the river.
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3. Meet The New Customers
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
One of my big fears in moving was that we’d have to start over from scratch with our customer base. If so, we were completely screwed – there’s no way we could even spend as long as three or four months without a good customer base.
The first couple of days we were open were a bit nerve racking. A few people showed up to check out the new place, but not many. The the few started growing quickly. Within two weeks we had already recovered a traffic level that was nearly the same as what Harry & Broadway had been.
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4. The First Big Loss
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
When Gamer Zone got started, life was pretty good for me. I was doing contract work, and The Redhead had a full time job. Contract gigs pay well – $45 / hour, and on top of that I still got checks from sales of my video games to supplement it. We weren’t rich by any means, but, we were at a point were things were really pretty good.
Through the course of The Story of Gamer Zone, contract work was slowly slipping away. More and more of my focus came to bear on Gamer Zone. I didn’t hunt for more work as much as I should, and I was definitely not doing the things that kept me in public view for contract stuff – knowing your available and good at what you do is important.
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5. Dance Danc-OUCH!
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
When we introduced our hacked up Dance Dance Revolution system at the old Gamer Zone, it was met with mixed reactions. Some liked it, some loved it, and some absolutely hated it. But it never gained any serious traction over there.
It surprised me a bit, but, there was an active community of Dance Dance Revolution players in Wichita. Active enough that they kept track of what places had DDR machines, and would travel out of town for tournaments, or just to play on some of the better machines. Cool – nice to have that sort of community in the area.
Problem was, they didn’t like our equipment at Harry & Broadway. What we used were a set of “soft pads”, and no self-respecting DDR player messed with soft pads. For casual players, soft pads were just fine – and I have to admit, as I started getting better at DDR, the differences between soft pads and hard pads and how they affect performance is enough to matter.
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6. The Damned Fire Escape
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
At the end of January, we hit our first big stumbling block. While it was cold outside, we had set up space heaters upstairs to take the chill off. Without a fire escape, the backdoor was closed, and the stairwell helped turn the place into a downdraft kiln. Basically, as the place warmed up, cold air was forced down the stairwell, either outside or into the comic book store. I wouldn’t say we managed to make it toasty, but, it was bearable.
And since it was bearable, we were already starting to pack the house.
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7. World of Warcraft
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
Different Games made different sounds within Gamer Zone. For instance, Dance Dance Revolution make the place sound like some sort of line dancing bar – unless I was playing, then it sounded a bit more like an ape having a seizure. Half Life 2: Deathmatch caused all sorts of yelling and screaming. Halo 2, when played by The Halo Team created a lot of foul smack talk. Gunbound usually caused fits of laughter.
But World of Warcraft caused a completely different sound in Gamer Zone: silence.
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8. Gamer Zone 4.0?!
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
April rolled around, and Gamer Zone was jumping. It wasn’t uncommon to have an employee standing downstairs chatting with people – we were at our 15 person capacity upstairs, and couldn’t allow anyone else in. Having an employee down there meant that someone was there to keep chatting with the customers who wanted in – if someone was there, they would wait around until a computer was free.
While the 15 person limit worked against our profitability, it had the interesting side effect of turning Gamer Zone into some sort of exclusive club, where people would actually wait around outside until they could get in.
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9. An Insane Plan
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
By June I had gotten to know some of the neighbors in the area. Of course I knew the folks down at the comic book store, and with the exception of ComicRelief, they were all great folks. And so were the other people in the neighborhood that I had met.
One group that stands out is The Bookroom. They were a married couple with an idea – they wanted to build a used bookstore, and so they did. And they did a really good job at it. From time to time, I went over and chatted about them, and eventually even did a webpage for them.
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10. The Cracks In My Life
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
The obsession of Gamer Zone has already cost me considerably by this point. I’ve lost a car, and my contracting business is totally trashed, I have no new video games in the pipeline, and there’s very little hope that I’m going to have my home.
Gamer Zone is almost the entirety of my life now – the only thing I have that I do every day that isn’t directly related to Gamer Zone is talk to my wife. Sometimes we just talk inside of World of Warcraft, and sometimes we talk for an hour by phone. We both have cell phones on the same plan, so talking to each other doesn’t cost us anything.
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11. Gamer Zone Heats Up
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
While I complain that Gamer Zone isn’t making enough money to support me fully, it is making enough money to support it’s self fully, and pay at least a portion of my bills and food. And it was growing – the number of days we were at maximum capacity for hours on end were increasing rapidly.
The weather was getting warm out, and of course, Gamer Zone didn’t have air conditioning because of my questionable choice of location. Sure, the location was good for exposure, security, and a host of other reasons, but it didn’t have everything we needed.
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12. World of Gamer Zone, Take 1
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
Mid-September saw a slow return of business to Gamer Zone. The temperature dropped a bit, not a lot, but in the low 90′s we could at least keep the temperature down low enough for customers to start returning. I was a bit disappointed though – they weren’t returning in sufficient numbers to make up our back rent issue we now had to deal with.
But there were positive things to deal with too. While it took a bit longer than originally expected, the very first episode of World of Gamer Zone was scheduled to be shot there on location at Gamer Zone!
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13. Renewed passion
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
Gamer Zone felt a bit helpless now. We were going to die, I was pretty sure of that. We couldn’t persist there anymore, as now we had a reputation of no longer being a comfortable place to be. There were nights that we were back at maximum capacity but those weren’t nearly as common as they were back in early July.
But I continued to go with it. I was on a set of rails, and I was going to run out of tracks soon. I wasn’t sure when, but soon. I figured it this way – if I was going to derail this thing, I wasn’t going to do this half assed – we were going to do it at full steam. There’s always an outside chance we really would survive it, and I was just being overly pessimistic about everything.
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14. The Final Days
Posted by Midnight Ryder in Chapter 5 on December 3rd, 2008
Moving into October signals the beginning of the end of Gamer Zone. Business continued to increase, but, it didn’t increase enough to get me out of the hole I was in. The power to the house was going to be shut off any day now. The Sheriff’s department had served the final papers, giving me notice that on the 31st I had better be out of the house because it would no longer belong to me, it was going to belong to the bank. The papers had been signed on my divorce (and as sick and twisted as it might sound, The Redhead and I went out to supper to celebrate. We didn’t hate each other, we just couldn’t do what we were doing.) And I was pretty sure Gamer Zone wasn’t going to manage to pull of rent at the end of the month.
A sane person would have been crushed by all that was going wrong. An insane person would have probably killed themselves. Me? I’m not sure what I was classified as at that point – I could see it all going wrong, but, I kept going forward, hoping to pull off the next trick to save Gamer Zone. Actually, it was worse than that – I was having a hell of a lot of fun!
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