Back in late January of 2020, I was in the car with my mom after finishing a tutoring session. I had twenty more dollars to my name, and while talking to my mom, she mentioned a store downtown I hadn’t been to in a long time, not since I was in elementary school. We drove over to a small brick store next to a Cajun-style restaurant and walked in. I was hooked immediately. The store had rows of video games, and I walked through the store, and I bought some NES games and a console for them. I don’t know how I summoned the courage to ask, but I asked the man behind the counter if I could come in and help out sometimes, and to my surprise, he said yes. I don’t think he fully expected me to actually come in, but next weekend, when the store opened, I walked through the door, and I proceeded to come in and help for roughly 5 years. The store was iDaGamer, and the man was Neal Bryant, the owner.
iDaGamer was my first job ever, and it taught me a lot about having a work ethic, showing up on time, managing a schedule, and school. In the early days of working there with Neal, I ended up doing a lot of what he called “Grunt Work.” None of it was hard, really, or laborious, but it was boring, and long tasks that needed to get done. That included alphabetizing shelves, taking out the trash, going through the bins and bins of items that were in the backroom and coming up with some sort of organization system for it, testing systems and video games we would buy, looking up prices, and putting out price tags, etc.
I thought at the time it was a test; is this kid really going to sit through and do all these random tasks that I ask him to do? Is he willing to put in the work? Does he want to help me, or is he just looking for free stuff?
In a way, it was a test, a test of whether I was a trustworthy teenager/potential employee, and my first real taste of getting to work for him as an employee was about March 2020. Lock downs had started for COVID, so the shop was closed, and I remember being concerned that something was gonna happen to the store. So in an effort to try and be useful, I asked Neal what I could do. He looks at me and points to a tote of Xbox 360 games, about 300 of them, and goes, “If you’ll test this tote of games, I’ll give you a GameCube for the work.” So I took that tote home, and I tore through the testing. I sat at my desk for hours making sure each game booted up, and I put sticky notes with notes about each one on the case. I was meticulous; I wanted to prove to him I did a good job. So, when I returned a few days later, he looked at me holding the tote of games, each labeled telling him if it was good or bad, and gave me the GameCube.
From that point on, I would come in during the lockdown and help organize and test anything Neal asked me to work on. I finally had my first real job, and it was at a game store, nonetheless. I was in love with that job, and those early days are memories I look back on often. A lot of the time, it was just me and Neal working upfront, where we would order some food, and he would rag on me, joke with me, tell me stories about his life.
And I ate it up, I loved every second of being there in the store, and the customers that would come in. Through the years of working there, that was my favorite part: The customers. Everyone had a different story, and everyone had a favorite game or system to play on. They would ask questions about what I thought of pop culture moments, and I could ask them which game in a series was the best to try. Many of these conversations live with me in a way that has influenced how I work and how I connect with people on a daily basis. Working the counter at that store taught me more than I can put into words; more than what I can describe in a blog post.
Neal’s focus on the store was community first. How he would describe the store is imagine it’s like going to your buddy’s mom’s basement to play video games together. That was always met with laughs, but it was a pretty accurate statement. Anytime you came into the store, you could see or hear people playing on free-to-play arcade machines, playing on the hooked-up consoles on the TVs, or on the couch watching a show or playing a video game on a system they brought with them. It was a place where you weren’t immediately expected to pay for something; it was a community-driven location, a place where you could just hang out and have a good time because everyone was welcome.
Throughout the years, more people would show up and become our regulars. Then those regulars would start coming in and hanging out with us at the store, and they became what Neal called “The Adopted.” “The Adopted” became my friends and found family. It provided an escape for me during times of my life when I struggled, and to this day, I am still friends with most of these people. I have made some truly beautiful friendships through iDaGamer, and without the opportunity to meet these people in my life, I would not be who I am today. My career path would be different as well; I would have never picked up the skills I learned that would shape the foundation of what I want to do for a job. I would have never looked into what repairing and recovering data looks like, or even what repairing electronics looks like in general, be it physical repair or more software-related fixes.
The store eventually moved to a bigger location, and I remember getting to tour the empty place and see what it was going to look like. When the store was fully moved in, they had a ceremony, and the new iDaGamer store was ready for business. In this new store, it became tradition for the friends I met there to hang out on Saturdays. They would show up during my shift, I would talk with them while they hung out until it was time to close, and then I would lock the door, and we would play Smash Bros or Mario Kart and make our Walmart trips to get snacks for the night. Neal would stay up front some nights and play on his PS5, or knock out some late-night repairs. We would sit up front with him and talk about our lives, jokes, and whatever came up in conversation. He would leave, and we would hang out for a little longer, and then I would turn off the lights, lock the door, and go home.
At this point, I was getting ready to go to college. I was in my last summer and year of high school, and I helped as much as I could during this timeframe. Neal and I would have long talks where he would ask me what my plans for my future looked like. During these talks, he mentioned that there will come a time in my life when I will have to leave the store, that despite it all, I cannot take the store with me through my journey of becoming an adult. This used to deeply upset me. I couldn’t picture a time when I wouldn’t work/go to the store. I had been there for so long with Neal and his family. At that point, it had been 3 or 4 years of me working with Neal, and I had grown up in that store. But the time came around, I graduated, and the very same store that I loved closed early that day to make sure that Neal would be there for my graduation. He posted a cheesy picture of Mario and Luigi wearing caps and gowns, and sure enough, he was there for it.
I went to college, and I would come home and regale him with my life over there. I would talk about friends, the jobs that I would start, and the struggle of being a college student. The store was always there for me to return to. I made a point that almost every time I came home, I would visit Neal and the store, just to be back and see everyone and hang out. It’s this reason that it hurts to know I won’t be able to come into the store now that it is closed. It was such an impactful part of my life.
Neal is right. I’m not going to be able to take the store with me everywhere I go; things like that do not always last. What will last is every connection and every moment that was had in that store. All of my memories from the store I’ll still have, and all the people who would become my friends from the store are still my friends. That store meant a lot to me, and it meant a lot to other people as well. So if you ever went in, thank you; you contributed to building a wonderful community. Thank you for taking the time to stop by and visit a store tucked away in a corner. In some way, shape, or form, you influenced a community by stopping in and saying hello. Like Neal said, “Every event, every conversation, and every person who walked through those doors meant something to me.” I couldn’t say it any better than that.