I like beef, so I eat it sometimes. It's too much work for a lazy blogger go kill and roast an animal in the woods, so I'm glad that there's a place that shapes it into squares, then puts it on bread and cheese. It's called Wendy's and they're helping Destructoid pay the bills this month once again (thank you). Go throw your money at them.
Better yet, convince them to give you $5,000. You can win it in their "Where's the Beef" T-Shirt making contest, which is based on an old ad campaign that was running when I was about ten years old.
You know, before the Internet. Yeah, I'm a dinosaur. Do you know what I had to do to buy videogames when I was little? Oh man, was I ever a young and bastardly entrepreneur.
Back in the dark ages, I ran a pen-and-paper video game club at my school called The Nintendo Force, or something equally mortifying ... but in the late 80's it was also a nerdy symbol of status. If you still only had an Atari, then your parents probably hated you and wanted you to die alone.
There was only one thing arguably worse: being stuck with only copies of Gyromite and Duck Hunt with an unquenchable thirst for a gamer's life that you could not afford, as magazines began to appear with middle-class kids in skateboarding apparel hugging their mountains of games with pasty faces. I wanted to be a pastier. The pastiest, if possible! For you 90's babies, imagine owning PlayStation and having to play Bubsy 3D on loop for a fiscal quarter. It's no way to go through life.
My parents didn't believe in allowance. The concept was so foreign to them that they actually laughed at me. Extorting my grandparents for dollars, digging through the sofa and drawers for change, and gradually syphoning lunch money was taking too long. What kind of a reputable video game club only plays one video game for months? It was a disaster! There was only enough tape-trading you could do with neighborhood kids before you end up trading Double Dragon for Clu-Clu-Land, then again for Urban Champion out of desperation. This was not sustainable.
On the wise advice of a neighbor we turned to knocking on doors and asking people if we could wash their cars. My best friend and I had three consistent clients (namely, our parents and the wise neighbor) each willing to pony up a whopping $5 dollars for a full-service wash and tire shine. This would take us hours and, when split between us and factoring costs of materials, was a total waste of a weekend. Like the great men that founded this country I ultimately gave up on actually doing the work myself and resorted to capitalism and robbery. Had any siblings slavery would not have been above me. I tried selling Kool-Aid once but parking lot dust got in it.
After acquiring an audiotape at a book fair called "The Buck Starts Here" I learned the power of the sale. It taught me that if I purchased packs of Garbage Pail Kids in bulk and used bags of G.I. Joe action figures from the Thrift Shop, I could sell them for double what I paid by selling them one by one at school. Kids had loose dollars, it was just a matter of figuring out how to collect them. (The Japanese call this process "Pokemon"). Ultimately I got greedy and would look for things my parents could innocently purchase and that I could resell. Margins are higher if your supply comes free! I did this with school supplies, baseball cards, chocolates, and even a 6-pack of cereal once. Perhaps the most preposterous thing was attend a big family wedding and rob each table of its plastic gold rings, a party favor, and sell them for a quarter each to susceptible older girls on the tether ball courts.
Yeah, I went there.
On one hand I hated being so hungry. On the other hand, there was a certain magic about it. When I would get my hands on a new game it was like having a new lease on life. I would read the instruction books from cover-to-cover over and over (Kid Icarus was amongst my favorites). The damn ride home from the toy store felt longer. The art of trying not to crease the box while bouncing around the back seat to sneak an early peek of your conquest! The mystery and weeks of anticipation and sweat equity to discover if the game you've carefully selected will not suck, for the concept of game demos would not appear for another decade! Thus, I got really good at picking my games.
Anyway, this story has a happy ending as Wendy's is indirectly buying my next game, and I worked for it this time! I've so many games now that I can't give them away fast enough, much less play them all. Sucks to be me, right?
Did you hustle for your video game purchases before you had a big boy job? Share your old-timer stories in the comments below!
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Contest:
7:50 PM on 02.23.2012 | 
Trading my copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 for The Little Mermaid game. Yep. To its credit the game was good, but it was no SMB 3.
Winning money in a raffle and my mother allowing me to rent one game with it. Holy crap, they had Double Dragon III! The first two were great, so this one had to - aww shit, the game's terrible!
For that matter, wanting and getting Total Recall for Christmas. No one could have told young me that game was trash... no one. To me it might as well have been gold.
One Christmas I was told I could have a Sega Genesis... IF I would sell my SNES to a family friend. Seemed like a bargain, until Donkey Kong Country came out. :-/
Back the day though I got my variety just by working my way into homes and becoming friends with the kids with gaming systems. It's how I experienced most of Nintendo's catalogue as I was a Sega Master System kid.
We had every so many systems from Atari, NES, SNES, SMS, Genesis, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, PS1, N64, Dreamcast, Gamecube, PS2, Xbox, and various handheld gaming systems. She bought probably 1-3 games a week, and we quickly amassed a large collection of games. Yeah, it was amazing growing up. Looking back I was spoiled.
Bought ff8 and 9, well worth it
Ask the manager of a grocery store if you can sell mistletoe at the door, when they say yes, it's time to make some fucking bank. At a buck a bag, I was able to afford a new game a night. You'd only have to spend like $5 in baggies and ribbon. Make up some fold-over labels to print out and staple them to the bags and you're on your way to swimming in a money vault.
(Just don't die getting it out of the trees, you know. A little occupational hazard is necessary from time to time.)
We thought that if we donated this money to the parents, they might be more inclined to get us the NES for christmas because all they'd have to do is cover the difference. We gathered all our singles, loose change and pennies - probably not more than 40 dollars - and presented it to our parents in a children's rainbow Garfield suitcase, like a couple of little gay coke dealers making a dropoff.
http://www.etsy.com/listing/50257408/rare-vintange-garfield-suitcase
The result was mostly skepticism, and because the suitcase sat open in the master bedroom for months, and we had no willpower, we ended up stealing probably half of the money back to pay for junk food, or quarters to plunk into the Playchoice Nintendo cabinet at the arcade. In dreams, I'd become Super Mario, adventuring through strange alien worlds and icy snowbound levels that were much more colorful than anything actually in the game.
Somehow or other, our pathetic ploy proved successful, and I'm pretty sure my parents didn't regret it too much, at least until the following month when I tried to strangle my brother for accidentally erasing my Zelda save while I was at a sleepover.
Those were the days.
I saved up my allowance ($2/week, a new GB game was $80 here, AW YEAH) and bought a game ONCE. This was back in the day where they would let you actually try it in the shop before you bought it. The 5mins I had seemed pretty good, but it turned out that Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle was only about 3 hours long, and it was pretty easy too. I told my friends about it and they said they had seen it in some Nintendo magazine. I went to the library and read the review which gave it about 50%, which I agreed with. AND THUS I OBSESSIVELY READ ABOUT EVERY GAME BEFORE I PURCHASED IT SINCE.
In high school I did hustle (sold my worldly possessions, wash the cars of my RICH friends parents, mow lawns etc) to save up for a gamecube. That was my first current gen console, quite the upgrade from the old Sega Mega Drive that had been given to the family. That system had some amazing games on it, Super Smash Bros Melee everyday with friends for years, Wind Waker, Metroid Prime etc. GOOD TIMES. Also weird thing, that system sold NOTHING in my country, so was heavily discounted at local game stores. I bought my gamecube for $350NZ 6 months after release, today if I want a 6 years since release PS3, it is $460. THAT IS CRAZY.
Now I have a backlog that grows faster than I can play even though I have fuck all money. I actually spend very little per year though, Steam sales have kind of revolutionised the value of games for me. Gaming is better and cheaper than ever, I'm kinda jealous of any kid growing up these days, although the barrier to entry to this wonderland of CHEAP AMAZING GAMES is still a bit of a bitch to someone under 18 (need a decent PC which takes know how, convince your parents to make a lot of credit card purchases).
The smile I got from my parents told me everything I wanted to hear.
Earlier than that, haggling for Nintendo carts - the stuff I would barter with was outlandish.
I had a kool-aid stand more than once, fairly successful ones too. The kool-aid stands were probably a high point of childhood pride. Business transactions were and still are just as pleasant as any enjoyment I can get out of playing games.
To make up the difference, I "created" my own product that sold like crazy at school, and it was dirt cheap for me to buy the materials. All it was, was 1 packet of Kool-aid mixed with a cup of sugar. i sold these bags for 50 cents a pop. Combine that with saving my lunch money (in Jacksonville, FL lunch was like $3 in the mid nineties, but to be fair it was pretty amazing lunches and worth every penny) and I could get an extra game per year.
Saved my allowance by living off of school lunches, sold candy at school behind the security's back, sold bootleg VHS tapes with "R"-rated movies to kids that weren't allowed to watch them.
It's good to know I'm not the only one that misses the days when instruction manuals were a joy to read, it was a ritual for me to pour over every page of the manual before I even put the game in, then laugh at my brother as he constantly asked me how to do this or that.
And boy, do I remember the anxiety of wondering whether I just wisely spent my money on the next great game or wasted my cash on a huge piece of crap. Thinking back, I think I was disappointed most often during my TurboGrafx-16 era. Because of this, Blockbuster used to get my business 3-4 times a week back in the 90's
Great read, Niero. Now I'm off to get a bacon double stack and a Frosty! :P
The profit motive isn't there for me. I don't have that instinct. I'm a joker. I love hearing stories like this, pure capitalism and I love it. I was happy with dollar rentals, finding a dollar for me as a kid of the late eighties wasn't so bad. I'd always borrow things from friends, insisting they buy games I wouldn't and I would buy games they didn't have, just so we could have a bigger pool of games to play. This is why I don't own a copy of Super Metroid or Link to the Past, my friends had them.
Now that I'm a jerk with more games to play than I have to time to, I feel like I did something wrong. Especially once something like emulation hit, how did you deal with that Niero? Finding out suddenly that every game ever is totally there for you to play if you wanted. I'm curious.
I would spend my lunch money on candy in the morning and then sell it to desperate kids during P.E. for up to almost twice the price, always making sure I made a profit.
That got shut down when teachers caught wind and banned any selling of things with the possibility of suspension and even expulsion.
Anti-Capitalist jerks.
A billion years later came adulthood. My mom told me my childhood friend was a Kleptomaniac.
Yeah.