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A couple nights ago, my dad and I had twenty minutes to kill after ordering a pizza. We were in the vicinity of the local Funcoland, so we drove over there and I walked into the store.
It was around 8:15 pm, 45 minutes before closing time. The store was eerily silent as I stepped in. There was not a single other customer in the store.
As I often do, I looked behind the counter to see which employees were currently working. One of the employees was a person who I've never seen, and the other one was, lo and behold, the Good Employee.
The Good Employee greeted me. "I've never been in this store when nobody else is before," I responded. "Yeah," he said. "It's been pretty quiet tonight."
As usual, I picked up a price guide and walked over toward the NES rack. Only about twenty carts were there, about ten unique. I already had all of them.
Walking toward the Super Nintendo game selection, I heard, coming from behind the counter, the sounds of a dial-up modem. They have an Internet connection at Funcoland? I remember thinking to myself.
As I started browsing through the Super NES games, I heard the two employees start to talk. I picked up bits and pieces of the conversation, and I eventually I heard the Good Employee say "...NES Top-Loader..."
I almost dropped the two games I was holding. Had I heard correctly?
I had. The conversation continued. Apparently the two were looking at an NES website. The Good Employee then said, "I once saw on some site this thing called the NES-002, I've never heard of it." It was time for me to speak.
"They were probably referring to the Top-Loader," I said. "The original model was the NES-001, and the Top-Loader was the NES-101. But some people probably call it the NES-002."
The Good Employee and I then had a conversation on the NES. In retrospect, I should have plugged some NES sites (this guy probably would have loved Seanbaby's NES Page), but I didn't.
At this point, two kids who were friends of the Good Employee walked in the store. One of them walked over to the NES games, while the other one came over to where I was, at the Super Nintendo games.
I wish I could have captured this moment in time forever. It was perhaps the coolest moment since the start of my NES collecting career. There I was, in a store that has been evacuating classic games in favor of next-gen systems, standing next to four other people who loved classic Nintendo games as much as I do. Not a single modern gamer was in the store. It was great.
The kid at the Super Nintendo games said aloud to himself, "I need to buy something tonight." I pulled Blackthorne off of the shelf. "Get this," I said. "It's a damn good game, and it's only 5 or so bucks."
The kid took the game from me, and I can only imagine that he bought it. But I couldn't stick around to find out - the pizza would be ready in 3 minutes. And so I walked out of the store.
As I left, I turned around and looked back in at the 4 people who had shared something with me - a love for the NES.
You can't get this if you like modern systems, because so does eveyone else. You've probably been in a room with 4 other people who love modern games more than 1000 times in your life.
But with the NES, it's different. These days, 16 years after the NES's release, collectors are, unfortunately, few and far between. And when you stumble upon a few of them, all at once, with no one else to spoil the fun - it's a classic moment.
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