The parking lot is full—unusual for the small strip mall where I sell video games. It takes me a while to park my car, and when I make it into the store, chaos greets me: a line at the counter, the cardboard remnants of a FedEx drop shipment scattered everywhere, my harried-looking manager matching names from a printout to real customers standing in line, then doling out colorful boxes to the mob as quickly as she can. An unattended toddler knocks over an endcap display and starts crying.
I hurry to the back of the store to grab my name tag. When I return, a customer at the front of the line exclaims, “Bullshit, lady! I got the preorder slip right here. I want the damn jet ski game, not just the Mario one.” The other customers in line begin to stir angrily. My manager looks over at me as though I might be able to sort out the mess.
It is September 1996, I am 18 years old, and I am the “keyholder” at Babbage’s store no. 9 in Houston. This is the North American launch day for the Nintendo 64, which makes it the third major 1990s console launch I am lucky (or “lucky”) enough to work. As the yelling escalates, I wonder if I’m going to make it through my shift without getting punched in the face.
But let’s start at the beginning.
Sega Saturn
In August 1994, I began working at Babbage’s as a minimum wage sales associate earning $4.25 per hour—which, having just turned 16, I was thrilled to have. By the time the whole operation came to a crashing close three and a half years later, I was an older but wiser man who had worked through not one, but three separate console launches that would together bring “modern” consoles to the world. For younger or newer gamers, those who have seen console launches only in the last few years, those mid-1990s launches may sound like they took place in a different country. And in many ways, they did. The retail landscape around video games felt little like it does today, and the launches themselves were not quite the truly mainstream events they have become in the years since—but for store employees, they were just as crazy.