Lab Report 28: The Game Store That Wasn't

🧪 Lab Report 28: The Game Store That Wasn't

The other day, my wife asked me a seemingly simple question:
“When was the first time you went to a game store?”

Not a toy store.
Not a comic book shop.
But a store just for games.

At first, I laughed—because that question? It’s a time machine. The answer is weirdly complicated. I’ve always gone to “game stores”... but like many people my age, those stores shifted forms over time.

When I was a kid, it was all about toy stores. That’s where games lived. As I got older, those places transformed—morphing into game-focused stores or comic book shops with RPGs in the back corner. But the first time I really remember seeing a game and thinking, “This is different… this is for me,” was when I found The Fantasy Trip.

This wasn’t in some dedicated game shop in a big city.
Nope.
It was at Radio Shack.

Yes, Radio Shack.

This was around 1980 or 1981. I lived in a tiny town in Michigan—so small the entire downtown was just one block long. About halfway down that block was our humble Radio Shack. And believe it or not, they carried games. Not just the odd dice or chess set, but actual tabletop RPGs.

Radio Shack, of all places, was where I first saw books for Dungeons & Dragons. But those were expensive—too expensive for young me. So instead, I zeroed in on this other little game with a much more forgiving price tag: The Fantasy Trip, designed by Steve Jackson (yes, that Steve Jackson). I could actually afford those digest-sized books like Melee and Wizard, and they opened my mind to a new kind of gameplay—strategic, modular, and filled with imagination.

That was the spark.

It wasn’t the clean-cut “game store” people picture today with walls of board games, Magic singles under glass, and demo tables in the back. But for me, that Radio Shack was the first place I found my tribe—even if I didn’t realize it yet. It wasn’t long after that I started seeking out dedicated shops whenever I could find them, following a scent only gamers know: the smell of cardboard, old dice, and possibility.

Since then? I’ve never stopped.
I’ve chased that feeling across decades, systems, editions, and formats.
And it all started… at a Radio Shack, wedged between the calculators and cassette tapes.

Funny how memory works.
Sometimes the game store finds you before you even know you're looking.

—
Signed,
Madsaxxon
Tibalt’s Apprentice

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