When Sean Kelly opened his new store, Videogames Etc, this past June he kept the fanfare to a minimum. “Video game collectors can be a pretty critical lot, so I avoided doing the grand opening thing,” he says. “I just wanted to get it up and quietly running, then give myself some time to get the details right.”
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Until he sold his franchise last January, Kelly was well on his way to becoming a lifer with White Hen. He started working there at 14 after lying about his age on the application. It seemed to Kelly that his boss there had a pretty good life, so at 15 he applied for a franchise of his own, only to be told that 21 was the minimum age. Kelly continued to clerk at White Hen until he turned 18, when, with a bank loan and some help from his dad, he opened a Subway at Harlem and Devon, close to the family home. He didn’t turn a profit until he sold the store two years later.
White Hen kept his application on file and called Kelly just before his 21st birthday to see if he was still interested. In 1989 he opened his own store at Milwaukee and Austin. He liked the business well enough until the chain was acquired in 2000 by Clark Retail Services, a gas station management firm that steered White Hen away from its traditional grocery lines to focus on snacks and sodas. “You don’t make any money on that stuff,” Kelly says. “They turned us into a giant gas station with no gas.” Nine months ago Kelly sold his franchise and stock back to the company and walked away.
Kelly married his wife Melissa in 1989, by which time he was hitting flea markets, yard sales, and thrift shops “literally every Sunday” in search of the lost games of his youth. “You could get the games for two bucks each,” he says. “You could get a big box with a system and games in it for 20 bucks. Everybody was just dumping it.” Today a rare title like CommaVid’s “Video Life” can fetch as much as $3,000.
Overall, Kelly prefers the 2-D minimalism of vintage games and thinks that advancing technology has made game designers lazy. “In the old days the only thing that they could concentrate on was making the game fun,” he says. “They’re not going to be able to do Dolby Prologic, they’re not going to be able to do DVD video, all they can figure out is how to make something fun.” A lot of the new games, he adds, “are insulting to my intelligence,” citing PlayStation 2’s “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty” as an example. “When you first play that game you have to sit through 20 minutes of video. They won’t let you use your imagination. Am I stupid? Do I have to be told everything about this game? Let me figure some of it out. I’m pounding on the controller: ‘Can I play yet?’”
