The Dumbest Kid in Gifted Class

by Dan Ryckert

  “Mortal Monday” was the marketing term built around the console release of Mortal Kombat, and I was at FuncoLand with NES trade-ins in hand the moment the store opened. I impatiently waited for the cashier to ring up my copy of the game that I had spent so much time obsessing over at my uncle’s gas station. Soon, I’d be able to play it in my own home on my Sega Genesis.

  While the cashier processed my trade-ins, I noticed an issue of Game Informer strategically placed at the register. A giant image of the Mortal Kombat dragon logo was splashed across the cover and I instinctively lunged for it. As any FuncoLand cashier worth his salt would do, the guy ringing me up jumped into the pitch. He told me about the discount card that came with the magazine, which would save me money on any used game in the store. His pitch was unnecessary. I was sold as soon as I saw Mortal Kombat on the cover.

  For weeks, I spent almost all of my time at home playing the game. Whenever I had to get in the car to go somewhere, I brought the issue of Game Informer along for the ride. The “Meet the Editors” section was fascinating to me. These were grown men, and they had found some way to make playing and writing about video games their full-time jobs. No matter what, I knew that I had to angle all my major life decisions toward making that a reality.

  At nine years old, there wasn’t much I could do besides continue to play games and subscribe to every gaming magazine I could get my hands on. Every time my mother went to the grocery store, I’d park myself in the magazine section with a spiral notebook and jot down codes for my favorite

  Genesis and Super Nintendo games. When it was time to leave, I’d grab subscription cards for Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro, Nintendo Power, Ultra Game Players, Next Generation, Official [insert console name here] Magazine, Incite, and more. If I didn’t get subscriptions for Christmas or my birthday, I’d do more chores and mow more lawns until I could afford them myself.

  My family moved from Lenexa to Olathe in 1996. This was still close enough to go to my original FuncoLand location, but I was thrilled to learn that another would be opening close to my new house. Once I was 14, I started bugging the store about getting a job. Store policy said that they wouldn’t hire anyone under 16. Within a week of my sixteenth birthday, I went into the store and asked for a job. They had seen plenty of me in those few years, and knew that I was more than enthusiastic about video games. I applied, interviewed, and got the job.

  In the year 2000, I was a 16-year-old with jobs at a movie theater and a video game store. The former expected more from me in terms of actual work—even if I was good at avoiding it—but the latter was a cakewalk. It was a new location and foot traffic in the area was light. Six display stations were set up around the store, spanning numerous generations of video games. FuncoLand would eventually phase out older consoles, but when I started, we had everything from the NES to the Dreamcast. With so few customers entering the store, nothing was stopping me from grabbing games I had never played and working my way through them at one of our stations.

  Most of my shifts were spent working alongside Tom, the assistant manager. If a Hollywood writer who didn’t play games were to create a “Video Game Store Assistant Manager” character, it would be Tom. He was in his mid-30s, severely balding, had never kissed a girl, and lived in his grandmother’s basement. During every one of his breaks, he’d sit in the back with a spiral notebook, filling it with a comprehensive list of each Final Fantasy creature’s stats and weaknesses.

  I could have gotten away with anything while working with Tom, but for once I actually wanted to do my job. Whenever someone would enter the store, I’d put down whatever I was playing and enthusiastically answer their gaming-related questions. We had a few regular customers, and it was always rewarding to introduce them to new titles and then hear their reactions after they had played them for a bit.

  Sometimes my efforts to steer customers toward games they might like didn’t pan out. During one shift, a gigantic woman in a tobacco-stained Tweety Bird shirt came into the store with her son, who looked about twelve years old. They scanned the shelves for a few minutes before the mother approached me.

  “My son likes that spy shit,” she said. “You got any cheap PlayStation games where he can sneak up on bad guys?”

  This couldn’t have been any more of a lay-up recommendation for me. One of my favorite games was called Metal Gear Solid, and it was cheap since it had been out for a couple of years. I enthusiastically explained the game to both of them and her son seemed intrigued.

  “How much is it?” she asked.

  “It’s $12.99.”

  She thought about it for a moment before taking another lap around the store. When she returned to the counter, she was holding a $9.99 game called Spec Ops: Stealth Patrol. This was a bargain-basement action game, and didn’t even deserve to be mentioned among the likes of Metal Gear Solid.

  “How ‘bout this one?” she asked while holding up the case.

  “Eh, I can’t really recommend that one. I guarantee that your son would have a lot more fun with Metal Gear Solid.”

  “But this one’s ten dollars.”

  “I know, but I promise you that Metal Gear Solid is much more than three dollars better than Spec Ops.”

  She’d have none of it and bought Spec Ops despite my urging. I’ve often wondered if her desire to save three dollars came at the expense of her son’s potential lifelong love of video games.

  Tom didn’t share my enthusiasm for talking to customers. He didn’t seem to have enthusiasm for much of anything, actually. As far as I could tell, there were only two things in life that he had strong feelings about. One of them was pickles. Every day, he’d pay for my McDonald’s if I agreed to pick up his lunch, too. It was the same order every day: a super-sized #2 value meal—two cheeseburgers, fries, and a Coke—with extra pickles. Having my car smell like pickles for years seemed like a small price to pay for a regular supply of free plain Quarter Pounders, however.

  His other strong feelings related to women. Despite never venturing outside of the store or his grandmother’s house, he couldn’t fathom why he was having trouble meeting a girl. I was far from an expert on the matter, but I tried my best to explain to him that nothing was ever going to happen if he didn’t at least leave the house. My suggestions bounced right off of him, and he opted instead to get angry whenever he saw an attractive girl walk by our storefront.

  If Tom was devoid of personality, the next member of our team had way too much. He was close to my age and his name was Peter. Despite this being the name on his birth certificate, Peter insisted that everyone refer to him as “Cryo.” This was his handle when he played Halo competitively, so he wrote it on a piece of tape and put it across his employee nametag. He’d answer the phone by introducing himself as Cryo, and refused to respond whenever one of us referred to him as Peter. This was annoying, but it was nothing compared to when his girlfriend, “DangerGrrrl,” also started working at the store. It’s always taken a lot to anger me, but hearing the words “Cryo” or “DangerGrrrl” during my shifts always triggered a Pavlovian response of pure rage.

  If Tom was the stereotype of the basement-dwelling virgin who lived with his grandma, Cryo fit nicely into the stereotype of the “hardcore gamer” who swilled energy drinks and talked unironically about “pwning n00bs.” I felt sorry for Tom and had trouble relating to him, but at least I didn’t actively hate him the way I hated Cryo.

  As time went on, the makeup of the staff continued to decline. Our nearly absentee store manager left and was replaced by his polar opposite. Stepping into the role was Josh, a guy who gave a terrible first impression that only got worse as you got to know him. Nothing felt genuine about the guy, from his fake smile to his obviously forced friendliness.

  Josh also came off like a pathological liar. No matter the topic of conversation, he always seemed to have a close personal connection to it. When the Xbox was released and it allowed you to rip music CDs to the console, I brought in a Lynyrd Skynyrd
album to test out the feature. Immediately upon seeing me pull out the disc, Josh jumped in with his coincidental connection to the making of “Sweet Home Alabama.”

  “My cousin had a big impact on that song,” he told me. “Right before the piano solo at the end of the song, you can hear Ronnie say ‘My donuts, god damn.’ That’s because my cousin was a janitor at the studio they were recording in, and he had taken Ronnie’s tray of donuts away before they started the ‘Alabama’ recording. That line wouldn’t be in the song without my cousin.”

  Everything was like this with him. If you were playing a game, his best friend had designed the best level. When he saw a cool car in the parking lot, he’d talk about how many chicks he picked up when he had that same car in high school (despite repeating this same story about numerous different cars). Oh, you got a high score in a video game? He could double it easily.

  His personality was insufferable and his managerial tendencies were just as annoying. Only two things in the world mattered to him: securing pre-orders for games and selling Game Informer subscriptions. Granted, this seemed to be the entire focus of GameStop—the new name of FuncoLand—as a company.

  When it came to pushing pre-orders, Josh was prone to making wild claims that any gamer could see through. Halo had been the hottest game on Xbox ever since the console launched, so Josh always used it to trump up his pre-order pitch for other titles. For what felt like a year, I heard the same refrain every time a customer purchased anything.

  “Hey, you’ve heard of Halo, right?” he’d ask the uninterested customer. “Well you’re not gonna hear about it for much longer.”

  This is the point at which he’d pull out an issue of Game Informer and open to the Brute Force screenshots. These images typically featured the dumb lizard guy you could play as.

  “Once Brute Force comes out next spring, Halo’s gonna be left in the dust,” he’d say. “This is the game you bought an Xbox for!”

  No matter how apathetic the customer acted toward the game, Josh wouldn’t shut up about how they should pre-order it (whether or not they had an Xbox). Once his pitch succeeded or failed, he’d pivot straight into his attempt to get the customer to subscribe to Game Informer.

  I never felt comfortable with canned sales pitches, even for a magazine that I had enjoyed since I was a child. GameStop owned the magazine, and they wanted us to push it hard onto every customer who came into the store. Back when the store was called FuncoLand, they’d even give us a two-dollar commission for every subscription we secured.

  Selling Game Informer was clearly a big priority for the company. Advocating for the magazine didn’t make me feel bad, especially considering that I had grown up wanting to write for it. It was the company’s aggressive strategy that bugged me. Around this time, I started thinking about a way that I could pitch the magazine while simultaneously inching me closer to a job writing for it.

  Every month, GameStop would send a VHS tape for us to loop on our in-store television. These tapes contained trailers for upcoming games, accompanied by constant prodding for customers to place pre-orders. One of the company’s big focuses was covered, but there was never any mention of Game Informer. If the company cared so much about pushing subscriptions, why wouldn’t they include a brief spot on the VHS tapes that they produced for their stores?

  My video production experience was limited to high school video announcements, short comedy sketches, and a few weddings, but I felt like I could pull off a commercial for in-store use. Any Game Informer exposure on those VHS tapes would be better than nothing, even if I didn’t have access to professional-grade cameras or other equipment.

  I sure as hell wasn’t going to pitch this idea to a doofus store manager like Josh. Instead, I looked up contact information for GameStop’s corporate headquarters in Texas. Starting with the number for their front desk, I explained my idea to several people as they kept transferring me up the chain. Eventually, I got to a woman who was in a position to give the green light to marketing plans.

  My idea for the ad wasn’t revolutionary, but I thought it would be quick and effective enough for these purposes. It would be a parody of Metal Gear Solid, featuring a spy sneaking into Game Informer’s headquarters to obtain the new issue (I specifically included the headquarters so that I’d have a reason to travel to Minneapolis and meet the editorial team). After the spy was caught by editor-in-chief Andy McNamara and thrown out of the building, the commercial would cut to me in my GameStop uniform. I’d explain that there was “an easier way to get Game Informer,” and then pitch the subscription offer.

  I explained all of this to the woman on the other end of the line and said that I’d be happy to make the ad for free. All I’d ask of them was to cover my flight to Minneapolis and a hotel. I expected to hear a polite but immediate “no” in return. Surprisingly, she told me that she’d bring it up with others in her department and get back to me. In the meantime, she wanted me to e-mail her a script for the shoot.

  It was nice to not be rejected outright, but at no point did I ever expect this to go through. I didn’t even expect a call back. They were just being nice to this kid who was enthusiastic about his idea. There was no way they’d actually consider the offer.

  I tossed together a quick script and sent it her way. A few days later, I received some big surprises. One was a call back. The second was that GameStop’s marketing team had talked it over and given my idea the green light. This seemed insane, and then the woman hit me with a third surprise.

  “There’s only one issue,” she said. “Legally, we can’t have you do this for free; we have to pay you for your work. How much would you charge for a project like this?”

  In no way had I prepared for that question. Just getting the go-ahead for the ad seemed impossible, and now they were asking me how much money I wanted to be paid (on top of travel expenses). I made my short films and comedy sketches for fun, and the only experience I had with making money for my videos came from a few weddings that I filmed. Those jobs had netted me about five or six hundred dollars apiece, so I figured that I should aim a little higher than that.

  “Um, for a project like this, I’d charge $2,000. I’d also request another $500 so that I can bring a second cameraman and buy the spy outfit.”

  She didn’t hesitate for a second, moving right along to booking dates for travel. I requested a week in late August, just before my sophomore year of college started. After she took down my information, she thanked me for reaching out and said that we’d be hearing from GameStop shortly.

  Even if they were actually thinking about doing this, it surely couldn’t be the end of the process. After all, they hadn’t asked for a demo reel of my work or any evidence whatsoever that I wasn’t completely full of shit. This was before YouTube existed, but they could have at least asked for me to mail in a VHS or DVD of some samples.

  Nope. They apparently needed zero confirmation of my video production chops, because a FedEx package arrived at my place a week later. In it was flight and hotel information; an American Express card for cab and food expenses; and a check for $2,500. It was the biggest check I’d ever received, and I hadn’t even done anything besides make a few phone calls. If I were a con man, this would have been the easiest score of all time. I was looking for more than money, however. This was inexplicably working out so far, and I was set on going to Minneapolis and doing my best to make an impression on the Game Informer staff.

  In the weeks leading up to the trip, I visited military surplus stores around Kansas City and bought the components for the spy suit. One element of the video required a brief shoot with my grandfather at his home, so I got that out of the way. He was to play the spy’s commander, who radios in to check on the status of the mission.

  My grandpa had two lines. One was “Cobra, have you reached the infiltration point?” The other was “Good. Remember…that magazine is mission-critical.” His full appearance in the video is eight seconds long, and it took over an hour to get
the lines out of him. Playing a role for a video was an alien concept to him, much less one for a commercial that he didn’t understand in the least. He’d get a few words into each line before bursting out laughing.

  “What the hell are we doing here?” he’d ask. “This is crazy.”

  It really wasn’t that crazy, and his bewilderment at the entire process was cracking me up. For the entire shoot, my grandmother held a lampshade at an angle to better illuminate my grandpa. She was laughing the entire time as well. After the first half hour, she grabbed a couple of poster boards and wrote his lines on them with a Sharpie.

  They were great sports about it, and it was good to get some footage in the can before I headed to Minneapolis. I also shot the ending of the commercial, in which I pitched the Game Informer subscription from inside a GameStop store.

  This entire time, I was expecting the floor to suddenly drop out of the operation. At some point, a marketing dude was bound to see the plan, say “what the hell is this?” and snuff it out. With each day that brought me closer to August, I started feeling more and more like it would actually happen. My buddy Kiu was available during the proposed travel week and could hold a backup camera, so I explained the ridiculous story to him and recruited him as my cameraman. He loved games like I did, so getting him to agree to hundreds of dollars and a visit to Game Informer wasn’t a hard sell.

  The day finally arrived and we took off for Minneapolis. Once we stepped off the plane and grabbed our camera bags from baggage claim, we both just stood there for a second.

  “Why is this happening?” he asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “This really shouldn’t have worked.”

  With a mix of bewilderment and excitement, we cabbed it to our downtown hotel and unpacked. GameStop set each of us up with our own suite, complete with kitchens. We dropped off luggage in our rooms and reconvened to discuss what we’d do next. Since we were 18 and 19, bars weren’t an option. Instead, we decided to utilize our in-room kitchens.