1 A Complete Unboxing

A Store in Ephrata Offers the Public a Way Celebrate Collecting Video Games

By Grant T. Pearsall

THE STRIP MALL is an unassuming work of stone and mortar situated next to a busy street somewhere in the borough of Ephrata, Penn. Cars and trucks carom by at high speeds, the road feeding arterially into a junction that spreads out across the county as the automotive pulmonary system of southeastern Lancaster County. A large neon sign blazes in the darkness of this cold fall evening:

“Complete in Box.

Video Games

From Every Era”

Figures seen through the brightly lit windows move back and forth across the large expanse of the store front, giving the impression of vitality and commerce. An American flag stirs atop the pole that juts from a thin median of grass in front of the building. Across the busy highway, a Big Lots store sits, boxy and impassive, its parking lot mostly empty. 2

The soft glow of commerce-- Complete in Box located along Reading Road of Ephrata

The Clash at Trout Run

Complete in Box is a thing that should not be-- a privately owned small business that traffics almost exclusively in ‘retro’ video games. In this case, the term ‘retro’ refers to video games at least five to ten years old belonging to gaming consoles which are no longer in production.

During the late 1990’s, Lancaster County was rife with boutique stores which sold retro games and accessories. Even big box stores of the day, like the now defunct FuncoLand, had a thriving economic model that included the buying, trading and selling of retro games. But in the early 2000’s, the small stores folded, their business cannibalized by internet sales and by sites like Ebay and Craigslist. Even the chain stores like FuncoLand vanished overnight, having been subsumed by the corporate conglomerate Gamestop, which has positioned itself as the gatekeeper of modern video game sales.

As the independently owned stores closed, options for purchasing games locally dwindled. Now super-chains like the Targets and Wal-marts have moved in, offering only the 3 very newest video games and their accompanying systems. Despite this new economic landscape, Spenser Brossman quietly financed and opened a small video game store in the Trout

Run Business Center. His endeavor is modeled after the video gaming boutiques of yore.

It should not be, yet there it stands.

Resident Retro

Out of the cold, past the glass doors and into the warm glow of retail, the store reveals itself to be a delightful hodge-podge of geek-etcetera from floor to ceiling. It has a distinct feeling of hominess-- the inescapable sensation that this space is the logical extension of a teenager’s bedroom. That teen is of course wild for the video games of the not-so-distant past.

The store is divided into two distinct sections-- one dedicated almost entirely to retail sales and the other serving as an ad-hoc gaming museum and arcade. It is this latter half that makes the store a strange and unique creature among its peers, ostensibly a shrine to geek culture.

Acquired in February of this year, the retro gaming side of Complete-in-Box was made possible by the fortuitous vacating of the previous business, a Verizon cell phone store. The acquisition came at just the right time, as Brossman was considering whether or not the amount of stock they were taking in necessitated opening a second store.

“I think stores, for the most part, not always, lose a little bit of quality when they have more stores,” says Brosman.

When he heard the location next door was about to be vacated, he spoke to the landlord immediately and proclaimed his intentions;

“Dibs, dibs, please we want it!...” 4

The stores’ free to play arcade machines offer a unique cross-section of gaming history.

The expansion opened up the store’s total footprint to roughly five thousand square feet by Brossman’s estimation.

Close to the rear and adjacent to the storefront, a long row of arcade machines line the walls. Titles of the machines include: “Deluxe Space Invaders,” “The House of the Dead” and

“Smash Tv.” Their monitors flicker dimly with attract screens scrolling, waiting to be activated by would-be patrons. The machines have all been switched to a free to play mode-- a courtesy gesture from Brossman to his patrons. Two young boys in thick jackets and wool caps jump up and down excitedly in front of the arcade cabinets.

“Dad, can you help me play this?” one of the boys loudly demands.

His father is preoccupied in thought, staring up at a massive poster of Mega Man 5 squaring off against one of his myriad of robotic foes. He mumbles something conciliatory to his son. Soon, the two boys are deeply engrossed in playing the “Smash Tv” machine, hooting and hollering together as they succeed. Slowly, the father gravitates towards them until eventually he is watching their progress over their shoulders.

Just like mom’s basement, circa 1987! Towards the front of the retro area, beneath the plate glass windows, a space has been set up that emulates the home gaming experience. A plush tan and brown sectional couch has a small flat-screen television positioned in front of it. Connected to the television is a kind of a modern hybrid gaming console that allows for classic NES and Super NES games to be played on the same machine. A man in his mid-twenties with close cropped hair rapidly jams on a controller, propelling Mario through a vibrant, sixteen-bit world. A young woman in a baggy hoodie perches 6 on the back of the couch watching as he plays. She twirls her hair through her fingers and leans down to speak quietly into his ear. He chuckles and places the controller on the cushion of the couch. The pair exits out the front door and disappears into the night.

A small, cluttered counter is located centrally in this half of the store, strategically placed to oversee the goings-ons of the area. Brad Canull, an employee, works at the counter refurbishing old video game consoles that have been traded in by customers. Canull has a mop of dark, shaggy hair, a thick beard, and he wears a bright red Arsenal Football Club jersey.

Toothbrush in hand he scrubs away at the plastic housing of a Nintendo Entertainment system that has yellowed with age. A box of doppelganger NES consoles rest on the floor, while another large stack of dirty Super Nintendos sits on the counter nearby. Restoring and reselling these systems is a large part of the Complete in Box business model.

“We go through a fair number,” Canull says,“it’s nice [when] they look somewhat new.” 7

Brad Canull, an employee for 2+ years works to clean a dirty NES console.

Refurbishing these systems to a retail state is not without its hazards though. Recently, another employee had an allergic reaction when cleaning an old console without wearing protective gloves. Canull smiles sheepishly “he felt pretty nauseous for a while.” Canull reminisces playing video games at his grandparents’ house as a child, eating peanut butter sandwiches without regard for how messy it got. He speculates that all types of food and dirt winds up on these systems and their controllers. The years of grime on an old console reveals the story of their past owners for better or worse.

Along the very back wall of the retro gaming area is a row of small glass display cases similar to those found in a jewelry store. A printed sign placed inside reads “The Best Games of

Each Generation AND All Time.” Several video games from classic systems are carefully 8 arranged within the glass box, including titles such as “Kaboom” for the Atari and “Super Mario

64” for the Nintendo 64. Each item is accompanied by a sheet of wry text justifying their esteemed status. The cases serve as a kind of tastemaker barometer for classic gaming, letting the patrons know Brossman’s enterprise encompasses more than just commerce-- there is a reverence for the history of the gaming culture located here.

Brossman’s Creed

The impresario of this entire venture is Spenser Brossman, who sits in a rolling chair in his crowded stockroom. Shaggy haired and perpetually smiling, Brossman exudes a kind of zen- like confidence and tranquility that instantly puts those around him at ease. Yet contradictorily, his physical mannerisms are anxious and full of a restless energy-- he is endlessly drumming on tables, playing with his fingers and raking hair away from his face. His attire seems to reflect all of these qualities at once-- a tie-dyed tee shirt with a picture of an eagle wearing aviator sunglasses, flannel patterned board shorts and a pair of slightly battered neon and slate running sneakers. He also bears a striking resemblance to Greg Sestero, an actor from the cult film “The

Room,” which could go either way in terms of flattery depending on your love of esoteric cinema. 9

Spenser Brossman-- Owner of Complete in Box Brossman, a native of Lancaster county, is a graduate of Drexel University where he double majored in psychology and math. His story for the inception of Complete-in-Box is ambiguous in the details, but clear in intent. Returning to Lancaster, he decided to sidestep the pitfalls of the post-graduate employment hunt, instead diving headlong into opening a video game store. It was mixing business with pleasure, as he has always loved video games and gaming culture.

The economic model for nearly all video game retailers involves purchasing older games from customers in exchange for cash, credit or trade value towards other games. While big box stores only deal in modern games, the Complete in Box method extends far back, often seeing systems and games from the 80s and 90s brought in and traded for credit towards the newest games and their systems. Brossman refers to this in industry slang as, “the circle of life.” 10 “We get a lot of trade ins. People in this area seem to have a lot of things… they seem to like to trade in,” Brossman says.

This is a boon to the Complete in Box ecosystem, which traffics only marginally in new game sales.

“I think at the end of the year we do roughly 70-75% [used]... and the rest is new.”

A carefully selected and organized catalogue of games are for sale from every era.

Taking one look at the interior of the store, this seems readily apparent. On the retail side of the space, massive racks are filled to capacity with games spanning many generations of consoles back through the 1980s. And while there is a presence of Playstation 4, Xbox One, and

Wii U, the three most contemporary gaming consoles, the stock is small by comparison.

Brossman is quick to point out that he always aims to stock the latest games and systems and prides himself on carefully curating the titles he sells, hoping to avoid the flotsam and jetsam of 11 inferior products that are being made perpetually. This system seems to be working so far, though it has one obvious drawback;

“We do sell out [of new titles] constantly.”

The economic model employed here is lopsided, strange and unpredictable. In a sense, these older games are akin to electronic antiques, earning a fluctuating price tag based on amorphous attributes like scarcity of like items, historical/cultural context and, of course, the physical quality of the product. Brossman has seen his share of rare items offered for trade-in value. He likens the experience to the TLC show Pawn Stars-- a reality show where people haggle over the pawn value of a variety of antiques, Americana and rare curios.

“We’ve gotten in a lot of really rare Atari games. Like, obnoxiously rare,” Brossman says.

For example, a customer brought in a copy of “Lochjaw,” an Atari 2600 game that currently sells on Ebay for upwards of a thousand dollars. Brossman launches into an impromptu history lesson of the title, detailing how representatives from Universal Pictures threatened to sue the game’s production company for copyright infringement over their film “Jaws” if the title for

“Lochjaw” was not changed. The gaming studio complied, and future copies of “Lochjaw” were renamed “Shark Attack” and relabeled, leaving the limited number of original copies featuring the “Lochjaw” sticker highly sought after as a “label variant” of the product. 12

Image Courtesy of AtariMania.com Brossman often dips into short asides like this, revealing his deep well of knowledge on the video game industry and its history and culture. The business he has created is more than just a source of revenue and employment; it is the fulfillment of a lifetime’s worth of passion and deep seated interest in the industry. At home, Brossman keeps his own collection of classic and retro video games and systems. Yet despite the fact that Complete in Box presents him with frequent opportunities to add rare and interesting gaming curios to his personal collection, he resists the temptation. While the move is certainly shrewd from a business perspective, aiming to keep stock of even the most rare items, to Brossman it is more about pleasing his customers.

”So everything that I take from [from the store] I think, you know, this might be a person we… [it’s] not necessarily the money of it, but like will be made happy from it. Like, ‘this is the one game that I need!’” 13 Brossman struggles to clearly articulate his feelings on the matter, but one gets the sense that his desire to share his love of gaming with like-minded people by way of his store easily trumps his need to create a ‘perfect’ collection for himself.

Symphony of the Retail

Back on the retail side of the store, business is picking up with a steady flow of customers trickling through the doors. The clientele is mostly male, ranging from mid-teens on up. Another father escorts his son through the chest high racks of carefully alphabetized games packed into the space. They lean down together, examining the clamshell cases for used Xbox 360 games.

The little boy grabs one of the lime green cases and holds it out to his father who reluctantly accepts it;

“I guess you can get two since I’m paying for it,” he says.

His tone is stern and fatherly, but the expression on his face seems to suggest he is somehow pleased with the outcome. The little boy grasps his hand, and they head towards the front of the store together.

Brossman is behind the counter now, holding court with his customers and employees.

Every person that comes through the front door is greeted with a “hey man” and their requests are returned with “sure man, no problem.” The customers respond positively, even the most shy and demure engaging with him as he rings up their purchases or fields their questions. He even plays a bit of video game psychic, calling out the title of the game he thinks a customer will want as they approach the counter.

“Call of Duty?” Brossman says, his voice rising higher at the end to indicate it is a

question. 14 A cherubic man in his twenties wearing a purple hoodie seems startled, pulling his hood down off his head.

“Yeah...”

“The Real Good Stuff!” -- The rarest of items for sale are kept under glass.

Two older, deeply tanned men in Carhart jackets browse the glass cases by the counter that holds the store’s rarest items for sale-- pristine Sega Cd, Dreamcast, 32X games and much more. On the rear wall are racks of store branded tee shirts with a logo has a quaint handcrafted look about it.

The two men purchase a power cable for an old Playstation console and leave without further browsing. Other customers slowly peruse the tall metal racks and chat excitedly about the

Black Friday deals the store will be offering next week-- a ‘buy two, get one free’ deal amongst others. The store’s speakers pump the sound of heavy metal at low volumes-- Iron Maiden’s

“Children of the Damned,” the demonic equivalent of grocery store muzak. Deep in the retro 15 section of the store, the trigger on a plastic pistol of an arcade game clicks out a staccato beat. A customer with a bushy beard, pajama pants and moccasins laughs theatrically at one of

Brossman’s quips, and the pair banters back and forth about game store etiquette. The front door softly shuts with a ‘fwump’ as more customers enter.

The phrase ‘complete-in-box’ is terminology used by video game collectors. It indicates that all original items are present, including the game, the manuals, advertisements and related ephemera. In short, it is as close to perfection as a used item can be, and the status is prized among collectors.

As a business and a local fixture, Complete in Box embodies this spirit. The store has everything a geeky collector could ask for-- video games new and old, comic books, action figures, movies and more. But most importantly, Complete in Box offers an appropriate sense of reverence for the hobbyists and their coveted pastimes. Brossman’s store, his staff and his customers share a unique passion for the ineffable joy that belonging to gaming culture brings.

The experience is complete.