This Early Gamer Was A Flop

I used to manage an electronics and gaming store in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was a store like today’s GameStop video game stores, but we sold mostly computer software with a small amount of NES and Sega Genesis cartridges.

You have to remember that computers in this time period were early PCs, and people weren’t as used to them.

A woman came in and threw a box on the counter of “The Hunt for Red October” video game on a 3.5″ floppy. She was livid.

Customer #1: “This movie wouldn’t play in my VCR! And it took me nearly an hour to get it back out of the VCR slot!”

But that’s nothing, really. We had a guy come in and buy a PC game, knowing it was a PC game. I’ll admit that the name of the game is lost in the mists of my elderly brain.

This guy was also livid. He kept shouting and gesturing wildly.

Customer #2: “You ruined my computer! There’s gonna be h*** to pay!”

He was agitated enough that I called mall security to come by and mediate.

We had ruined his computer, and he was demanding that we buy him a new one. With the help of mall security, I managed to get the story.

This guy had bought the game on a 5.25″ floppy (go ahead, Google it) but owned a computer with only a 3.5″ drive, so he did what one does, I assume.

He folded the disk in half and jammed it in the drive.

This managed to hook the drive head somehow, knocking it off alignment, and now it wouldn’t read any disks at all.

Even the security guard, who was probably close to seventy years old, looked at me wide-eyed. I returned the game, even though the disk was now ruined, and gave him the business card of our regional manager to discuss anything else.

I called the regional manager and told him the guy was going to call and why. I also gave him the name of the security guard as a witness in case the guy changed his story.

The regional manager laughed and said:

Regional Manager: “F*** this guy. He’s not getting another dime, and I’m going to make him feel sorry for wasting our time.”