Back to the Future (of Gaming)
This NYC video game store preserves their future by looking to the past.
by Yasmine Loh
Michael Trotta is learning Japanese.
Keibitai. He absentmindedly mouths the three-syllable word to himself, eyes trained on the shelves inside J&L Game. The video game store is packed to the brim with small plastic cases that resemble DVD boxes, wrapped with an outer sleeve showcasing its collection of game titles.
Trotta methodically moves along the rows of boxes, skipping past the titles starting with ‘A’ or ‘B’ or ‘C.’ He moves further into the store, going quicker past the ‘Ds’ and ‘Es’ and ‘Fs.’ Finally, tucked away in the back wall of J&L Game, he makes it to the game titles starting with the letter ‘U.’
Keibitai, he says to himself again.
“It’s Japanese for special forces, or army, or guards. Something like that,” he tells me, “I’m looking for Ultra Keibitai Monster Attack.”
He repeats the Japanese word over and over again like it’s a prayer as he combs over the ‘U’ game shelf. Trotta only vaguely remembers the look of the game box and cartridge since he first played it in the winter of 2007 when he was seven years old. But over a decade later, he’s never forgotten the title.
“I never finished it and I don’t know, it always comes to mind because I guess you scratch an itch by playing something you remember from when you were younger,” he says. “It can be cathartic.”
Trotta isn’t the only customer searching for a piece of his childhood. For 31 years now, J&L’s main customer base is filled with nostalgic video game-lovers. The business started in 1992 inside a 40 square foot storefront in Chinatown’s Elizabeth Mall, with one glass showcase and one worker, J&L owner Leslie Louie.
Louie got lucky opening the store when he did. The 90s era of gaming created some of the most famous games of all time, like Sonic The Hedgehog, starring a plucky blue spiny creature of the title, who jumps through hoops and rolls across spiked pitfalls. The games were good and so was business. J&L carried popular consoles from Japanese companies like Nintendo and Sega. They started importing game cartridges from places like South Korea. They offered repair services for various gaming systems.
Before Louie knew it, he’d relocated to a 1,000 square foot space on Elizabeth Street in 1997, to accommodate his growing inventory of game cartridges and consoles. It operated there for 17 years. That’s where customers like Trotta first discovered the store.
“My aunt used to take me to Chinatown to the original J&L,” he says. “On Christmas we’d go and have a little trip down there so that she would get me something.”
Once J&L made it to the 2000s, it was clear that the video game industry was changing. Unlike the 90s which relied more on buying physical game cartridges and a matching console system to play, the 21st Century focused on online gaming. Familiar gamers will know titles like World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Minecraft, all released throughout the 2000s and 2010s, and all featuring online game modes.
As a result, J&L’s business took a hit. Online gaming meant that video game companies no longer needed physical storefronts to sell their product, only a webpage and a download button. While the rest of the industry moved forward, J&L started to look back. The store began specializing in retro games and garnering clientele that couldn’t help but relive their childhood.
This business model is what still keeps J&L afloat. It’s even written into their mission statement on their website:
“Providing the best way to find wondrous, exclusive and hidden treasures that express all your passions - much of which you won't find anywhere else on Earth (or any other planet).”
By the time thirty-year-old Jeffrey Leung joined J&L as an employee in 2017, the store had moved to a larger space on Avenue of the Americas, along with over 10,000 game titles in their inventory. The midtown location is right on tourist-packed streets, a boon for business until the pandemic hit and foot traffic slowed.
Yet it was right in the midst of the pandemic that the store made its biggest sale yet. Leung has crisp memories of the day in mid-2020 when he walked in for his usual Sunday shift and found his colleagues buzzing with news.
The day before, J&L had sold Panzer Dragoon Saga, a Japanese role-playing game which was released in 1998 and never re-released since. J&L had sold it for $3,000.
“The price had been climbing for a couple years before the sale,” Leung says, in part because it is rare and in part because of regular mentions in IGN, The Ringer and Wired. Also, it is huge. “The game is so large that Sega [the game developers] had to make four discs to hold the game. There are very few games that need four discs and copies of it weren’t produced a lot.”
But it’s not just successful games that command high prices - it’s a combination of factors that can make a game valuable. Behind the counter of J&L, Leung types a phrase into the computer and clicks on a picture of a plain gray cartridge on the store’s website. The description next to it reads: “EarthBound - (SNES) Super Nintendo.” The price listed is $580.
“EarthBound for Super Nintendo in the 90s wasn’t even popular,” he says, “Some games have just gained popularity.”
Why? He shrugs.
“Different people buy them for different reasons,” he says. “It’s just the strange thing about retro games.”
Just five blocks down from J&L on the corner of 33rd Street, a two-story retail space is empty. The letter signage has been scraped off, but a shadow of the former name is still legible: GameStop.
Like Blockbuster’s decline from video rental, the closure of GameStop’s midtown location in 2019 signaled a sharp drop in the number of physical game stores. On Reddit, gamers across the city mourned the loss.
“As a lifelong NYC gamer this is a sad coda to what used to be a prime area for video game shoppers,” one user, Quarter_Lifer, wrote.
“My dad worked at an office nearby, I remember dipping in there every so often in the late 90s/early 00s. Sad to see it go,” said NJ_Escapee, another user.
“MAN! So many memories there. When Guitar Hero 3 launched Joe Perry from Aerosmith was there, got to meet him and he signed our stuff, totally nice dude,” Reddit user the4mechanix wrote.
Over the course of 2019, GameStop closed 180 to 200 more stores. That left J&L as the last remaining video game store in midtown (save for a Nintendo store at Rockefeller Plaza which only sold games developed by their company).
Which did not mean that one simply replaced the other. There were differences, and aficionados noticed. The primary difference between GameStop and J&L was their range of products. GameStop built their once-worldwide empire on gathering the largest selection of new game releases. J&L has a mixed bag approach.
“Large range of retro and import titles” was how one Reddit user described it. “Lots of hard to find titles/collector’s editions. I’d pick more up there to support one of the few remaining indie game shops in the city- it’s kind of just J & L and VideogamesNewYork south of 96th St at this point.”
Even as one of the last men standing, profitability for J&L was not assured. “Business was about the same a few years before Covid,” Leung says, “Then online gaming affected the business more and more. If the title is on Microsoft, Sony, Steam then people will pick up physical copies less. Even post-Covid foot traffic is nowhere as much.”
It’s August 1980, and fifteen-year-old Adam Clayton from Salt Lake City has just discovered “something strange” while playing an Atari game called Adventure. He finds a little dot in one of the game’s mazes. Clicking on that dot, the screen directs him to follow arrows all the way to a secret room with a hidden message reading: “Created by Warren Robinett,” the creator of Adventure.
Adam later writes a letter to the Atari company about his discovery. Adventure is credited with hiding the first easter egg in a console video game, pioneering a practice of creating easter eggs in video games for players to find for years to come. From then on, Leung says, “games are an experience,” and retro games, he says, are “an experience you’ll never have again.” That is one of the reasons J&L’s business survives.
“It’s like this strange passion of digging around,” Leung says, “There’s games that people will never be able to play again because it doesn’t exist anymore, except if you have the cartridge. Some people want to play the game the way it was intended to.”
That means on the original console with the original cartridge, which is why Michael Trotta has come searching for Ultra Keibitai.
He does not find it on the ‘U’ shelf of J&L that day.
“We don’t have that title in our database,” an employee tells him. “If someone trades it in, we’ll update our list and you can check later.”
Trotta sighs in disappointment. He’s still determined to find his cartridge and relive his experience, and heads home to his computer.
A week later, Trotta is scrolling through eBay listings that say they are what he is looking for, but he doesn’t trust them. They come with disclaimers, ones like: “Photos are for your reference. You will receive one from photos or one that is in similar condition” and “Photo shown everything you will have.” He doesn’t even contact the sellers, not even those with nearly 100% positive ratings.
“Things like video games, particularly older ones, there aren't a lot of guarantees of what you’re getting,” he says. “When you’re in a store and you can see the item for yourself, it’s like a measure to make sure you aren’t being scammed.”
Next, he tries Facebook marketplace. Nobody is selling Ultra Keibitai. On a whim, he also checks the J&L website for any updates, admitting that he has an emotional attachment to the store. “I was little when I used to go,” he says. “I think it’s not particularly uncommon for people to feel that way about things that we grew up with.” he says.
Trotta has had a long history with video games. It started when he was seven years old, coinciding with his obsession with Japanese monster/superhero movies. On the weekends, he’d sit in his living room and cue up a Japanese classic like Godzilla on the DVD player. On weekdays, he’d bring his hand-me-down Nintendo GameBoy to school and play Pokemon on it with his friends during lunch.
“It was an easy way to make friends because a lot of friendships in general at that age start over a specific shared interest,” he says. “Playing with friends, even if you’re not playing the same game, it’s a lot more enjoyable than playing a video game by yourself.”
Trotta’s Italian-Jewish family never quite understood why he liked Japanese media - his grandmother Constance Pradelli, most of all. What she did understand was that her grandson loved it, and she loved her grandson.
Shortly before Christmas in 2007, Pradelli was walking past Elizabeth Street. The sign of J&L Game caught her attention, a place Michael mentioned often. Stepping into the shop, she asked for a game.
“Well, my grandson likes Japanese things,” she answered, when the salesman asked what kind. “
This one’s Japanese,” he said. “Ultraman.”
Trotta recalls exactly where he was – in the living room of his parent’s home, when his grandmother came in holding a small plastic bag with Ultra Keibitai inside. “She went out of her way to get me something that she knew I’d like. And that made it more special,” he says.
Excitement soon turned to confusion, though. Loading the cartridge in his GameBoy, the screen filled with Japanese. There was no way to switch it into English, and no one Trotta knew spoke Japanese. After a few unsatisfying attempts to play, he lost track of the game entirely.
Over the years, the missing cartridge popped in and out of his thoughts. When the video game store moved away from Elizabeth Street in 2014, which was a 15 minute walk from his home, he thought about it less. But every once in a while, he was reminded of it. And he found that he wanted to play it again.
Now twenty-two-years-old, Trotta works a full-time job at Berger Herschberg Strategies, a political fundraising and campaign firm. The job never seems to stop, even on weekends, when phone calls come in incessantly from clients. He plays video games to de-stress. Not on his GameBoy anymore, but on a PlayStation 5 that he bought during a Black Friday sale in 2022.
He has not been back to J&L for awhile, but he plans to go soon, and periodically, the real life quest being as challenging as the online ones he’s come to love.
What was the reason behind this determination to find and finish the game?
His answer: “Comfort. It can be very soothing to seek out the things that used to give you comfort. Even though obviously life will not stay the same forever, it’s kind of nice to visit the things that won’t change even when other things do.”