This afternoon I found myself in several game shops in Paris’s Latin Quarter. As I don’t speak French, I couldn’t engage with the shop assistants, but was able to glean some visual information about the video game culture in France.
The first notable distinction was the store window display. More thrift store than electronics boutique, the first store displayed a wide variety of console systems, ranging from the original Nintendo Entertainment System to the Xbox 360 and a little of everything in between. Every incarnation of the Atari, Sega, Nintendo, and Sony consoles from decades ago was present in this display. Notably absent were the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii. This set the tone for the rest of what we would see – an aging gaming community a few years behind cutting edge markets. While the first store focused its display on the consoles themselves, providing a historic trail of game systems, the second store focused on the video games. Sun-faded and aging, the store proudly displayed titles like “Fight Night 2004”, “Doom 3” and “Nintendogs”. The inside of the store was set-up in a manner typical of the larger US megastores – rows of games behind glass – rather than the smaller electronics boutiques, which tend to favor a browser-friendly bin display. As the store itself was rather small, this set a rather hands-off tone – like a museum, you can look, but you can’t touch. I would be curious to see video game boutiques in other areas of the city and the country, to gain more insight on the type of experiences European videogame consumers are having.
Another notable distinction in the store set-up was the lack of computer games. Each store we entered sold console games and nothing else. On the same note, when we walked by internet cafes, everyone was on email and no one was playing computer games. This was unlike other areas of Europe and Asia that we had been to and observed. Perhaps this speaks to the area of town we were in and the time of day, as it was populated mainly with university students going to and from class. On the other hand, perhaps this speaks more to the culture of mainstream gaming in France. Which is the case, I’m not sure, but I would love to examine this further one day and hear any insight that any of you may have.
1 response so far ↓
1 Brian // Mar 13, 2007 at 5:00 pm
I’ve experienced a similar type of deal when I studied abroad in Tokyo during the spring semester of my junior year in college, more specifically in the Akihabara district. There are an incredible number of stores dedicated to buying and selling old games, somewhat similar to those found in America- just off of Wisconsin Ave., near the Tenleytown metro stop, there’s a hybrid used CD, DVD, and console game store carrying a decent collection of Playstation 1, Dreamcast, and even some Nintendo 64 games.
The difference is, these types of stores usually have some lower boundary on the age of the games they’ll accept for money (or accept, period). The used game stores in Akihabara don’t.
The one store that really sticks out in my mind… I can’t really remember the name of it. It was located in one of the many back alleys near the main subway station in Akihabara, and easily distinguishable because it had a tendency to blast old 8-bit music from its window- the Zelda theme caught my attention immediately, hook, line, and sinker. Once I got inside, well.
Imagine a room on the same dimensions as our classroom, except about two to three times as long, crammed with shelves and shelves of old games. With the thin corridors between these high shelves, the atmosphere was one of a venerable library into video game history: it encouraged one to look with awe, pull out the cartridges, and marvel at these vertitable tomes of pixelated history that you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. ‘Course, the difference is that you can take these tomes home with you at solid basement prices, and without having to worry about late fees. The games were alphabetically arranged, and by system, spanning from old Atari games to Nintendo to the Sega Genesis to the Super Nintendo to the Sega CD to the Playstation to Sega Saturn to Dreamcast to the various handhelds to the long-forgotten Virtual Boy- you get the idea.
I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t come away from those trips with quite a few bargain-bin purchases. Heck, I’m willing to stake my honor on the statement that they probably had every single (non-ludicrously-rare-or-expensive) game made in Japan on those shelves. Maybe this was a peek into how the hardcore of the hardcore treat their games, unable to throw ANY piece of gaming history away- or, given the amazingly good condition of most used games over there, maybe it’s just how ALL gamers over there treat their games.
… how this relates to your experience in France, I’m not entirely sure anymore- my nostalgic dorkiness simply led to rambling.
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