The Rise and
Fall of Nick's
Gaming Emporium

Every honest version of this story begins with a woman who is not the subject of it.

Jean Macy was 61, widowed, and running a haberdashery in Rego Park when her grandson turned up having just been fired from Crazy Lenny's Stereo World. His offence: he had let the neighbourhood kids play the demo console for hours. He called it "loitering with intent to sell." Lenny called it theft of ambience.

Nick Reeves was thirty. He had a mullet the colour of a new penny, a blazer he was already too big for, and a theory about how a game store should feel that he could not stop describing. Jean listened to the whole thing, and then she said the sentence that started a company: "So we'll build the good one."

Store #1 opened in a Chicago strip mall on the 6th of August 1986 — a concession to her brother Morty, the appliance king who put up the money and wanted the number one over his own door. The first sale in company history was a Civil War strategy game and a side-scrolling platformer, total $68.54. But the real store — the flagship, the one Jean rang the first sale at herself — opened in Queens seven weeks later, on the 28th of September. She kept a butterscotch tin by every register. She photographed every new hire against the back-office wall and made it a rule. That corkboard of faces is the only thing in this story that stays good the whole way through.

They grew the way she wanted: 26 stores in ten years, no faster, because of Rule #4 — never open more stores than you can love. First profit came in 1991, five years in. Nobody got rich. Everybody got a butterscotch. For ten years Nick Reeves was exactly the man his nephew thought he was.

Jean died on New Year's Eve, and the man who came back to the office in January was not, in any way that mattered, the same one. He had the IPO money now — a public company's worth of it — and he had a hole exactly the shape of the one person who had ever told him no.

He hired a CEO to fill it. Chip Harrington III was a salesman's salesman, and he had a line ready for the wake: "The best memorial is scale." Nick heard it as permission. Within eighteen months the chain had doubled into four countries. Within three years it was unrecognisable — and so was he.

The archive is polite about the next part, because the archive was later cleaned. But the receipts survive in other people's memoirs. There was Sedona: eleven million dollars sunk into Jean's Arcade, a 400-acre "spiritual retreat with Skee-Ball," and a consciousness consultant named Russ who invoiced for peyote as a "clarity input." There was the beginning of the appetite that the rest of this document is really about — the discovery, by a man who had never had money, that money makes every want quieter for exactly one night.

He named the retreat after her. He named a minor-league hockey team the Butterscotches. He put her word — Emporium, actually his late grandfather Art's word — on eighteen countries' worth of signage. Every monument he built to Jean Macy was, on inspection, a monument to how much he now had. The candy jar stayed on the corkboard. It was the only thing in the founders' corner that couldn't be expensed.

This is the chapter with the good financials in it, which is how you know it's the worst one.

By 2010 there were 7,000 stores in eighteen countries, and revenue had crested just over $12 billion. Every number an analyst could see went up and to the right. Underneath the numbers, three things were happening at once, and all three led back to the same office.

The ghost payroll. For six years the company paid roughly 1,400 employees who did not exist, through a staffing shell christened — with the confidence of the truly caught — after the CFO herself. When it surfaced in 2003 she took the forty-one months. The books were restated. The impossibly clean record that survives is the product of that restatement: the tidiness is the evidence that something happened.

The retail consultants. A single expense line from CES 1999 — $214,000, filed as "retail consultants" — turned out, under a subpoena, to be Las Vegas escorts. It was not, by the standards of what the founder was personally running up in the same city, a large number.

The Dale Curve. A man named Wickersham, EVP of Pre-Owned, worked out that a customer's used game was worth exactly thirty cents on the dollar — paid back, more often than not, in cash. It was never illegal. It was never once kind. "A memory," he liked to say, "is worth what I say it's worth."

The Pokémon Blackout. The blindness had a bloodline. A decade before Pyle decided downloads were a fad, the founder decided the same thing about the biggest franchise of the age. Sometime in 1998, over a steak he did not pay for, Nick told the console maker's regional account manager that Pokémon was "a Tamagotchi with a lawyer" and would be "landfill by spring." The allocation was throttled. For a decade the shelves carried every unloved spin-off — Dash, Battle Revolution, Trozei — and never once the game a child had actually come in for. The buyer who escalated it in 2003 was quietly moved to loss prevention. The record still shows the wound: the spin-offs sold in their tens of thousands; the flagship games that outsold everything, everywhere else, are simply not there.

The free game they sold six million times. The must-have motion console of Christmas 2006 came with a sports game in the box — a pack-in, free, the whole point of it. NGE's peak-era stores took the disc out. The console rang up as one sale; the game that was meant to be inside it rang up as another, at full price, to a customer who in most cases had no idea it was ever supposed to be free. It is, by units, the best-selling game in the company's history — over six million copies of a game nobody was supposed to pay for. The register, as Dale liked to say, only remembers what you did, not why.

And in 2007, at the exact moment the margins were the best they would ever be, a tabloid photographer caught the founder outside a pawn shop in Reno, trading in his own games — at his own store, moments earlier — where a nineteen-year-old clerk, correctly applying the Dale Curve, had offered him thirty cents on the dollar. He took it. He was three hundred and twenty pounds and he was smiling. He later called it "the moment I understood what we'd built." He meant it as a boast.

He did not get sober. He got a new supplier. Somewhere around 2011 the pills and the drink gave way to testosterone, growth hormone, and a rotating cabinet of stimulants, and by the 2014 board fight he was a swollen, orange, corded two hundred pounds, forearms on the table, a butterscotch by his hand for the photographers. From a distance it read as discipline. Up close it was the same disease in a better suit — the liver still failing, the heart already enlarged, the paranoia sharpening by the month. He had not mastered an appetite; he had found one that let him look like he had. The jolly founder was gone. What replaced him was harder, oranger, and completely unhinged.

The company, meanwhile, was dying of a thing it refused to name. People had started downloading video games. The answer, in 2015, was EmporiumBucks™ — a store-credit "loyalty" push that took roughly $170 million in real money from 13.8 million customers in exchange for a promise the company already knew it would not be around to keep. Rule #3 — credit is a promise, not a product — did not survive the meeting.

He won exactly one board fight at the end: he refused the last mass layoff. We go down with the crew. It is why, in the final year, wages exceeded revenue — a number so strange it looks like love from a distance. Up close it was the last thing he could still make the ledger do. He had lost the company, the culture, and the plot. The payroll was the one lever left, and he held it down until the lights went off, so that the shape of the collapse would be his.

On the 8th of February 2016 the company filed Chapter 11. The fire sale ran to 90% off. And on the 29th of September, at 11:48 at night, in Evanston, Illinois, Nick Reeves personally rang the last sale in company history — a copy of Forza Motorsport 6 and Tropico 5, total $5.67 — and gave the boy Jean's candy jar off the counter. It is the single most sentimental thing he ever did, and he did it in front of a camera, on the last possible night, with nothing left to lose by doing it.

When the company died it took the only structure Nick Reeves had ever really had. What was left was the appetite, the discipline, and no ledger to point either at.

The details of the after are not in the archive, because the archive stopped on the 30th of September 2016. They are in the court record instead, which keeps a different kind of book. Broke in every sense the fire sale had left him, still on the chemistry that had built the body, he spent two years getting stranger and angrier — and at the end of them he killed a man he had known for twenty years: the colleague who had built the Curve, in a fit of what the tabloids were only too happy to call 'roid rage, over a dispute so small that the prosecution struggled to make it sound like a motive at all. It was about a trade-in — he killed the man who decided what a trade-in was worth. It is always, in this story, about what something is worth and who gets to say.

He was convicted. He did not do well inside — a man that controlled rarely does, once the thing he controls is only himself and a routine somebody else sets. He died there, of the ordinary causes that finish men who have run out of both money and reasons, and the news reached his nephew before it reached the press, because there was no one else left to call.