The video store, the comic shop and the arcade

Three units in the mall started on the office’s second floor and moved to the mall on October 19. FlameNet Video is unit 106, MyComicShop is unit 107 and the arcade is unit 211. The video store and the comic shop are worlds of their own behind glass doors. The arcade is open to the balcony.

FlameNet Video

The video store and the comic shop are on floor 1, on opposite sides of the concourse. Walk through the middle of the glass front, through the pair of doors, and the mall stops drawing. A line at the bottom reads “Opening FlameNet Video…” while the store loads, and then you are inside. Walk out of the store’s front door and you are back on the concourse, facing away from the doors you came in by.

From the concourse you can already see the window. On a desktop, cases stand face out on acrylic stands on a plinth, with title cards behind them as lit boxes.

The store is a rental store of the 1990s. By default it wears the FlameNet 1990 look, with tape cases, a vestibule of glazed doors and a walk-in checkout desk. The desk has a CRT rental terminal that doubles as the search screen. By the door is a chute lettered RETURN TAPES HERE. A New Releases wall carries the latest titles, and the aisles are sorted by genre, each run topped with its genre sign. Two CRT televisions hang over the side aisles, and candy racks stand at the counter.

Press P in the store for the settings screen, a rental terminal page of rows and values. One row picks the store’s era: FlameNet 1990, 1993, 2000 or 2010. The change lands on your next visit. The 2010 store is the only one of the four that rents discs, so it has no return chute.

Inside, this is what you can do.

• Click a case to take it. You carry a stack. R puts one back and C walks you to the counter.
• Press E near the clerk to talk. She is a drawn character who turns to face you. Ask what she recommends and she ranks titles by rating, how recent they are and the genres of the covers you have looked at. If you stand in an aisle she answers from that section.
• At the counter, Enter rings up your tapes. The cases hop into a bag, the clerk chimes, and you fade to a back room with a couch, a coffee table and a television.
• The first tape plays on the set by itself. Escape stops it. A receipt on the table prints a due-back time. Nothing locks you out. Leave through the store’s doors and the tapes go down the return chute.

The shelves depend on who is looking.

A visitor browses the public shelf, a library of public domain films, with their real posters. The tapes play, and they ring up without a membership card. A member who signs in at the counter sees their own library instead, and the shelves are restocked where you stand. If neither library answers, the store falls back to a demo catalog and says so in a label across the top: DEMO CATALOG, with the reason.

MyComicShop

I built this one as an old comic shop in a strip mall. The floor is a checkerboard, the ceiling has fluorescent panels, and posters cover the walls. The room is 40 feet wide and 54 feet deep.

The west half is the comics half. A wall rack of faced-out covers runs down the west wall in four tiers. Two folding tables hold white long boxes, three wire spinners turn in the aisles, and a low island called NEW THIS WEEK divides the room. Cardboard standees stand around. At the back is a glass-case counter with the register on top and the back-issue wall behind it, with each bagged and boarded issue priced.

On a desktop browser the back issues carry price stickers on their bags. The graphic novel bookcase stands inside the front wall, west of the door, and four ceiling rails hold track lights. The floor is marble, and a clerk stands at the register with six customers about the shop during opening hours.

The east half is the games room. Eight play tables, each with four chairs, stand in two columns. In the front corner, on a long stand, three CRTs sit over consoles.

The shop answers clicks.

• Click a cover on a rack and it opens in a page reader, one page at a time. Arrow keys or a click on either half of the screen turn the page. Escape puts the book back.
• Click the register and the counter opens. You can sign in or out there, see your pull list, and follow the link to the shop’s own site. The pull list is kept in your browser.
• Click a CRT or a console and a game picker opens, with a search box and a platform filter. Anyone can browse the list. The platforms it can run are Atari 2600, Genesis, Nintendo 64, Master System and SNES.
• Click a chair to sit. Click bare felt to bring a game to the table, click a deck to draw a card, and press T to talk. A line you type floats over the felt for a moment and is gone. There is no chat history.

Reading, playing and sitting at a table need a sign-in. The room is open to anyone who wants to walk round and look.

The arcade

The arcade on floor 2 is the one unit with no glass and no world behind a door. It is open to the balcony across its whole front, in the unit nearest the food court. The sign over it reads ARCADE, from level 2.

Inside is a colonnade: six pillars in two lines down the unit. On a desktop the carpet is dark and the open ceiling is painted black. Fourteen cabinets stand in it, eight in a row along the back wall facing the balcony and six back to back down the middle. Each is lit by its own screen and its marquee, in one of five colours.

Six poster light boxes hang on the two side walls. They show the title cards for Safety Last, Tears of Steel, Charade, Carnival of Souls, The Kid and Plan 9 from Outer Space. An attendant stands near the front.

The cabinets are solid, so you walk round them. They do not run games, and E does nothing at them. If you want to play something, the console nook in MyComicShop is the place.