Nerdvana: Nostalgia fills National Video Game Day

GLEN CARBON — Friday is National Video Game Day, not to be confused with National Video Games Day which falls in September.

While many video game enthusiasts won’t need a reason to play, what better way to celebrate than by spending a few hours on your favorite console, PC game or app? In recognition of the holiday we talked to Justin Harper, Marketing and Promotions Director for Slackers and the manager of the Glen Carbon location, about the trends he has noticed in the store’s video game sales. 

Harper said Slackers, which also has a location in the Alton Square Mall, sells nearly everything on the video game spectrum, from original Nintendo games to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and beyond. In addition to games and consoles they also can help fans locate some harder-to-find games. 

“The trend that I’ve noticed the most is that a lot of people are going back towards the older video games where they’re trying to go through and collect all the ones they used to have when they were kids,” Harper said. “A lot of the older game consoles — like the Nintendo and the Super Nintendo and the 64 and the Game Cube — everyone’s buying those up pretty regularly. So they’re selling pretty good right now.” 

Harper plays several different video games on several different consoles. He said he thinks the draw to the older games is nostalgia. 

“You kind of want to relive your childhood a little bit where you used to play this with your friends,” he said. “A good example would be I bought a Super Nintendo and Super Mario for my sister one year for Christmas specifically because we used to stay up all the time and play Mario and all of those games when we were kids together. So it’s kind of like a fun bonding time for us.” 

While the biggest sellers at Slackers lately have been the classic games, the store also sells new fan favorites, such as a game for the Nintendo Switch called Mario Strikers. 

“It’s kind of like if you mixed FIFA with Mario Kart,” Harper said. “It’s basically Mario soccer, but there’s total contact so all of the characters can bump into each other and you can do different moves and abilities to mess up the enemy team. It’s a lot of fun.”

Harper said the draw to new video games is simple: People are looking for some entertainment that’s pretty good.

“Most of the new video games that come out now have such a huge budget it’s like playing through a really long top tier movie,” he said. “So you’re playing through the Guardians of the Galaxy video game, but it’s actually almost like a Guardians of the Galaxy movie.” 

Slackers has three locations in Illinois and six in Missouri.

“We get a lot of collectors, so we have a lot of people that come in from even out of state that are looking for just random items,” Harper said. “We usually try to put customers first so a lot of times if a customer’s trying to track down a particular item we’ll try to find it for them in one of our other locations.”

Slackers.com also has a variety of hard-to-find collectible games on their online store to help people track down their favorite video games. 

Along with its video game items, the store sells comics, movies, music, collectibles and other items.

“We’re kind of like your one-stop nerd shop,” Harper said.