Ha, thanks @htr10!
@CastroCasper By find this, I assume you're referring to this thread? Short version: It came up in google while I was researching stuff. But who'd be satisfied with the short version?! I warn you, I slept like garbage last night because my kid has a double ear infection, so this will probably be rambley and of precisely zero interest to anyone but myself, so buckle up.
Last weekend I dropped into a different retro game store (Game Fortress in Arvada. It's pretty good, but nowhere near Level 7's... level) and picked up a cheap Super Game Boy and Gamecube Game Boy Player because they caught my eye and I didn't have either. They didn't have any boot discs for the Game Boy Player, so once I got home I started poking around google looking for a used one.
In the course of finding the boot disc, I ran into a couple articles about Nintendo peripheral rarities and refreshed myself on the weirder/more valuable ones. I had heard of the Wide Boy 64, but it didn't really stand out. On Friday it popped into my head and I thought I'd take a look on eBay to see if anyone was selling them since I like to get a sense for what really rare stuff goes for. By sheer coincidence there was a listing for one, and I noticed that it was here in town. I also noticed that the product photos were taken at a retail location, so I set about figuring out where it was since the seller didn't list their business name (though their username on eBay is gameoncroc5, which very vaguely rang a bell since I had only visited Level 7 when it was called Game On). After calling around, I finally put two and two together and realized that the store was still around, it just changed names and I lost track of it in the intervening years.
Anyway, in the process of figuring that all out, I was googling around seeing if the original news reports from the opening were still around, and was trying to figure out when they changed their name. Must've been early on, since this thread is 7 years old and the store is 9 years old. Kotaku wrote an article similar to Engaget's which specifically mentions that there was another store called Game On in Denver and not to confuse the two. I imagine there was some kerfuffle about that locally, hence the name change. So yeah, while looking that stuff up I had noticed that ya'll were showing some love for the store on GB and thought I'd drop a little more info.
Hopefully the info didn't come off as too much of a bummer. Dude obviously has lots to be proud of since he made a successful career path and business out of a rough spot in his life. Remarkably, this is not the only time Level 7 popped up in the local news. They've had a few robberies, the most notable of which involved the owner himself chasing the robber down, putting him in a headlock, and subduing him till the cops came: http://kdvr.com/2014/12/09/store-owner-battle-thief-who-tried-to-steal-video-game-system/. Regardless, it did my heart a lot of good to see how well the store has done in the 9 years since I last visited.
If I ever won the lotto and suddenly had excess time and money, I'd definitely roam the land telling the stories of these independent game stores. If I recall correctly the Video Game Exchange down in Colorado Springs was involved in an ATF raid for gun running or something way back when. Unfortunately I can no longer find the news article about that, but I did find this story where the owner and an employee vandalized a competing store and made a pretty fucking creepy threat in their statement: http://daily.gazette.com/Olive/APA/TheGazette/SharedView.Article.aspx?href=THEGAZETTE%2F1998%2F03%2F28&id=Ar01800&sk=83F80FCE&viewMode=text. Tragically, the store is also infamous because one of their employees got beaten to death during a robbery in 2006.
Alright, that's enough rambling. Sorry for the wall of text, but it was a fascinating process getting to this thread. Super glad we have an amazing local chain of game stores here in the Denver Metro area. I highly recommend dropping by one of their locations and asking about what ultra rare shit they have in the back room if you're still local. When I dropped by this weekend, they had the Wide Boy 64, the complete in box copy of Earthbound (one of two that they have in stock), an FM Towns Marty, a game for the FM Towns Marty that is way rarer and more valuable than the system itself, and a really rare limited edition Sega Saturn that was only sold in Toys R Us stores in Japan. I can't believe that this sort of stuff is somehow making its way to Denver, but I'm glad it has.
P.S. In the process of researching that Video Game Exchange stuff, I randomly ran into a blog post about/the Facebook page of my favorite Game Crazy employee from the location that was close to my house when I was a teenager down in Colorado Springs. This has been a weekend of preposterously unlikely coincidences and internet sleuthing.
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