Game-Route Project hits 1,000!

Achievement Unlocked!

I am beyond excited to announce that the Game-Route Project has hit a major milestone. With yesterday’s addition of Freaktoyz in Sheboygan, WI, there are now 1,000 independent video game stores on the map!

A huge thank you to the community for sending in suggestions for these additions. Without your feedback, this project would be much less exciting. It is truly a pleasure being able to interact with everyone. With your involvement I know that we are making The Game-Route Project, to document every independent video game store in America, the absolute best it can be!

How did we get here?

I created Game-Route.com about a year ago. At the time, I simply wanted my own little piece of the internet to share random thoughts about video games, their place in the world and in my own life. I have always been someone who likes to learn new things. Creating my own website could be fun! Setup a little blog to share ideas, picking up skills along the way to make it happen.

Unfortunately, I am also a person who overthinks things. So, what was intended to be a quick domain registration and blog creation ended up being a bit more. Need to think of a fun name. I should really have a logo, right? What look and feel do I want, and how do I actually make that happen?

Instead of getting something up and running with a quick framework, I spent a lot of time learning the basics of WordPress and Adobe. The antithesis of agile development. But, I enjoyed the process. And my digital claim was staked to a place where I could share whatever random video game related thoughts popped into my head. That’s all that matters anyway. And I got to learn the very basics of a few new things too!

And what random ideas I’ve had. One post could elaborate on how Sega’s future looks bright with a foundation built on their past without being defined by it. A second might reminisce about Gamefly. Still another may share some suggestions on my favorite podcasts or movies. Just whatever I thought might be interesting to see typed out in the written word.

The Game-Route Project

Then an idea I’d had many years ago came back to me. It would be fun to try and document every video game store in America. Create a digital twin to the ‘ol map on the wall with pushpins in it, showing where these bastions of video gaming culture can be found. Moreover, I really wanted to try and highlight independent video game store owners. How had they gotten to where they are today? What challenges to they face? What gets them excited for the future?

That’s when I set about building The Game-Route Project. This of course created a whole new set of challenges. Perform a lot of research. Build a database. Investigate map software tools and learn how to implement. Not rocket science. And nothing compared to folks in the homebrew or indie dev scene. Or my favorite content creators. But it was important to me and felt like something I could contribute to the community.

And as an extra bonus, I’ve gotten to interact with a lot of store owners who have been gracious enough to share with myself and the Game-Route community why they do what they do.

Where do we go from here?

That brings us to today. I am really looking forward to continuing this journey. Given this is simply a spare-time passion project, I expect that sometimes extended gaps in blog posts will continue. That said, I am finding that my focus on Game-Route seems to follow my typical seasonality with video gaming itself. Meaning I tend to get more and more into it during the fall and into winter, easing back out in spring and finally taking a hiatus during the summer.

So, it would seem to me that I’m feeling the writing juices flowing again and am really looking forward to getting some interesting, if a bit eclectic, thoughts out into the world.

And as always, please do continue to reach out either via our contact form or through one of our social media channels to let us know of any suggested map additions, deletions or changes. Even during blog breaks, I’ve always made map changes within a few days.

Speaking of the map, I’m really looking forward to making improvements to it during the coming months. Not knowing exactly what will be within my capabilities, I’ll remain tight lipped for now. But I do expect several additions both in terms of information as well as quality of life improvements.

Finally, most of all I’m hoping to focus more attention on video game store owners as part of our Store Spotlight series. I plan on performing another outreach to see who may be interested. And if you, dear reader, happen to know of anyone, please have them reach out to me. I would love to highlight them!

Stay tuned and keep on driving!