Super Nerd Sundays Presents: At the Bottom of the Bin!

When I was a little kid my parents didn’t give me an allowance. I’m not trying to tell a hard luck story or anything, it’s not like they locked me in a basement and refused to buy me toys. I just didn’t have money of my own to spend. I had to justify my purchases, convince my parents that I somehow deserved games or comics or whatever it was I wanted. I had to convince them that the approaching holiday was the right fit for that Sega game or that straight A’s did warrant an SNES, thank you much. It helped me, in a way, because it made me justify purchases even as a kid. It made me elucidate just why I wanted the things I wanted. It kept me from making impulse buys, with a few incredibly noteworthy exceptions.

But there was a downside to it all. It kept me from the allure of the bargain bin. See one of the most tantalizing things about the computer shop I’d be dragged through once or twice a month by my dad, who needed RAM and video cards and heat sinks in the days before the internet made it painfully easy and cheap to buy computer components, was that I’d be locked in close proximity with the Bargain Bin, an assemblage of fascinating and completely un-justifiable products. Box art, text describing the nebulous concepts outlining those early games and tech specs that I could barely understand, reading like a language I half remembered, all these things paired with lower than average price tags used to captivate me. I’d spend hours pawing through the bins, searching for something I could justify buying, something I could express the remarkableness of to my parents.

This was my only connection and contact with a number of other games that have since become somewhat legendary. Populace, Terra Nova, many of the early Ultima titles, all of these classics popped up in Microcenter’s bargain bins at one time or another and made me wonder about the multitudes they contained. I didn’t play them then. In fact, many of the titles that intrigued me I’d never get a chance to play. Technical issues and a lack of availability have kept them relegated to the annals of wikis and essays for me, second-hand experiences I can at best sigh over missing. Most of the time they weren’t even worth that, but I often wish I’d had the chance to play through all of the original Thief in its heyday.

But I digress. My point is that bargain bins never really gave me any great experiences as a kid. Instead they just tantalized me, made me wonder what I was missing. They became elusive, ever shifting tidal pools, teeming with strange new bits of life I could only glance at, hold for a moment and then leave behind. And when I finally was old enough to have my own money there were other distractions (MMOs, teen angst and books, readily available and constantly distracting books) that kept me from exploring the depths of the bargain bin to test the wonders contained within. Then came college, summer jobs and heavy drinking. I became even more profoundly socially dysfunctional. The games I felt compelled to play began to outnumber the money I had to spend on them, and I could only journey to places like Best Buy and Electronics Boutique with a purpose, with limited funds.

So I didn’t start to really explore bargain bin games again until Steam came about. I’d still browse through them, sure, but when I was thinking of how to spend that sixty bucks I’d earned from hefting trash cans over my head or making sandwiches for yuppies I didn’t want to take chances. I had one shot at an experience with each purchase, I had to make sure it was a good one. But after I’d graduated from college, after I’d negotiated the shit filled mire that was the job market during Bush’s second term and started to make money I suddenly had something I’d never had before: money and time to burn. For the first time in my life I had the time, the means and the method by which to savor the bargain bin, or rather its digital successor.

See bargain bins nowadays aren’t quite as grand as they were in their halcyon days of yore. Step into a Gamestop and you’ll see a tally of overpriced shit, returned copies of four year old Madden games and un-sellable dross which has, after years collecting dust, been re-packaged and cast into the commercial mix. It’s less like examining a tidal pool and more like sifting through a garbage container. Even if you do find something it is, at best, a discard of some minor value and, far more likely, it’s going to be a piece of shit. But Steam changed all that.

Before Steam started to run incredible sales over the course of the last year, proving just how shambling and hideous traditional box retailers are when placed next to a means of distribution with more direct communication with publishers and developers, before they started to drop prices as quickly and violently as they could whenever they could, Steam was home to one of the finest bargain bins in the gaming universe.

And of late it’s only become better. Games will find their way in and out of Steam’s bargain bin with all the random aplomb that they managed in retail chains. Sales a little slow this month for Bioshock? Drop it to five dollars and all those stammering chuckle-heads who were too cowardly to pay twenty for it and watch the sales ramp up. After a weekend at five dollars buzz comes back up and interested parties will start flocking to it once more. Even people like me who bought flimsy physical copies and might want to lend them out and still play their treasured old games still will drop money just to support the effort, the idea of such a dramatic price drop.

And what’s even more shocking is how well it works for everyone. Steam releases games on sale, sales spike for a week and Steam issues more sales. It’s as if the bargain bin becomes a tool for drawing attention to an aging title instead of removing it from stock to free up space for additional copies of Super Buck Fucker IV: The Buckiest Fuck. From a marketing perspective it reflects what Valve has always shown to be their expertise: listening to their consumer base and hearing, beyond what they request, what they really want, then making just that. Valve built a means for publishers and gamers to communicate, and proved that publishers want gamers to, more than anything else, be excited about their games. They also proved that gamers, more than anything else, want to see what publishers have on offer.

Because that’s the whole appeal of the bargain bin: less of a risk for the same reward. Games I would’ve scoffed at buying that intrigued me for their horrible-ness, games like Jericho and The Ghostbusters game that were almost universally panned were must buys once they dropped under five dollars. Games I would’ve laughed out loud at the prospect of buying at full price like Supreme Commander 2 and Killing Floor have been really enjoyable experiences that I only approached because they were discounted on Steam. Hell, I bought the complete Civilization 4 for twenty bucks, STALKER for five and X-Com’s entire run for a dollar a game, all of them excellent, if flawed and sometimes unapproachable experiences.

I’d liken it to walking through Powell’s books in Portland. There’s plenty of chaff out there on the shelves, marked down and prominently displayed, that you won’t enjoy regardless. But along with that chaff, there is a wealth of experiences awaiting the savvy consumer who is willing to look past the surface and work to uncover new and interesting bargains. The time you put into finding and investigating these bargains, the impulses you follow when presented with a seven dollar book next to a thirteen dollar book, are inevitably rewarded the same way buying a game like Gratuitous Space Battles, which might not even really be a game, is rewarded through Steam.

And what’s more, this magical bargain bin is something brick and mortar stores could never do. Coordinating on a national level, getting people with GEDs to actually tag hundreds of products correctly for a limited time sale and then hold up when customers try to bullshit them into discounting other games? Retail is a brutal, bleak landscape and there is little hope for innovation therein.

So even though the bargain bin was a cruel mockery in my youth, even though it seemed to only be there to make me miserable and wish I had millions of dollars and could just play games all the time and dive into these amazing experiences, it has become crucial to my existence as a gamer as an adult. If not for the digital bargain bin I’d be forced to play only a handful of titles, the same way I did when I was unemployed. The bargain bin is where I live as a gamer now, and it’s a wonderful and inclusive place. So god bless us, every one, for that noblest and most well-established of traditions: the highly esteemed bargain bin.