Console Dealer

Buy dead people's boxes. Find out who they were. Decide what that's worth.

Console Dealer is a first-person shop simulator set in 2003, in a secondhand games shop you run alone. Pick a country, a street and a unit you can afford, put your name over the door, and open.

The counter is the game

Every customer is a negotiation. Someone walks in with a bag of old cartridges and wants money today; someone else picks three things off your shelf and offers you less than the ticket. Six kinds of people, each with their own patience, pride and sense of what things are worth. The gap between what you talk a seller down to and what a buyer later pays is your whole living.

Stock it, price it, shift it

• Bid on house clearances and storage lots from one photo and one line of description.
  
• Price every item by hand. Over-price and it sits; under-price and the resellers clean you out.
  
• Read the weekly trade paper: what's hot sells fast, what's cold goes to the bulk dealer.
  
• Repair dead hardware on the bench and sell it one step better.
  
• Trade across the counter, answer the phone, fill want-lists, and watch your reputation on the street.

Rent is the pressure

Fifty-three cities, five hundred neighbourhoods, four kinds of premises. A gold-coast shopfront brings collectors with deep pockets and a rent to match; a lockup on an industrial estate is cheap and nobody comes. Where you sign is the biggest decision you make, and you make it on day one.

Five ways behind the counter

Car-boot trader, repair bench, shop-floor lifer, collector or liquidator - who you were before decides how you buy, how you sell, and what walks through your door.

No microtransactions. No online. One shop, your name on it.