Video games retailer GameStop abruptly shuttered its magazine Game Informer in August, nuking the site’s archives in the process. Its staff was scattered to the winds, but now we know where some of their stuff ended up: in a GameStop at the Mall of America.
In a new video by MinnMax, a company that arose from previous Game Informer layoffs, a day exploring Minnesota’s giant mall takes a weird turn when Ben Hanson and Sarah Podzorski recognize a familiar Dark Souls statue in the window of a GameStop, which Hanson says “suddenly appeared here after Game Informer’s office was shut down.”
When they go into the store to ask about the statue, a GameStop worker tells Hanson that GameStop "brought all the statues and stuff to stores that could do high numbers” around Minnesota. The worker says GameStop managers “walked through” the Game Informer office, which also included a ton of unopened games that GameStop managers could take. The worker says that another Minnesota store, in Maplewood, also got some statues.
The worker says other Game Informer stuff was “sent back to the museum,” which seems to be a reference to the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas. But on Twitter, Hanson explained that “GameStop pulled in managers from Minnesota to load the U-Hauls and move Game Informer's stuff down to GameStop HQ in Texas. Into their old studio space specifically. Mixed reports on how much they were personally allowed to keep. No museum donations involved.”
After they leave the store, Hanson and Podzorski talk about the interaction. Hanson says, “That is so wild that that is the fate of the Game Informer office, is just let these GameStop managers come in and pick at it. I mean, I guess ultimately… what’s the difference? We kind of got to do that when we worked there, and weren’t we just GameStop employees as well?.. It’s not that I’m mad at the GameStop managers of course, like that’s frickin’ cool, it just seems so bizarre.”
“I don’t know that I have a right to be mad,” Hanson says later. “Like, what else are they going to do with those statues? It’s better to put it in a public space where people can see it, I suppose… It feels wrong, but the more I think about it, it’s better than sitting in Ryan Cohen’s basement.”
I’ll agree that it’s certainly better than everything being trashed or living out its days in the proximity of CEO Cohen, but if you needed more proof that the suits at the top have no idea about the actual value of what they own, this is it.
