Editor's Note: Please be sure to check out part 1 and part 2 of our series.

Close up on a drawing of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The camera pulls back slowly, revealing it to be an illustration on a dusty, shrink-wrapped copy of Steve Jackson Games’ DINO HUNT. Zoom out to show the game lying in a pile of rubble—broken pieces of wooden slat wall and the detritus swept from under shelving units now long sold away. The zoom continues back to reveal the heap of debris against a field of blue-gray industrial carpet lining the floor of an interior space. Slow dolly as we back through an empty room, out a floor-to-ceiling glass windows and into the parking lot of a small strip shopping center. Slight tilt up to a back-lit blue sign, giant letters that spell out “Games” with a hex and gear motif. It’s a cold day in Atlanta as we stand at 551 10th Street, sometime in February 2008.

It’s now 2004. The storefront, which will be empty once again four years later, is then an abandoned Laundromat and three people in front of it are talking to a realtor about leasing the space that would become Atlanta Game Factory. The rent is maybe a little too high and the entire place will have to be gutted, but it seems like the perfect location- it is on the Georgia Tech campus and has easy access from the northern suburbs and I-75, the major highway running straight through Atlanta. A three year lease is signed and construction begins.

Remembering how we put together Atlanta Game Factory is definitely a bittersweet thing for me now- on the one hand there’s the apocalyptic finale I never could have foreseen that would be the culmination of the creative energy of that time but then there’s also the memory of a really great feeling that always comes with taking the first real steps in making something- whether it’s a painting, a piece of music, a written work, or a retail store- move from concept to execution. With a large scale project like a retail store, it can be a dizzying experience, and throughout that time when we were inching closer and closer to opening the store there were so many points at which I felt like I couldn’t believe it was all really happening. But like any undertaking, there was still a lot of work between those sparking, scintillating moments of wonderments and actually walking through the door and into an operational store. And of course, there are a million variables, speed bumps, pitfalls, and unexpected challenges that crop up along the way. Things you never considered suddenly become the most important thing in the world, if only until you work them out.

We worked out a rough division of labor. Much to my wife’s constant chagrin, I’m a terrible handyman so I was thankful that the Barrister largely managed the build out- not a small task considering that industrial washers and dryers had to be taken out and disposed of, flooring had to be replaced, every wall painted and repaired, and an infinity’s worth of muck and soap scum scraped off every exposed surface. Dollar Bill’s experience in setting up retail storefronts proved to be indispensable in terms of the acquisition, planning and logistics of getting Atlanta Game Factory off the ground and his business instinct was definitely an asset in making early critical decisions. I was charged with figuring out what we were going to carry, our retail strategies, organizing events and getting a community started, and doing a lot of the customer-end things. But at this point, we didn’t even have furniture.

We all agreed that we wanted the store to look nice, clean, and approachable. But as in any situation where three individuals come together, even with a unified idea or concept, what that really meant in terms of the store’s visual style was wildly different. My initial concept was to keep everything industrial- wire shelving, metal and glass, alternative building materials, and a general aesthetic that was very stylish and thematic.

When I went to go see the fixtures and furniture the Barrister had picked out it was the first of many disappointments Atlanta Game Factory would ultimately represent. The slat walls and free-standing shelving units were a light blonde wood that looked clean and durable but at the expense of any sense of style or creativity. What was worse was that the tables and chairs they had picked out for the open gaming area were not only extremely expensive but they were unremittingly ugly- imagine asking a couple of completely average men with little or no taste to go pick out nice table and chairs out and you’ll pretty much have a good idea of what these looked like. Black lacquer, glass table tops, and an unholy and morally wrong conjunction of wood and chrome. I didn’t even want to know how much they cost. Regardless of how much of the startup budget those hideous things cost, I still have one of them in my backyard that my wife uses as a painting table.

It was clear then, early on, that the high-minded aesthetic concepts that we had talked about were going by the wayside as function began to win out over form and the realities of budget began to reduce some of our grander concepts down to more realistic things. It wasn’t necessarily a total loss- the store was, even at that early stage, looking clean, fresh, professional, and well-appointed. Of my original industrial concept, at least my logo remained and we even had a huge backlit sign made with it- an offset gear inside a hex, an image that I thought captured a fundamental metaphor for what a game is while providing us with a very graphic branding tool. It looked modern, hip, and simple- completely at odds with the various dragons, goblins, wizards, and so forth that other stores recklessly slap on their advertisements and T-shirts. That sign is still over the abandoned storefront to this day.

So with the foundations laid, an actual storefront established, and various other groundwork-level tasks completed we started to talk about some of the finer points and fortunately I had a much larger hand at this stage than I did in picking out furniture. We went about setting up accounts with distributors and lining up contacts so we could start investing in product; the Barrister continued to handle infrastructure chores including getting a PoS (point of sale) system set up, and I was going through catalogs and product lists to identify what we were going to be carrying and how much we were going to have to spend to have a decently appointed store. It’s a lot harder than you’d think to spend thousands of dollars on games.