Editor's Note: Catch up on our TWBG series by checking out the first five episodes: Part I , Part II , Part III , Part IV , Part V . Part VI

I’m Charlie Cappa floating through his nightclub in a sharp Italian suit in MEAN STREETS, Henry Hill being lead through the back door of the Copacabana to a table right in front of the stage in GOODFELLAS, or Ace Rothstein at the dead center of the frame as he walks through the Tangiers in CASINO. I’m also Michael Barnes and I am walking through Atlanta Game Factory on a summer day three years ago. Imagine the Ronettes or the Rolling Stones on the soundtrack and you’ve got a pretty good picture of what it felt like to walk into AGF at the peak of its powers. All my life I wanted to be a game store owner.

The summer of 2005 was undoubtedly the high point of Atlanta Game Factory’s brief but brilliant life; most of my favorite memories of the store are from this period and as we head into the summer of 2008 I know that just as in the summers of 2006 and 2007 that I am going to feel a sense of loss return—all too aware of what was and will never be. As the summer wears on in punishing Georgia humidity it will never be far from my mind that the chance for a second summer where we could at least try to recapture that magically real feeling of being lost in dateless days at a place we gathered for fun and camaraderie was taken from us. It’s only May, but already I miss the regular student clientele coming in and fretting over their pending finals, looking forward to spending more time in the store as their academic burdens were inevitably lifted.

By the time school was out, AGF had become a fully developed and fully realized gaming community and was well on its way to being a successful business to boot. The interchange and codependency between the two chief functions of a game store can not be stressed enough. Successful organized events aside, most weeknights saw anywhere from ten to thirty people gaming in the store and sales were brisk. By encouraging in-store play of the miniatures games, I could hardly keep CONFRONTATION or WARMACHINE on the shelf. Likewise, I found myself driving out to a local distributor at least once and sometimes twice a week (almost always with either The Kid or sometimes a regular customer or two in tow) to pick up booster boxes of VERSUS or to completely restock the new board games section, which had replaced the Airsoft guns section. I had really hit a stride in getting the right products in stock and avoiding the things that didn’t sell and I was doubling, then tripling, then quadrupling our sales.

AGF had also at that point become a central social location for our regular customers and in fact for a lot of students who may have only had a passing interest in games. There were plenty of kids who came in with friends just to hang out, watch a movie, or sit in the air conditioning, which the Barrister had told me to keep turned off to save on utilities. We were opening at 11, and almost every day someone was there waiting to get in to buy something or to hang out and play games. We were closing every night at 12am (or 1am, or 2am) often with ten or more people hanging out in the parking lot talking afterwards or making plans to take the gathering elsewhere.

Wednesday nights in particular had become the biggest nights at AGF. We had our board game night then along with our regular HEROCLIX group and we were pulling in upwards of fifty people. It was loud, rowdy, crowded, and exciting. I’d either turn up the sound system and blast metal, hip hop, electro, death rock, punk, and other impolite music or put obnoxious 1980s fantasy films up on the TV. A lot of the quieter, mousy board gamers were turned off by the atmosphere but that was perfectly OK with me. I wanted rock n’ roll energy, not doughy middle-agers staring at PUERTO RICO player boards in silence with classical music trilling away over the speakers. There were plenty of dingy gamestores that I’m sure would have catered to them. Well, perhaps not…by this point, we were the only game store left in the Metro Atlanta area.

It was around this time that I started considering buying out The Barrister’s share in the store. He had a slight majority over Dollar Bill and I combined, and I knew that if we were going to really reach our fullest potential we were going to have to get him out of the picture.

At this point, it’s an outcome that would have been amicable, reasonable, and as we’ll see would have saved The Barrister’s bacon from the fires of bankruptcy. So I started talking to Dollar Bill about it and he was willing to put up some money and although I didn’t have a thin dime to invest, I could have done some creative financing and rounded up some good faith loans from friends and family.

I had a sit-down with The Barrister and told him that for one thing, I knew he was disappointed in the store and that his heart wasn’t really in it any more; by the summer, his involvement with the store was extremely limited and many regulars didn’t even know who he was. He agreed, and it was pretty clear that he was willing to get out of the way. The problem was that he wanted almost exactly twice what his share in the company was worth to leave—a ludicrous proposition that would have been foolish to accept. We could have started a new store with the amount he was asking. Dollar Bill and I know greed when we see it, and we realized that he was trying to take advantage of not only Dollar Bill’s wealth but also my total commitment to the store.