Jason Brassard Spent His Lifetime Collecting the Rarest Video Games. Until the Heist.

[Celerity]

The porn trilogy for Nintendos. Atari games from the 1980s. Pristine nostalgia, potentially worth millions, gone in a night.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/06/rare-nintendo-atari-games-stolen

https://archive.ph/v65on



He tries his best to forget about the safe. But when he has a few free minutes and is cleaning the pins of old Nintendo cartridges with rubbing alcohol and Q-tips, a little piece of him dies every time he thinks about how he could’ve been so naive. When he ran the place, he would man the counter from a swivel chair next to the cash register, a can of Diet Coke by the keyboard of his desktop computer, his palms at the edge of a Super Mario World mouse pad. He’d lined his shelves with Pokémon and PAC-MAN figurines, Sonic the Hedgehog plushies, T-shirts and stickers with the store’s logo, dog-eared stacks of GamePro and Nintendo Power, and a feng shui of other games. Drawers nested all sorts of controllers smothered in black cords. Until he was forced to sully the store by putting jail bars on the windows and installing security cameras out front, Trade-N-Games had been lighthearted in spirit and charming in its accentuations. He’d wanted customers to experience what it had been like to be part of the video game generation that had discovered Nintendo and Sega. He had wished to replicate for people that feeling that usually disappears as they settle into adulthood. There’s a “great buys” bargain bin and a giant glass collector’s case.

A placard above the employee gate by the desk reads NINTENDO REPAIR AVAILABLE HERE. The AS SEEN ON YOUTUBE sign he’d taken down. He’d had a kind of philanthropic hubris as an owner and collector, someone who never gave a second thought to keeping his legendary game collection a secret. He’d gladly let YouTubers film in the back; he would even open the safe back there and show them, item by item, his Louvre. Other collectors had rare games, sure, but in the back room of his store, and especially in the safe, he was proud to own 10,000 of what he described as “cherry” copies—his preferred term for virgin condition. The cardboard on his Super Nintendo games was still crispy, as collectors like to say. His Sega Genesis and Master System games were as pristine in their clamshells as if they had been hanging from the racks at KB Toys.

Nothing about the store’s appearance alluded to the miracle of his collection. It was just a single-story former laundromat with a workaday sign. He’d had the idea to paint Mario and Luigi so big, anyone could see them from the main road beyond the parking lot in an antiquated strip mall, the Dye Hard Salon on one side and Murphy’s GOOD EATS Diner on the other. Trade-N-Games, this pixelated utopia in a suburb of St. Louis, had turned out exactly how he’d imagined it more than 20 years ago. The exception to his vision took the form of the scarred tracks of dolly wheels leading from the back of the store across the blue carpet, crushed into permanence by a 700-pound safe dragged out the door in the middle of the night.



Jason Brassard was racing 100 miles per hour to Trade-N-Games around 4:30 in the morning on August 16, 2019, a .38 caliber pistol by the cup holder in his truck. The trip was three miles from his condo in High Ridge, a commute that usually allowed an opportunity for his thoughts to drift, work with video games never being something to cause him stress. But he was terrified now, his hand pressed into the car horn to warn other drivers to stay away. A phone call had startled him awake, the Jefferson County alarm company telling him the front door of the store was open. He knew he would beat the police there. And he knew it’d be the newer games, he could feel it, straight through three consecutive red lights, barely easing off the pedal. It’d be the games arranged on the most prominent rows inside the store. They’d take the PlayStation 4s, and the used Nintendo Switch consoles, and popular games like Skyrim (dragons versus glitches, 2016), like Breath of the Wild (Link of Zelda fame versus his own sense of curiosity, 2017) and Mario Kart 8 (go-karts versus go-karts, 2014). Who would want to take anything else?

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[UpInArms]

1. That is so sad