by Brant Guillory, 26 September 2024
Over the 3rd weekend in September, I hopped in a car for the long drive to sunny Fitchburg, WI. With Ardwulf riding shotgun, and he-who-shall-not-be-named1 in the back, we suffered through long stretches of both Indiana and Illinois to arrive at the promised land.
A quick note about my background with Noble Knight Games – I was a longtime subscriber to founder Aaron Leeder’s manually-managed email address back on AOL in the mid- and late-90s. I filled in a few holes in my Mystara collection with him back when those products were only a few years out of print. His early focus was on RPGs and I think he was one of the first people to realize the power of listing his used/out-of-print catalog online could have. When you were no longer dependent on the limited audience in your immediate area as your customers, suddenly everything in your inventory is valuable to someone and that “someone” is easier to find. That sounds passé with the past 25 years in our rearview mirror, but in 1998, this was a big deal.
Our trip to Noble Knight was brought about by a confluence of factors: a surplus of unwanted games that needed to exit the office / game room, an extended trip to Ohio that would allow me to launch the trip from there instead of Dragoons HQ back in North Carolina, and other co-conspirators willing to make the trek because of their piles of games to unload.
The trip up was . . . well, it was a long midwestern road trip. There’s no sugarcoating it: long flat stretches of highway, punctuated with occasional tollbooths2, just suck. It’s a longer drive from Ardwulf’s Lair to Noble Knight than it is from Dragoons HQ in North Carolina to our Jump TOC in Columbus, OH. We left for Wisconsin after lunch on a Friday with our only goal being “get there,” although the later departure did allow us to miss most of Chicago rush hour traffic. We did have the advantage of gaining an hour thanks to the time zone change.
Saturday started early; we actually hit the Noble Knight parking lot about 40 minutes before they opened, which is how we got such a ‘clean’ photo of the front door. Ardwulf had made prior arrangements with his staff contact for an opportunity to meet with some of the staff, an interview with Dan Leeder (Aaron’s brother, who runs the day-to-day operations of the company), a tour of the warehouse, and someone to go through all the games we were bringing them. Thankfully, they’ve got carts to help unload the games.
Priority one inside the store was the mandatory panoramic photo
click images to enlarge
And that still doesn’t quite get everything. Some of the close-up shelf views also appeared in our FLGS Spotlight on Noble Knight Games
The retail store does an excellent job of mixing & matching their on-shelf inventory with a mix of current games, recently out-of-print-but-still-popular games, and true hard-to-find gems, to give the browsing public a good sense of the depth of inventory. The wargame shelves, for instance, included print-on-demand titles from The Historical Game Company, current titles from GMT, Compass, and MMP, recent-but-out-of-print games from folks like Columbia and Lock ‘n Load Publishing, imports from Vae Victis and VUCA Sims, and just to flex on people, a $195 copy of the nearly-impossible-to-find Battle Hymn standalone expansion for Ambush. The RPG shelves had a similar mix of current, recent, and “holy crap” in their mix.
We went live with this video from the store, but here’s a quick walk around for those of you that missed it.
Behind the Doors!
Thanks to Ardwulf, though, we were able to get a behind-the-scenes look at the heart of Noble Knight’s operation: the buy/sell/trade folks, and the warehouse. He’s going to have a full video on the warehouse at a future date (and we’ll update this article with a link once he’s done with his editing of it) but here are some photos from our time walking through.
This is the area where incoming games are processed. Their team evaluates what’s inbound – rarity, condition, age, etc – and puts together their offers for customers. As with virtually every used game / book / record / clothing store, you’ll get more in store credit than you would for a straight cash offer. The racks are labeled for the person who is assigned those items for processing, and they’ve all got their cubicles where they’ll process the inbound orders.
The shipping area handles all their outbound packages, and has more boxes and tape than your nearest 4 UPS Stores combined.
Into the Warehouse!
Just to get it out of the way early: yes, there were many jokes about finding the Ark of the Covenant in here somewhere.
Oddly enough, one of the first things we saw was a wall of incomplete games. Dan explained to us that this wall is where they keep all sorts of partial games – many of which come in with batches of other games but Noble Knight takes with the batch rather than turn down just 1-2 out of a 40-game lot – and these ‘spare parts’ will often be used to fill out another game that might be missing a reference sheet, or has a damaged map, or similar defect. Still, the eye-glazing had begun as the sheer volume of games on the wall is kind of stunning
The warehouse’s aisles of shelving are extensive. I got some photos, but Ardwulf’s forthcoming video will end up showing some more. There are some empty spaces on the shelves at the moment as they’re between their busy seasons and are holding some space for surges.
What’s on those shelves? Here are a few detailed photos of a couple of the shelves as we walked through
There’s an entire aisle of nothing but playmats, for CCGs & tabletop games, terrain mats for minis games, etc.
They stock more than just games / game accessories though. Folks who have read older 60s/70s-era comic books have no doubt seen advertisements for these playsets, or similar ones. There were plenty of these throughout the warehouse.
Among other things we saw on the warehouse tour were plenty of model kits, wall decor, and even an old Lite-Brite set.
Here’s a quick look at one aisle of the warehouse as we were walking through.
And finally, some of the decor around the store was pretty impressive.
This one is for sale
The original Errol Otus painting that was the cover of the ADD1e Deities and Demigods book is very much not for sale, however.
So How Was The Trip?
Overall, this was a fantastic time at Noble Knight Games. We made 2 different trips to the store, with a lunch break in between, and had fans of Ardwulf’s Lair there both times that we spent a while hanging out with. We did get a sit-down interview with Dan Leeder, that again will be coming from him on his YouTube channel and we’ll update this article when it’s live.
One thing that did come up in the interview, and we experienced in person: the people at Noble Knight offer a first-class customer service experience. They are universally friendly, engaging, personable, happy and eager to help with game recommendations or pulling items from the warehouse. I even asked for them to pull multiple copies of the same used game so I could compare the maps inside to make sure they weren’t warped (that title had a reputation for it). They store everything in bags to reduce shelf wear and so their inventory labels don’t get stuck to the actual product and to reduce shelf wear, but you’re welcome to take them out of the bags and examine the games before you make a decision on your purchase. We were treated like family while at the store, and it wasn’t because Gary set up anything special; they treated every customer the same way.
“I went all the way to Wisconsin and all I got was this SPI Soapbox and a whole ‘nother box of stuff.”
–– Ardwulf
It’s tough to say “hell yeah I’m coming back” because it’s 18 hours from home in a car, and unless I’ve got multiple boxes of detritus to unload it’s probably not worth the drive. But if I’m nearby for something else (like, say, GaryCon one of these years) then yes, I’m definitely heading over there to see what’s waiting to be unearthed.
And a huge thanks to Ardwulf for organizing the trip, Dan at Noble Knight for taking some time on his day off to join us, Lee (the manager on duty) for making us feel so welcome at the store, and all the great folks at Noble Knight for making it such a pleasant experience. And heck, thanks to Fucko for picking up the tab for lunch!
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Interesting about Noble Knight.
My local university has a department that has been archiving computer games and related material for a number of years, and I’ve given them practically all my computer games (mostly war/strategy games) and related stuff over the past few years.
They picked up the last of them just last week, almost 70 titles, about 90% of which were war/strategy titles. Over the years, I’ve given them about 200-250 items total. In addition to about 150 PC titles, this also included 50 old Amiga titles and my collection of early 1990s Computer Gaming World magazines, a steering wheel/foot pedal setup and a few other items I’ve forgotten about. They did pay me a reasonable amount of money for most of the items, and it was certainly easier than trying to unload the stuff on Craigslist or Ebay, which would have been all but impossible.
Here’s a link to their department: http://lgira.mesmernet.org/
They even named one of the collections after me, but the stuff listed therein only represents about 10% of all the stuff they’ve gotten from me. The professor in charge says that they have additional databases that are not online, but I take that claim with a grain of salt.
Over the last 25-30 years, the majority of games I purchased came from a local used book store, usually for about $5 apiece or thereabouts. That’s how I ended up with so many titles, 90% of which I never played. Almost all of them were complete in their original boxes, with manuals and everything. I made it a point to only buy stuff that was complete and in excellent condition.
For example, I had almost all the old Avalon Hill computer game titles from the early to mid 1990s – the ones that I believe were actually developed by Big Time Software. Those were beautiful games, with full color manuals and stunning maps. Unbelievable production values. No wonder they went broke. 😉
There were also a few I bought on Ebay and the occasional one that I bought new. I had the beautiful Civilization III tin box edition, SSI’s Twenty Classic Wargames collection, and the elaborate F-16 flight simulator from Spectrum Holobyte, I forget the exact title of it, Fighting Falcon or something… I still play Civ III, but it’s the GoG version.
I have all of 6 hardcopy PC games left now: Silent Hunter Gold Edition, IL-2, winSPMBT, Advanced Tactics Gold, War in the Pacific Admiral’s Edition, and Railroad Tycoon II Platinum. I’ve never actually played the first 5, but I play the last one fairly frequently, also GoG version. It’s the best of the railroading games, imo.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
wow! that’s a LOT of games you’ve shared.
Matt Kirschenbaum at the Univ of Maryland was also looking into how to archive computer games for long-term “survival” as computers continue to advance, but his interest was more as “works of art” rather than just games themselves.
Like I said, they did pay me for most of the stuff. I got $150 for that last batch of about 70 games last week, and I think he also gave me $150 for a previous batch of 50 games, plus $100 for the Amiga stuff several years ago. So, about $400 total for over 200 items. There was one smaller batch of about 20-30 games, as I remember, that I gave them for free.
Most of their stuff are actually donations, but he didn’t mind giving me something for mine because almost everything was in excellent condition. Plus I didn’t have to sell it piecemeal, which would have been a major pita, and I certainly didn’t want to throw it all away.
There are other colleges associated with this program. There’s one in Texas, a couple elsewhere in the US and even one in Germany. I think the website I linked to in my previous post mentions them.