Video game sales in the 80s

There was a hilarious sales anekdote from Sid Meiers autobiography. If you've never heard of him, he's well known for the civilisation video game series. The anekdote is about how they were able to sell their first games after their game first appeared in a hobbyist magazine in the eighties. As you can imagine, video games weren't quite the industry that they are now. You didn't have big online stores like steam, instead you'd have hobby stores that might carry a few floppy disks with games on them. So how might you get these hobby stores to buy your games?

You'd call them pretending you were a customer from out of town interested in buying the video game you wanted to sell. The store owner would reply that they did not have it and you would respond with dissapointment. After all, the game had a moderately good review in the magazine! How could they not have it?

You'd do the same thing 5 days later, and the week after that. Then you would call them as a sales representative telling them about your new game. By then the store owner would be of the impression that there is demand for this game and would be very eager to stock a few of them. Back in those days there was no caller id or anything, so you can imagine that this was a pretty easy stunt to pull off on repeat.

The book is great fun by the way, can highly recommend.