Ancient Web: Acts of Gord Made Game Store Customers Into Scripture

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Running a used-video-game store involves deciding what an old cartridge is worth. According to Acts of Gord, it also involves discovering new depths of human confusion every afternoon.

Visit Acts of Gord.

The homepage introduces Gord as a suffering game-store proprietor whose encounters with customers have been recorded in a mock-religious voice. The narrator speaks of keeping the 'Retail Faith,' calls the store an 'Establishment,' and presents Gord's stories as trials visited upon a weary but resourceful shop owner.

The joke is carried into the site structure. Chapters collect incidents involving disputed prices, rentals, trade-ins, broken equipment, shoplifting, and customers who seem unsure which console they own. In one preserved story, someone buys a game for Nintendo 64 and later complains that it will not fit a Game Boy Advance. The humor depends on the sales-counter dialogue and Gord's increasingly exhausted replies.

A storefront frozen in the console wars

For readers interested in game history, the names dropped almost incidentally are half the attraction: Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Dreamcast, and the products of an era when physical cartridges and accessories determined whether a sale was possible. A dispute about a memory expansion or a rental fee is a tiny record of the hardware and business models customers dealt with.

The jokes are not neutral reportage. They are shaped for comedy, often exaggerated in tone and unkind toward customers. The site's claim that Gord experienced these encounters should not be treated as independent verification of every line of dialogue.

The homepage also preserves a later chapter of the project. Its updates from 2012 discuss a hardcover edition of the website, the difficulty of shipping prepaid books, and a personal web server temporarily blocked by the owner's Internet connection. The last listed update is dated August 8, 2012.

That detail is as characteristic of the old independent Web as the stories themselves: readers cared enough about a collection of webpages to want it bound on paper.

Read the original Acts of Gord introduction and follow its archived chapters, including the separately preserved Book of Annoyances.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.