I was saddened today to learn of the passing of an institution in the world of hobby gaming in the Seattle area. American Eagles closed its doors on Saturday. The venerable old grand dame of the hobby trade has gone to that great shopping mall in the sky.
American Eagles was one of the last of the old time sources of gaming supplies, with its roots in the hobby shop trade rather than the comic book or board game trade. I turned 50 yrs old last year. My first visit to American Eagles came when I was 16.
That was when Dungeons and Dragons was a subversive new idea that caused parents and educators to question the sanity and moral uprightness of the high school and college-aged kids that were engaging in it.
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was considered to be a radical new departure from "classic three book" and there were just beginning to be a ton of imitators attempting to fix D&D's problems with new problems of their own invention (heh) as well as to cash in on the burgeoning market of pen and paper RPG's.
Mind you, nobody called them "pen and paper" back then. There was no reason to qualify what you meant. The only comparable computer games were MUD's that were primarily available only to people with internet savvy and that was a very restricted set of people. The handful of games on personal computers were generally called "adventure games", after the grand-daddy of such games, Colossal Cave; commonly referred to simply as "Adventure". Most of those games had yet to even be created.
No, the only question anybody had when you said RPG was whether or not you were
running around in steam tunnels under campus waving sticks and playing make believe, or
practicing satanic rituals and
perverting the minds of your friends under the guise of playing a game.
In a time and place where mainstream bookstores didn't know about RPG's and wouldn't touch them if they did know, American Eagles was a kind of Nerd Mecca. I remember meeting my gaming buddies and catching the county transit for ninety minutes of travel, what with transfers. I didn't know what to expect that first time, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer awesomeness that was American Eagles.
Eagles was not really a "game store" in the sense that businesses nowadays are sometimes focussed mostly or entirely on games. It was a hobby shop that expanded into war games and military miniatures battles, and from there into RPG and some other related games.
People tend to forget that D&D itself was a kind of expansion of the game Chainmail, which was no more or less than a set of battles rules for mideaval European lead miniatures armies. Miniatures war games are a very old pastime - amongst his other accomplishments, H. G. Wells is credited with publishing the first book of rules for tabletop war game miniatures. While Wells' rules were intended for children, the hobby was very much an adult one running the gamut of naval ship battles and armed forces of various eras.
Where the local comic book store might raise an eyebrow, and the local B. Dalton Bookseller would pass on it entirely, Eagles accepted RPGs as just another variation on what it already did and they stocked a little bit of pretty much everything that was available at the time.
Imagine, now, being a sixteen-year-old red-blooded American Nerd, who has had a taste of a fantastic and strange new way of playing games; one that frees the imagination and actually puts you in the role of DESIGNER and arbiter of your imaginary worlds. Imagine that finding the frustration of having no access to the books that fuel your designs, and that the handful of places that you do find them, they are in such limited supply that you can never find anything NEW.
Now, step out onto the sidewalk at 85th and Greenwood and walk the half-block to the American Eagles storefront. Your first impression is, well, impressive. The storefront is all glass, with large military stripe running across the windows and the store's eagles heraldric-style logo out front. This isn't your typical game or comic store struggling to survive in a dark forgotten corner of some little strip mall. You can see right off that this place is big. Bigger than some dime stores and drug stores. The wonder strikes home when you reach the door and pull it open.
Shelves. Rows and rows and rows of them. Full shelves. Packed to the tops and bottoms and end with things that you had never even imagined before.
Plastic models of every ship and airplane ever used in a military conflict.
Thousands of wargame miniatures.
Hundreds of paints, glues, rule books, terrain pieces.
And that's just the UPSTAIRS.
The Holy Grail, though. The Mecca. The El Dorado of your Nerd Heaven, is the back left quarter of the store. That's where the games are.
Sure, some board games and some of these are pretty weird and interesting in and of themselves. Cosmic Encounter. OMG! The original edition of Cosmic Encounter! I still have it with all of the expansions there were.
The real treasure, though is the RPG section. Not three feet and three shelves of "modules" and assorted stuff. No, this was ROWS of stuff. ROWS of books. ROWS of miniatures. ROWS of brain-melting, mind-bending role-playing sweetness that only began with Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons.
No, here we had a role-player's wet dream. The Arduin Grimoire, with all of its "we're better than D&D and we make everything as complicated as possible to prove it" holier than thou goodness. Traveller. Spacequest. Dragonquest. JUDGE'S GUILD! Oh, mercy! In a day when "modules" was still a new idea, the Judge's Guild was one of the first organizations to put out a whole campaign world with new content on a regular basis and real maps and accessories and story seeds. The City-State of the Invincible Overlord was one of the most wonderful purchases I ever made. heh.
As time went on, Eagles continued to carry most everything published. A lot of it wasn't all that good and ended up in the back room with the discounted stuff. Somewhere along the way, they moved from Ballard to their current place in Lake City. I grew up, married, taught my kids about RPGs, but mostly lost the time and desire to play them much myself. I was into MMORPGs by then and CCGs and most of my college friends had scattered to the four winds. RPG's had always been somewhat pricy but nowadays they have become downright expensive. I mean, $40 or more for a single book? Seriously? What kid is supposed to be able to afford that?
In a sense, scattering to the winds is what happened to American Eagles' customers. The generation or two that had supported the games portion of the store grew up, but they weren't really replaced by new players. I visited the store a couple of years ago, out of nostalgia. I picked up some TORG books that were in the back clearance room, but otherwise I didn't see anything I wanted to buy. The couple of times I visited over the years, the store was always empty or nearly so.
I suppose that at some point, the military gamers must have all moved on and aged away also. The newer generation is being brought up on computers, not on lead miniatures. Those that do play miniatures games are more into Warhammer than they are into Napoleonics, and Games Design Workshop helpfully grabbed all of that market for themselves when they opened their own stores and shut out the game shops.
It was probably inevitable that the store would eventually close rather than be passed down to a new generation of the "Eagles Family". Eagles had become something of a relic. It had not changed visibly in almost forty years, other than changing location. Eventually, time was going to just pass it by altogether, and that time has finally come.
American Eagles was an institution of the Seattle gaming scene. It's the last of its kind, as far as I know. I suppose that's a natural progression, now that we live in a world where kids pore over AD&D at the local Barnes and Noble and their parents look on indulgently instead of uttering a quick prayer and trying to find something less dangerous for their kids to be interested in.
That's the problem with growing older. The world becomes more interesting in some ways, but rather less interesting in other ways. So long, Eagles. You may be gone, but you won't be forgotten. Hopefully, that makes it all worthwhile in the end.
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