An alliance has formed in the flow of downtown Ogden. Enter Ogden’s friendly neighborhood gaming alliance between cohorts Game Vault and Gamers Asylum. In a world where the convenience of big-box stores threatens to take away from the interactions within the gaming community, the duo is striving to keep Ogden’s gaming scene local.
Andrew Patten, a Weber State University philosophy senior, opened Game Vault with Joseph Graber in September of 2010. He said he had been working for a video game chain store, and when it went under, he and Graber took the opportunity to create their own gaming business in Ogden.
Game Vault’s current location at 2671 Washington Blvd. resulted from Gamers Asylum’s interest in aligning its specialties in comics, collectibles and cards with Game Vault’s video game enterprise. This collaboration seems to have created a common place for Ogden gamers who frequent the gaming duo’s establishment.
“We’re all over the place. We try to carry pretty much everything a geeky person would want,” Patten said. “For the video game side, we carry everything vintage and current. We do pre-orders and midnight releases and all that, but we go all the way back to the NES as well. We try to keep a really good selection of what we have in stock. We try to make it worth walking in and checking out pretty regularly.”
As for Gamers Asylum, half of the store focuses on collectibles.
“We carry comic books,” Patten said. “We have all sorts of different board games, and we do miniatures.”
Game Vault has become a staple for many gamers in Ogden, simply because it’s the only store of its kind in the area.
“We actually have tables set up in the back for miniatures so people can come in and play,” Patten said. “We do hosted events every week for that. We also do trading card games . . . We even do occasional video game tournaments, and we have some big-screen TVs set up front for that.”
Patten said that nearly all of these events are free, and that many of their loyal customers make an avid effort to shop at Game Vault and Gamers Asylum because of the true interest they share in giving an experience along with a product.
“We have people who go out of their way to spend money here instead of buying it in the big shops,” he said.
Game Vault will purchase not only customers’ vintage games, but other gaming memorabilia as well.
“The most common thing we buy is video games, and then we buy comic books, and then we buy trading cards,” Patten said.
He said the most expensive trading card he’s seen in the store cost $330. Though that was an atypical case, he said, they see everything from ultra-rare cards to regular Pokemon cards.
“The prices are good, and selection is good,” said Alan Beenken, an Ogden local, of the store. He said he likes the convenience of being able to come into Game Vault and sell his old video games.
Many chain video game stores like GameStop won’t buy back video games that are not for the most current systems, because it doesn’t see immediate value in them. Game Vault offers its customers a place to earn some cash for their vintage video games or even revisit their childhood classics through their collection of vintage games and consoles.
