Opposable Thumbs, Ars Technica’s gaming personality, has a story up today that I’m sure is going to piss a lot of people off. Apparently, Ben, the author, purchased Twilight Princess right around the launch of the Wii, from Gamestop. He played it a bit, probably thought it wasn’t the next coming of Christ, and placed it on his shelf to be forgotten next to his copies of The Lost Boys and Hard to Kill. Recently, though, he was phoned by Gamestop’s automated phone service (cleverly named Aeris), with the following message;
“We hope you’re enjoying your copy of Twiliight Princess, but if you’re finished with it, why don’t you bring it to the store and trade it in? We’re willing to give you $35 in trade for your copy of Twilight Princess….”
That’s the point at which he hung up. Of course, if he had stayed on the phone, I’m sure Gamestop would have offered him oral for a twenty or their entire New Jersey division for a fifty.
Telemarketing is the sixth ring of Hell, according to Dante, right between the fifth ring (where you have to stuff your eye sockets full of scorpions) and the seventh (Kentucky), but stooping to the point where you are hounding your own customers to resell you games that you sold them in the first place is a brand new low. This is the retail equivalent of a man trying desperately to jam his two month old child back into his wife’s uterus, because she wasn’t full of the delicious candy that his wife had promised him.
The moral of the story, kids, is that babies are not fun, and Gamestop is some how even less fun.
