About Us – Second Playfield
I live on the second floor of a building that still has a dental office underneath it, in Dubuque, Iowa. Most mornings I walk downhill toward the river and the public library where I work. The streets are quiet enough that I can hear the freight trains before I see them. I’ve stayed in this part of the country longer than most people I grew up with. While friends left for Chicago or Minneapolis or somewhere with better Wi-Fi and newer consoles, I stayed. The river stayed. The thrift stores stayed. And the games I already owned kept sitting on shelves long after the magazines stopped talking about them.
The Library Desk
My job title is circulation supervisor, which mostly means I spend the day around other people’s stories. I check in books that smell like someone else’s house. I pull holds for regulars who still prefer print. Every few months a dusty strategy guide comes back twenty years late, the pages soft and the maps marked up in pencil. I like the pace. It leaves room to notice things. You learn a lot about how people hold on to stories when you watch what they return and what they never quite let go of.
I started playing games when cartridges were still the normal way to own something. SNES first, then the original PlayStation, then the rest of the sixth generation. I never chased the newest hardware the way some people did. I just kept the systems I already had and kept returning to the same titles. Over time the replaying started to feel different. A game that felt important in high school can feel thin when you’re thirty-eight. Another that seemed messy or slow suddenly makes more sense once you’ve had a few real losses and a few quiet jobs. That gap is what I keep coming back to.
Thrift Runs and County Roads
On weekends I drive the county roads. Sometimes I stop at a diner that still uses paper placemats and order coffee that tastes like it was made in 1997. I write on a legal pad until the booth gets uncomfortable. Other times I make a loop through the thrift stores and pawn shops between here and the next town over. I’m looking for discs, manuals, old strategy guides with someone else’s notes in the margins, the occasional memory card that still holds a save file from another life. I write down where I found each one before I write about the game itself. The place matters. A $4 copy of something pulled from a shelf in a town of eight hundred people feels different from the same disc bought online.
I keep a small index-card box on my desk at home. Inside are handwritten cheat codes, remembered save-file details, and notes about which thrift store produced which disc. It isn’t organized the way a proper collection should be. It’s just the residue of paying attention for a long time.
What the Replays Are For
I don’t work in the games industry. I’m not a streamer and I don’t have early access to anything. My only real credential is that I’ve kept playing the same titles long enough to notice when they’ve changed and when I have. Some games don’t age well. Some just wait for you to catch up. I’m still figuring out which is which, one slow replay and one thrift find at a time.
The writing started as notes to myself. Then it became something I wanted to leave somewhere other people could find it. This site is that place. It isn’t trying to cover every release or win any argument about which console was best. It just tries to sit with the games long enough to ask the only question that still interests me: does this still mean something now that the original moment is gone?
I write between coffee refills, after closing the library, or in the car before I head back down the highway. The sentences come slowly. That’s fine. The games waited this long. I can wait a little longer with them.
— Everett Lane
Second Playfield
Dubuque, Iowa