Not for Resale

The documentary is about video game shops at the scale of a neighbourhood. Its subject is the future of those shops against digital distribution, and the last days of physical media. The film talks to shop owners, to collectors and to people working to put the history of games on record. The question it asks is this: as ownership goes digital, what gets left behind. The account moves less as an argument than as a tour close to nostalgia. How games are distributed is part of the subject as much as how they are made. What future collectors will be left holding is the documentary’s real worry. Frank Cifaldi and Kelsey Lewin are among those who speak in Kevin J. James’s eighty five minute American documentary, completed in 2019.