Used becomes new in the land of the Gamestop

How it happens

This is basically how I discovered it from my perspective. Walking into the GameStop as I usually do, I browsed around their selection until I decided to purchase a PS2 game labeled “NEW”- “Castlevania: Curse of Darkness”. About 6 months old, I was hankering for an action game to entertain me over the weekend, so I simply walked up to the cash register and hailed one of the people behind it (Who were busy salivating over some sort of movie trailer on the computer instead of working), and simply paid for it.

Now, here comes the tricky part, and the part I fault myself for not being quick to notice. Handing him the box (Which was empty, a floor model), he simply put it to the side and had an associate grab a copy from a drawer in the back. This somewhat confused me, due to the fact that this is the same procedure they have for old games (they keep them in a drawer, presumably not to be stolen), but I thought nothing of it at the time. Bagging the game for me, the salesman handed the bag to me, and I paid- end of story.

Walking out of the store and returning to my computer, I looked at the game as I booted up my PC- and it hit me. Where was the shrink wrap? New games, as a default rule, come with what is known as “Shrink Wrap”- a very annoying plastic that protects the case and labeling from shipping, as well as employing rudimentary security setups to prevent someone from busting the game open and walking off with the disc.

Scanning the box further (As you can see a picture blow), I noticed that not only was there no shrink wrap, the label had just been stuck on the front- so obviously, the game had been opened. “Wow” I thought to myself- is this a used game or a new? Little did I know that it wasn't exactly what I had paid for.



So, before I did anything, I obviously checked the sticker- and noticed something very small, but very very strange- the sticker appeared to have been pasted over another one. Pulling it back, I noticed one small thing- the remnants of an older sticker that had been on there beforehand.



Now, normally, many people would think this is just a markdown- and that's generally what I thought. That is, until I opened the case and checked the DVD instinctively (I'm like a old woman at a flea market when it comes to used video games):



See the arrows? Those are scratch and use marks. While these are completely normal and don't affect the gameplay at all (They generally just come from touching the discs. However, in this case, there were a few scratches, but whatever), it did show me one resounding fact- this game had been used. I had paid for a game labeled NEW that someone had obviously placed into a console before me.

Now, I'm not a stickler for used games. Hell, it's a quick way for me to bolster our inventory- and most of the time, Gamestop has quality used games, nothing absolutely horrible or torn up. The issue here is that I paid a full new price (exactly the same as at neighboring stores Best Buy and EB Games) for a game that was obviously used- and they had obviously done it right in front of my face. This was not an innocent mistake, this was cheating.

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