Independent gaming has Infinite Lives in Watertown

The game plan for Mitchell J. LaBarge began by accident.

His independent video game store started as a repair business.

“The whole repair thing started because I had some friends who had Xboxes that were broken,” he said. “They knew I was kind of handy with that sort of stuff.”

He also addressed some “Play Station 3 issues” and knew how to remedy the infamous “red ring of death” of early Xbox 360s.

“We fixed a lot of that stuff,” Mr. LaBarge said. “They couldn’t afford what it cost to fix, so they asked, ‘Could I just trade in some games?’ So it just spiraled to what it is now.”

What Mr. LaBarge has, through ownership, is Infinite Lives. In one corner of the 1305 State St. business, near the Park Circle, “Popeye”, a cartridge built for an Atari 2600 system from the 1970s, awaits a buyer, ready to duke it out with customers also considering newer and brand new games, such as the latest “Modern Warfare” and “Battlefield 3” releases.

Infinite Lives moved into its present location in November 2009 after spending six months in the Empsall Plaza as Northern New York Console Repair and Sales.

“It gets busier and busier every day,” Mr. LaBarge said.

He’s tapped into a customer base that is hungry for what Infinite Lives offers: retro video games and the chance to trade in games and hardware at the highest possible price. He said there’s nothing of similar nature in the Jefferson County area.

By this spring Mr. LaBarge has plans of opening another Infinite Lives store in Oswego.

“We have customers from all over,” he said. “I have guys who travel from Rome, Oswego and Rochester. We have a lot of customers who come down from Canada.”

What attracts them, he said, is what the highly competitive price he pays for used games and gaming systems and the nature of the independent video game store.

“Retro gaming is getting to be big again, and a lot of people are kind of going to an anti-corporation mentality,” said Mr. LaBarge. “We found a lot of people would rather give a local business money rather than a big corporation.”

One of Infinite Lives’s loyal fans is Eric S. Binion of Syracuse. The 2000 graduate of Sackets Harbor Central School and 2002 graduate of Jefferson Community College resides in Syracuse where he works is a concert promoter and a talent buyer for Westcott Theater. He recently purchased a stand-up “The Simpsons” arcade game from Infinite Lives for his office. He’s a fan of video games from the mid-1990s, his wife is a fan of games from the 1980s, and they can purchase them cheaper at Infinite Lives than on eBay, he said.

“It’s definitely a lot of fun to search through all of the old games and see all the long-lost treasures,” Mr. Binion said.

Mr. LaBarge said another element that sets his business apart from others is that customers can trade their retro hardware in. He noted the decades-old Nintendo consoles and the Atari systems scattered around the store. “Everybody has a box of this stuff sitting in their garage and they have no idea of what to do with it.”

Mr. LaBarge, who stressed Infinite Lives also offers new releases, said he was surprised at the market for retro video games and their consoles.

“There are kids 7 and 8-years old coming in to buy stuff from the 80s,” he said. “A lot of it is because it is simple. A new controller can have, like, 12 buttons on it. The old Nintendos had a jump button and a shoot button.”

He has also found that people like “moms,” “grandmothers” and “girlfriends” enjoy the simpler, retro games.

He said many people discover his business through word of mouth and it has become popular with Fort Drum soldiers.

“We have guys in Afghanistan and Iraq who will call in orders and order stuff and we’ll ship it over to them,” Mr. LaBarge said. “That’s unique because a lot of the big retailers stopped doing that.”

Mr. LaBarge, a city native and a 1994 graduate of Watertown High School, said Infinite Lives is something the community needed.

“A lot of people don’t want to embrace where we live,” he said. “But you got to remember we have a military base with a lot of young guys and a lot of families that come and go. And a lot of places they come from, they have places like this. When they find us, they get pretty excited.”

The store has hosted video game tournaments and recently hosted its first “Saturday night social” where some display racks were moved to make room for two or three televisions. In the socials, gamers, who up to that point may know each other through online names only, get together for some face-to-face time. The first social featured “Street Fighter 3: Third Strike.”

The store recently took down a wall in back to make more room. Looking forward to more growth — his second location in Oswego — Mr. LaBarge said it should be a smoother opening than his State Street store.

“When we opened here, we had to piece it together a little bit at a time,” he said. “We just packed it all up in garbage bags and moved it all over here. We didn’t have very much. We built all this pretty much from the ground up.”