Cases of Stuff

Cases of Stuff is a small website for a small business in Abilene, Texas that sells retro and vintage video games. The games sit in display cases inside a local vendor mall, and the site mostly exists to show what's in the cases and where to go look at them.

The owners like fun easter eggs, so there are a few. Every so often a little critter wanders across the bottom of the page, usually a dino or a mushroom and sometimes a space invader or a star, and if you click one it hops. The dino is standing in for Yoshi and the mushroom for Toad, since trademarked characters on a real business's website seemed like a bad idea.

The Arcade

It started with the "Press Start" text on the home page. My wife said that if it says Press Start, pressing it should start a game. So it turned into a button that asked "Abandon the cases for a quick game?" and then dropped you into Snake. It only worked with a keyboard at first, which doesn't help much on a phone, so it got swipe controls and a little D-pad about seven minutes later.

Close to a month after that, Snake moved off the home page and into the Arcade at /arcade, with Breakout and Tetris on the same cabinet. When you lose, the dino chases the mushroom across the screen, which is the closest thing to sympathy the site offers. Then came a Cheats panel, "for those with skill issues", and the first cheat is Jenny mode, which makes Snake five times slower. Cheated runs don't set a best score, which seems fair.

The leaderboard was also my wife's idea. At the time most of the traffic the site was gaining came in for the Arcade, so she said to give those people a reason to come back. It keeps the top ten scores for each game under three initials, the way a real cabinet would.

The admin side

The owners post items from their phone through a server-rendered admin, and there's a sales page that adds up revenue and margin by month. It also has CSV import and export and an audit log for when someone wants to know who changed what.