Clutching a fistful of soiled bills, Gregory Taylor, 25, emerged from the Park Avenue Mall GameStop with a sad smile on his face. “Well, that’s over with,” he said to no one in particular, as he headed directly towards an ATM to deposit his newfound earnings in his “DON’T SPEND THIS” savings account. He had made $98.21 and rid himself of years of memories, thanks to the kind and marginally-paced work of the attendants at GameStop.

“Oh, yeah,” he said in an exclusive interview, “I lost my job a few weeks ago. And I had always kept my old games around – I’m not sure why. Maybe I just wanted to have them in case I ever felt like playing them… Maybe I thought that one day my kids would want them. I guess I never really had a good reason. So I just thought – well, why not get rid of them. And I knew these guys would take them off my hands.”

His girlfriend, Molly McKinney, told us, “He never would have sold that shit. Seriously. 25 years old, and he keeps around a Super Nintendo? Sure, I used to play games. When I was 10. What the hell is he doing with that stuff, when he can’t even afford to eat dinner most nights? He expects me to eat ramen noodles with him when he’s got 5 Mario Party games taking up room in my closet? That’s when I told him to sell them. And then, two weeks later (naturally) here we are.”

Gregory denied Ms. McKinney’s version of the events while she wasn’t present, but then immediately began nodding vigorously about the story, while she petted him, and told him what a big boy he was to have gotten rid of all those silly-willy videogames. His eyes died a little as he quietly stated, “I think I’m saving the money for a new dresser for the bedroom. We need nice things around the apartment.”

Diego Veracruz, the GameStop employee who handled Gregory’s account, told Hardcasual that, “that was a bunch of lame old shit, anyway. I would be happy to get rid of it. Seriously, I mean, a Dreamcast? He expects to trade that in? Sure, I mean, I guess I’ve heard of it – in my grandmother’s encyclopedia. The guy had all these controllers for a GameCube, and like all these Mario sports games. I’d figure he had a bunch of friends, but he just came in with this girl. Wait, why are you asking me all this stuff? Would you like to pre-order Prototype? For $5 you get an exclusive download.”

Gregory, who now owns no game systems, told us that he planned to spend several hours in the next week telling his girlfriend he was looking for work, while secretly quietly apologizing to his adolescent self for not getting the sweet home theatre system that he had always wanted in his mid-teens, where he could always have friends over to play Mario Golf.