Just call Corvallis a

Corvallis is becoming a major hub for major geeks. So play along with us for a moment. … 

Many a hero doth dwell in the realm the legends (and everyone else around town) call Corvallis.

Some seek justice. Some seek treasure. Still others seek Pokémon (gotta catch ’em all). Yet the most valiant of all seek … engineering degrees?

Honest to goodness and for sooth!

Oregon State University’s engineering students (and their professors) are geeks bearing gifts, and Corvallis’ economy reaps the bounty. They help keep people like David Okerson, purveyor of role-playing board games at Gamagora Geekhouse, 108 SW Third St., in eight-sided dice.

Okerson said roughly half the people who join his store’s club to play fantasy board games come from Oregon State University, many of them from the College of Engineering.

“Engineers like solving puzzles,” he said. “It’s building systems. It’s trying to be efficient. It uses a lot of logic and math. Once engineers discover fantasy board games, the hobby pulls them in.”

Even when students leave for the summer, he said, their professors stick around to roll dice and battle orcs — often with other educated professionals, such as those who work at Hewlett-Packard.

In short, the legends be true. Corvallis is a veritable Nerdvana.

Above its weight class

Many cities the size of Corvallis, and even smaller, have multiple game stores and other businesses that cater to the nerd community.

However, few downtowns offer four stores where people can find board games, video games, graphic novels, action figures and all manner of other nerdy memorabilia all within a block or two of one another.

Oh, and a 1990s-themed video arcade opened downtown just this week.

Salem is almost three times the size of Corvallis and has only one gaming store, Wild Things Games at 241 Commercial St. NE, downtown.

Corvallis also has two comic book stores and another game store outside of the downtown core.

Once upon a time, Corvallis had even more gaming stores. The Krakken was located just two doors down from Gamagora Games, and Pegasus Games was located in South Corvallis.

Complementary, not competition 

Gamagora Geekhouse’s Okerson said he’s not in competition with any other stores.

“Our downtown feels fairly unique,” he said. “It feels like it has a good life to it compared with other downtowns that have bigger box stores or malls that pull a lot of that traffic away. The traffic we’ll see on the weekend, or even in the middle of the week, is impressive. Everything is here.”

He often directs people to the other stores, Okerson said. “A lot of our customers found us because they knew Guardian Games was here,” he said. “They’re in an excellent position. That corner is almost the heart of downtown. They get amazing foot traffic, but they will direct people here.”

Stephen Friedt, who sells pop-culture artifacts at The Shadow Remembers, 115 NW Second St., said he feels the same way about competition.

“I try not to be competitive with the other stores in town,” he said. “I try to be complementary.”

He also narrowly focuses his inventory.

“I try to stay away from card games because we have such great card game shops in town,” he said.

“It’s the same with basic comic books. I leave that to James Serrano up at Heroes Never Die and Matt Ashland at Matt’s Cavalcade of Comics. I do the off-shoot stuff.”

Corvallis has definitely carved out a nerd niche, Matt Onstott, manager of Game Stop, 1580 NW Ninth St., said.

“Without us, people would have to drive to Albany and go to the mall or Walmart or something like that,” Onstott said.

Game Stop is a chain retailer with some 2,000 outlets across the country that specializes in video games and related merchandise.

Kontraband Retro Games, 121 SW Fourth St., covers the same market but also provides older, harder-to-find games.

Both Gamagora Geekhouse and Guardian Games (the latter at 259 SW Madison Ave.) deal in tabletop role-playing and card games. Gamagora also tosses in graphic novels.

Heroes Never Die, 2511 NW Ninth St., offers comic books, cards and various related merchandise. Matt’s Cavalcade of Comics, 2075 NW Buchanan Ave., is arguably the granddaddy of them all — providing comic books, games and related swag since 1993.

The newbs on the block

The newest players in Corvallis’ nerdconomy are Stephen Friedt at The Shadow Remembers and Jacob Oliver at Back to the Nineties Retro Arcade.

Friedt, 70, opened The Shadow Remembers this year where he offers a small fraction of the comic books, action figures and assorted what-not he’s been gathering since his boyhood in the 1950s.

There is more to the magic of Corvallis than it simply being a college town, he said.

“We have so many college students, particularly the foreign students, who stay over during the summer,” he said. “We really seem to have a clientele all year long, but I don’t think it’s so much that it’s a college town. A lot of it is just the age we’re in. Escapism is just something to enjoy while the rest of the world is going crazy.”

Escapism is the central theme of Back to the Nineties, an old-fashioned video arcade that opened Wednesday, Aug. 13, at 451 SW Madison Ave. While the video games of the ’90s required coins, owner Jacob Oliver lets people play all day for $15.

A millennial, Oliver was born and raised in Corvallis and felt nostalgia for the games of his youth. “We never had arcades in Corvallis, but I remember all the places that had video games,” he said.

“I would go to Izzy’s to play Magic Sword. I would go to 7-Eleven to play Street Fighter. The Circle K on campus had a CarnEvil.”

Nerdom’s foundation

Modern nerd culture flows primarily from the fantastic adventures of comic books, whether they revolve around superheroes in tights or knights in armor. Tabletop gaming is a sort of hybrid of comic book themes mixed with historical wargames where players pit miniature armies against each other on elaborate boards.

Michael Peck of Corvallis is an old-school wargamer. “I don’t know how much overlap there is between people who collect ‘Magic’ cards, historical wargamers and fantasy role players,” Peck said.

“The personalities attracted to these hobbies are not the same,” he said. “Historical wargamers — which tend to be a Baby Boomer cohort — may not share much with high school kids playing ‘Dungeons and Dragons,'” he said, the latter a reference to a game that debuted in the 1970s.

Gaming, comic books and related memorabilia all flow from the same stream, Okerson said, but it can be difficult to break nerd culture down its component parts — especially when it comes to gaming,

“If you’re on the outside looking in, that all gets lumped into the same thing,” he said. “I would divide the hobby into four categories: hobby board games, trading card games, miniatures games and video games.”

Gaming with small painted figures is almost a separate hobby, Okerson said.

“It’s within board gaming because it’s tabletop, but you’re talking about paints and putting the pieces together, these huge armies that require tables and terrains,” he said.

City Hall’s biggest geek

Patrick Rollens has a sort of secret identity. By day, he’s the public information officer for the city of Corvallis. In his spare time, he leads some of those miniature armies. Unlike Peck, however, his characters are drawn from fantasy rather than history.

By the way, he stressed, he participated in this story strictly on behalf of himself, the gamer, and not as a city representative.

As it turns out, the city of Corvallis has no official position on the outcome of Warhammer.

“I got into this hobby in the ’90s as a tween of 12 or 13,” Rollens said. “It was just an extension of my interest in science fiction and fantasy literature. It all came together in tabletop gaming.”

When he came to Corvallis some 10 years ago, Rollens immediately set about finding his people. A sense of community is one of the biggest draws of tabletop gaming, he said.

“It’s an analog hobby that you have to undertake with friends around the table,” he said. “I don’t want to sit in front of a screen. I want to be with my friends.”

Often a gamer will be introduced to the hobby by a friend or family member. “I didn’t have that,” Rollens said. “No one showed me the ropes. I had to create my own game groups from scratch everywhere I went.”

Time was when a grown-up with a professional job might shy away from telling people he was into fantasy role-playing games. Grown-ups didn’t play such games. They also didn’t play arcade games or read comic books.

“I came up during the transition period,” Rollens said. “It was a little bit of a guilty pleasure. Some people would pass judgment. It’s been really interesting to see society change over gaming. I had a front-row seat for it.”

Now, of course, superheroes have taken over the multiplexes, comic book shops attract all types and genders, and nerd culture has become mainstream.

Pandemic-inspired

Okerson said gaming took a huge step into the mainstream during the pandemic.

“People were trapped indoors, and they wanted something to do while they were inside,” he said. “Board games were one of those options. Afterwards, there was a drive to get out and socialize. Board games are socially interactive. They don’t involve a screen in front of you or a tablet.”

Tabletop gaming mushroomed from there: “It was one of those things where they more people you know who are doing it, the more they can spread it to their friends,” Okerson said.

Gaming has become so mainstream that the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication offers a minor in game studies.

Max Foxman, an assistant professor of game studies at the university, said the minor provides students with a better understand of the games people play.

“The reason for games’ cultural influence is at once a tale as old as time and due to many contemporary factors,” Foxman said. “We have always played games, and they are deeply embedded in all components of society.”

Foxman is particularly intrigued by video and digital gaming.

“It is now the country’s largest media industry with direct influence on everything from movies to live streaming and even sports,” he said. “Everyone had a console in their pocket due to mobile phones. In Oregon, there is a vibrant indie game scene and a long history of support of analog games.”

It all started with ink-on-paper comic books, a passion Friedt has never felt guilty about, not with warehouses full of comics and merch. “My daughter said I had to open a store or a museum,” he said.

Changing times

Yet comic books may be dying out. Fewer and fewer people are reading monthly comics, preferring to enjoy their heroic adventures via movies or games. Traditional comic books are more widely read through large graphic novels and through the collected stories of trade paperbacks.

“I think that’s due to distribution,” Friedt said. “Used to be you could get a floppy comic book in every grocery store, drug store, mom ‘n pop store there was. Now you have to go to a specialty store. And the prices are outrageously higher.”

When “Superman” first appeared in 1938, comic books sold for a dime. Friedt remembers when the price went up to 12 cents in 1960. Now comic books sell between $3.99 and $5.99.

Okerson said comics were originally marketed to kids, but now the average comic book reader is an adult. “That demographic aged, but it didn’t bring on any replacements,” he said. “It is dying out.”

Of course, movies, games and other elements of nerd culture may die out as well. The future of Corvallis’ Nerdvana is by no means assured, Okerson said.

“It’s fascinating,” he said. “I wonder what will happen in the next 20 years. Our daughter and her friends don’t watch movies much. Cinema itself is arguably dying. There is so much competition for our time with devices and TV shows and movies and TikTok.”

Video gaming is in particular trouble, Onstott said.

“Gaming companies are moving toward digital,” he said. “Game Stop is having to make the adjustment to the market. That’s why a lot of the collectibles have come into the picture, because selling just games wasn’t doing it.”

For now, at least, the power of the dork side remains relatively strong.

“We get a mix of everybody,” Onstott said. “Everyone comes in. I’ve had 80-year-old guys who come in here, and they buy video games. They also do the trading card thing with us where they’re submitting their old baseball cards. There’s really no rhyme or reason. It’s everyone. It’s nice.”

Retro arcades are popular right now, and while there are larger ones than Back to the Nineties, they don’t have Bucky O’Hare. The anthropomorphic rabbit and the crew of the Righteous Indignation battle the evil Toad Empire in the classic video game.

Oliver said only 10 to 15 Bucky O’Hare video games remain in existence. “We’re the only place in the Pacific Northwest that has this game,” he said.

Kjersti Wettstein brought her children for opening day at Back to the Nineties Wednesday, Aug. 14.

“They were blown away,” Wettstein said. “They were absolutely blown away. They were like, ‘We can play as much as we want?’ This is what we did when we were their age.”

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