You run a small shop that buys, fixes up, and sells old games.
Most of the time, that's exactly what it is. You track down cartridges and consoles, clean up the rough ones, price them, and put them on the shelf. You hire a few people, cover the rent, and every so often watch a Pretendo Wave U sit in the window for a month because nobody wants one.
What the game actually cares about isn't the money. You can run the place like a shark, overcharge everyone and work your staff to the bone, and you'll turn a profit that goes nowhere. What counts is Influence, and there are only two ways to earn it: preserving games and treating people decently. Fair prices, a shelf you've genuinely restored, staff you haven't burned out. Turning a ruthless profit isn't on the list.
Influence is what lets you change the industry's history.
Leave it alone and everything plays out the way it really did. Catari runs out of money and folds. Zega gives up on hardware. One company after another quietly disappears, each on the schedule it actually died on. There's no villain and no countdown the game made up. It's just what happened.
But preserve a company's whole catalog, then sit down with the people who ran it and spend your Influence making the case, and you can buy them another shot. A version of events where they never went under. Save one and things start showing up on your shelves that never existed: the console that company would have built next, and the games that would have come with it. A history you wrote instead of the one we got.
Co-op (coming after launch)
You can do all of this with friends, and you don't have to be online at the same time to do it. Everyone runs their own store at their own pace. When you finish a week, whatever you pulled off, like the makers you saved, the Influence you banked, the collections you closed out gets added to one shared timeline the whole group is working on. You might play on a Tuesday night and a friend on Sunday morning; the timeline moves along either way, and you'll see each other's shops as postcards. One history, nobody has to sync up.
Get your favorites through and it's a good run. Get all of them through and you've mastered it.
It's a solo project, one person doing the code, the design, the art, and the music.
