I cannot believe this is just now becoming a "scandal."

I was a Gamestop assistant store manager in the early 2000's. This was policy way back then, and we abused the shit out of it. Yes, policy said you could only check out one thing at a time for a certain period of time (I remember it being six days, maybe things have changed ...) and you could only check out any given product once, and no products like OSes or consoles. In practice, we took whatever we wanted whenever we wanted for however long we wanted. All the managers covered for each other and the other employees when the district bigwigs came by. On inventory days everyone brought in a list of things to add to inventory. This was SOP for all the stores in my district, and pretty much every store nationwide if you believe the chit chat at the annual store manager meetings.

"Gutting" has been policy for at least that long too. Per policy, you'd "gut" one copy of a game and when it came time to sell, you'd repackage and re-shrink wrap it. We were supposed to shrink wrap the shit out of everything (Dreamcast software for example: pull the entire CD tray out of the jewel case, shrink the case and put it on the sales floor, shrink the CD tray and secure it behind the counter), but in practice that was too much work once there were 500+ PSX titles, 200+ DC titles, etc. I made sure there wasn't anything obvious left over (stickers with SKU numbers on CDs, for example), but many people didn't. We were also instructed when selling the gutted copy to just walk it to the back and shrink wrap it without offering any explanation. The old pre-EB POS system (which was written in QuickBASIC Professional, and I swear I am not making that up) used to say "Gut checks save lives!" as a part of the screen saver.

This is been going on for well over 10 years. CD-based software borrowed out and scratched. Cartridge-based software borrowed and sold as "new" with saved data on it. Ask any Gamestop employee if they pay for magazines or tax software. Ever wonder why every Gamestop has a shrink wrapper in back? Do you not know how to tell the difference between factory shrink wrap and re-wrap? Factory wrap is "crinklier" ... and there's always a seam somewhere where a small machine with a glorified hair dryer can't produce one (usually down the middle of the back of the package).

Oh, and my apologies to whoever ended up buying that one copy of XP Home we had. I didn't realize at the time that the product key couldn't be reused.

Maybe I'm just getting too old, but why are people still arguing back and forth over what their system can do graphics-wise instead of gameplay? The shininess of your textures and number of polygons whizzing around on the screen has little to do with whether the game is actually fun to play.

I'll take a good SNES game over yet another "beat up whores ... in 3D!" game any day.