Today we’d like to introduce you to Brian Chamberlin.
Brian, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Retrograde Charitable Toy And Videogame Museum, or as many people call us Retrograde, has been a labor or love for the last eight years. The real echoes of what started this project was a group of friends sitting together after work and just talking, wondering what would be something that we all wanted to do. And there is always the talk and the idea of how cool it would be to own and run and arcade. To relive some of the fun and nostalgia of our kid and teen years. And it wasn’t lost on us that over the years, many places like the ones we had and enjoyed were either being lost or were already gone. The fact was that as time has moved onward and forward technology has progressed in amazing ways that have certainly changed the world for the better, but there has been a real loss of physical locations where people can enjoy themselves, meet new people, and have wonderful experiences. There has been a real loss of places that offer an organic opportunity to just have fun and be away from the worlds being delivered to us on our personal devices.
The core philosophy of this project and organization was created out of the idea that there should be a place for people of any age to enjoy themselves. Places like that are often labeled as “Third Spaces”, and a direct definition of a Third Space is “a location that is neither one’s home nor workplace and provides a space for relaxation or recreation”. A place of community and fun and connection, places that feel just a little more special than the day to day locations someone would be. These places are like Coffee Shops, Parks, Gyms, and even Arcades and Museums.
And we’ve all been avid collectors over the years, big lovers of pop culture and all the ways the media that we’ve grown up with and continue to explore. From the love of music to the movies we’ve watched, from playing video games, and all the number of toys we all wanted and had, they were all part of our own story and the stories of every other person who has ever walked in through our doors. And it was baked in from the very start that this was a supposed always be a project for others, to teach others, to help others enjoy themselves, to help others. That’s why we created our business model to be a non-profit business, really just highlighting that this was a force for community and the people in it.
We started in a small but nice little Victorian home that was slowly renovated and grew with all the items that had been added over the years, growing from the first floor of the building holding our small collection of toys and tech, with a few arcade machines. It wasn’t easy but we remained steadfast, earnest, and constantly growing and pushing. We’ve made friends with many amazing people along the way who have all placed a little bit of themselves into the legacy of this building, growing our collection, adding more machines, and continually building. This allowed us to be able to continually grow, expand out of the first floor of our building and grow the few machines into many machines. It wasn’t very long before the collection began to swell, and burst at the seams.
That home had served as very well, and has become a local book store here in town named Gunzil and Bowser Children’s Bookstore now that we have successfully moved out. It wasn’t an easy feat, it took us over a year to renovate and get the building we’re in now ready for operation. Moving massive cabinets and shelves in some ways was the easy part compared to putting in hundreds upon thousands of toys on shelves and hoping you wouldn’t cause a spill or an avalanche. But we did it, we’ve been able constantly grow, changing layouts of rooms, moving around machines to maximize how much fun we can squeeze into this place, and of course constantly adding new items in our collection.
We’ve become a place for so many people to come and bring their friends and families, both repeatedly and for the time, and just have a good time. We’re constantly trying to create a better experience for the people who come in, making sure we have something that hopefully no one else has ever seen anything like. And from the words of many people who are well storied and well traveled, we are fulfilling that. And we’re constantly trying to remember our ethos of doing good work, making good memories, and creating a space that is good for people.
It has been a long learning process of trying something new, learning lessons from we might have gotten wrong but also taking lessons from what went right. We never let ourselves stop improving and just being satisfied with where we are. We are constantly looking for what we need to add, see that community needs, and what people want. That’s been a lot of what drives us to keep adding new ideas and growing what we offer as an organization. And that’s really at the heart of what we’re doing, creating a place that feels good and is good. It’s been a lot of work and we continue to look forward to being able to keep expanding and growing into the next phases of development. To bigger, better, and brighter things.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
This has been an incredibly rewarding venture for us, we’ve been so lucky in the way we’ve continued to find success and that people really enjoy what we’ve made. We’ve worked very hard to ensure that we have a successful operation but even then still, all the planning in the world can only take us so far. There were many things that make things harder, and they often just come up as is.
One of the biggest struggles we’ve faced was COVID, as you can imagine we had to close down during that time and hope for the best. It wasn’t easy by any means but we have been so incredibly fortunate that we were in the right place at the right time, and there was a window of time for us that we would have been shut down anyways for the sake of moving our showcase and renovating our new home.
But other challenges that we face, and are ever increasingly facing at the breaks and mechanical failures that constantly creep up. And that’s to be expected, these are old machines, they get a lot of wear and use. The we are always trying trying to strike a balance to navigate where the line between repair and completely replacement. The same goes especially for Pinball but even worse because its an industry fact that the second you get a machine, new or old, you’re instantly going to be chasing bugs and breaks. There aren’t the same number of people who are trained and able to fix such complex machines as there used to be, but we are also very lucky that Kansas City isn’t so far away that we can’t get professionals and people with skill sets outside of our own to aid us in fixing and refurbishment.
Another one of the harder things we’ve dealt with has been just getting our name out there, and getting the local people to come in. We have had people who have traveled from states away for the sole purpose of seeing what we’re doing and our collection but we still get people weekly who have lived in Warrensburg their whole lives and only just heard of us. Social media is a hard game to manage and figure out. We’re right now in a development phase to try and get a better handle on that and we’ve got some very bright people who we’re lucky to have in our mix who are going to be part of the team leading that charge. And we hope to that it’ll help turn some of the local eyes over to us and bring people in to see what is so special about what we’re making here.
Another obstacle, which by all measures isn’t so terrible, is really the market for collectors items. We saw a huge spike in the price of collectibles and antiques around 2020, and that price has stayed pretty high still to this day five years later. It wasn’t to say that the market was dirt cheap or anything, but a lot of people dipped their toes into collecting things from their childhood and that’s what we’re trying to do. And so it became really a competitive market and being that we’re operating with a very well controlled budget it does make it harder to get some of the more special items that we come across or have wanted for a long time in our collection. But even that still has been able to be circumvented by people who have items of their own to donate because they were so enamored and charmed by the place we have. We’ve gotten items and collections that we couldn’t even dream of delivered straight to our doors and we’re eternally grateful every time.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Retrograde Charitable Toy And Videogame Museum?
Retrograde Charitable Toy And Videogame Museum is a special place, I would love to say that there is nothing else quite like it. And everyone who has come in has said the same thing. We’ve built a place that has succeeded in combining education, fun, and community in to a single place. We’ve managed to capture the essence of the old school arcade, with none of the quarter eating and limited play time that often came too quickly as kids. We have so many cabinets, we have racers, we have light gun games, pinball machines, and so many other offerings to come and play that you can’t really do it all in a single visit.
But that’s not even the half of it, because there is a whole museum that we’ve created that is full of everything nostalgia and pop culture related. We have thousands upon thousands of toys, hundreds on hundreds of video games, and so much technology that goes back decades. But we have other less expected things like animation cels from real on screen productions, dozens of autographs, and other oddities and special items that people need to come in and see.
We’re really proud of what we’ve made and how entirely unique but also warm and familiar it also is, there is a mix of nostalgia and wonder that really is in every bit in a game, every seam on a toy, every drop of ink on an album. It’s just something the likes of which you need to come to see and experience.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
This is a hard question, and we’ve had many long hours discussing what that looks like. Now of course we know what we WANT it to look like, but that’s often quite different from how things often shake out. We do think that there is going to be a very real push for people to find something outside of their homes, to want something that feels real and authentic, something that isn’t so tailored and clean. And we do hope that something like Retrograde can offer that for the people who are interested.
It’s not hard to see that people all over are looking for more connections and for something that feels authentic, they want memories and experiences that feel real for them. They’re looking for places that can give them a chance to make connections and have a sense of community, something outside of phones and screens. We know that many trends move in cycles and we could be reaching a place where the trend cycle brings back things like the mall culture of the 2000’s, the music scene of the 90’s, and the gaming revolution of the 80’s.
We also hope that we can continue to hold on to and preserve technology as much as we can, because we see how that’s always becoming more and more streamlined and many companies are creating products that all emulate each other. We’re hoping that the more we collect and hold on to, we can keep being able to show how things used to look and how we got to where we are today. We don’t want to lose that information and those treasures to places like burn piles and landfills.
It’s hard to be sure what it will look like, but we’re going to keep pushing forward, looking for new opportunities to keep building our legacy and continue our name as a group that is hopefully able to help lead a charge and inspire people and groups to do things that feel more real and outside of the purely digital space.
Pricing:
- $12 for 13 and older
- $10 for 12 and under
- Three and under are free
- Military and Student discounts available with valid ID
Contact Info:
- Website: https://retrogrademuseum.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/retrogrademuseum
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RetrogradeMuseum
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@retrogradecharitabletoyand8357
