Merchants Of Easton: The Game Gallery

Angel Correa, owner of The Game Gallery, 315 Northampton Street, has dreamt of video games all his life:

"My fondest memory and my earliest one was on top of a pile of laundry, my parents first starting out in an apartment in Allentown and I'm playing Super Mario Brothers III over and over and over again. That's where it initially started. My parents regretted it at some point in time, 'cause they were like 'What did we do here?' 'cause I was addicted. Like everything: art direction, the characters, the story, I loved it all. Then we had a family friend who would come over every weekend and he was like a man-child, so he would have everything new the day of.  I remember PS1. My parents weren't going to shell out four hundred, but *he* did. And he brought over every new game that came out. Then I'd start dreaming of working for Capcom in California and I started collecting more. When I was a kid, I had to earn all my stuff, so everything that I got, I held it closely. Then when I started getting money in high school, my collection was getting huge--I was hoarding a lot and started selling on social media like Facebook, then eBay and Amazon. Then, I wanted to open up my own shop and I proposed the idea. Here, they were definitely against it. The city was trying to make the downtown very classy, which it has; it's growing and it looks great. But they needed entertainment. We have a lot of restaurants but not a lot of things to go to. This spot was exactly what I wanted, and three years later, I have a 40-plus game arcade, a retro store, and then we also do Magic: The Gathering, any type of tabletop game.  I just like things that make you think and involve you."

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