TCB Games

I was just a customer when this started. A close friend had been telling me for months that I had to see TCB Games — I’m the kind of guy who still lights up over a boxed SNES cart, so eventually we made the trip. That first visit hooked me. It became our Friday after-work routine for a few years running, and somewhere in there I got to know the owner from being in the shop so often.

Calling TCB a game store undersells it. It’s equal parts nerd museum and retail store — autographed memorabilia on the walls, comic books, video games, toys, collectibles, and whatever else falls into a fandom the owner finds interesting. If it even remotely fits, they buy it. There was a retro Super Mario rotary phone sitting on a back shelf for the longest time, just hanging out, priced like it was normal. That’s the vibe. Glass cases full of cartridges, CRTs humming in the corner, staff who actually know what they’re talking about.

One afternoon I overheard the owner talking to one of his staff at the counter — the shop was up for some kind of industry award, and one of the qualifying criteria was having a real web presence. Not a Facebook page. An actual storefront. They didn’t have one, and the deadline was tighter than anyone would want.

I’m not usually the guy who jumps into conversations at the register. But this one I couldn’t let go of. I introduced myself, told him what I do for a living, and said if he wanted help, I’d help. That was the start of it. We’ve been friends since.

The problem was straightforward on paper and genuinely thorny in practice. The shop ran entirely in-person. Every cart, every controller, every box of loose Game Boy games sitting in a bin by the door — all of it lived in Lightspeed, the POS driving the counter. Lightspeed is fine at what it is. The trouble was how it was being used. Products in the system had missing SKUs, no photos, no descriptions — data good enough to ring up a sale at the register and nothing close to good enough to put on the internet. Fixing that was its own massive project hiding inside the real one.

It took three years. Through several in-store staff changes — each one meaning another round of training someone new on a cleanup process that wasn’t fun to begin with — we combed through the catalog, SKU by SKU, and got it to something manageable. That work finally wrapped up earlier this year, in 2026.

Somewhere in the middle of that cleanup, we took a hard look at whether Lightspeed should even stay. The owner and I sat through pitches from several different POS vendors and integrator reps, trying to figure out if the right move was to rip it out and start over. We ended up staying. The switching cost was real, the staff knew the system, and on paper the item-and-order sync problem was solvable with a bridge rather than a replacement. That bridge was SkuIQ.

So the plumbing ended up settled like this. Shopify is the storefront — it’s where the eCommerce gravity is, the payment rails are figured out, and the admin UX is good enough that shop staff can manage orders without me in the loop. Lightspeed stays the source of truth for inventory because that’s where the register is, and the register is never going away. SkuIQ sits between the two and keeps one listing synced to one physical item. Sell it at the counter, it disappears from the site. Sell it on the site, it disappears from the shelf. That’s the whole ballgame when your catalog is thousands of unique items that exist exactly once.

With the plumbing settled, the fun part was the front of the house. A default Shopify theme would have been fine. It would have worked. It also would have been a betrayal of what TCB actually is. The whole appeal of the shop is that it’s for people who care — people who notice the little stuff, who’ll pick up on a reference, who know the difference between a Japanese Saturn import and a grey-market bootleg. You can’t put a beige theme on that and expect it to feel like the shop.

So we built a custom storefront in Next.js on top of Retro UI, hitting Shopify’s APIs for the catalog and checkout. Retro UI gave us the right starting vocabulary — chunky pixels, unapologetic color, the visual language of the consoles the shop sells — and from there it was late nights in the details. The loading states, the hover transitions, the way the add-to-cart button clicks, the easter eggs tucked into corners for people who look. The 404 page. The footer. None of it was strictly necessary. All of it mattered. That’s the thing about building for a shop whose whole brand is caring about the craft — if the site doesn’t care about its own craft, the site is a lie.

What shipped was a complete eCommerce channel with the soul of the store intact. Inventory flows from the counter to the web and back. Customers who could only shop in-store can now shop from anywhere, and the people who walk in on Saturdays still get the same experience they always did. The shop qualified for what it needed to qualify for. And I got a friend out of it, which was not the point but is maybe the best part.

The honest ending: SkuIQ has turned into its own headache. Quantities drift across Shopify and Lightspeed in ways they shouldn’t, and reconciling them is an ongoing fight. The storefront shipped, the catalog is finally clean, the plumbing is in place — and now the sync layer we picked specifically to solve this problem is the thing we’re still working on. That’s where we are. Not a bow on top. A real project, still moving.

It’s been running since 2023, and I’m still the guy they call when something needs a nudge. Friend of the shop is a role I’m happy to keep.