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Retail Clerk '89
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About the game
Retail Clerk '89 is a short story game set in a shopping mall at the end of the 1980s. You are the new hire at a store in the Bayhurst Mall, starting work during the Christmas season, and the game follows you through eight days on the job until the holidays.
Most of the game is walking around the mall and talking: to customers who never quite know what they want, to the employees and owners of the other shops, and to the friends who drive you home after each shift. Conversations branch on what you choose to say, and there are three possible endings. Along the way there are small mysteries to look into, like items that keep disappearing from the stores at night.
The game was inspired by the role-playing games of the era and grew into something closer to interactive fiction. Its author calls it a complete, albeit short, demo of what he learned about Mega Drive programming. The mall, the stores and the characters are all fictional.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Mega Drive: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in ClownMDEmu, a Mega Drive emulator compiled to WebAssembly. Click Play now and choose New Game on the title screen.
The game saves to the cartridge's battery memory, which this site keeps in your browser automatically; Load Game on the title screen continues from it. F2 also saves the full state of the emulator and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too. The game is in English and has a lot of text.
Controls
| Key | Mega Drive button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | D-pad | walk; choose answers in a conversation |
| Z | A | talk, examine, confirm a choice |
| X | B | close a conversation |
| C | C | status screen |
| Enter | Start | pause; New Game or Load Game on the title screen |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Talk to everyone, every day. The people in the mall change what they say from one day to the next, and some of the story only moves forward after the right conversation.
Your answers matter. The three endings depend on the choices you make in conversations, so it is worth playing again to see a different one.
The status screen (C) shows where you stand; check it when you are not sure what to do next.
Credits and licence
Retail Clerk '89 was written and programmed by Hugues Johnson. It uses the Echo sound driver by Javier Degirolmo, music by Drozerix (public domain) and Blurry (CC BY-SA 3.0, adapted), scenery based on tilesets by Sithjester and fonts based on Audiowide by Astigmatic, Deathwake by Zee-3 and Tragic Marker by Missy Meyer. The code is under the MIT licence and the story, characters and art under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. The licence texts and full credits are linked from this page.