Acts of Gord: Retail Horror Written as Scripture

Acts of Gord is a video game store owner’s account of his customers, written as though it were the Old Testament. That sentence sounds like a joke premise. It is not. The site has been online for well over two decades, it runs to hundreds of pages, and it remains the single funniest body of retail writing on the internet.

“And there came unto the store a woman, and she was wroth.” That kind of thing. Sustained, at length, with total commitment.

What is Acts of Gord?

In the late nineties and early two-thousands, a man who called himself Gord ran an independent video game shop that both sold and rented games. Independent game retail in that era was a spectacular pressure cooker: cartridges and discs that could be copied, returned, damaged or stolen, a customer base skewing young and broke, parents with no idea what they were buying, and margins thin enough to see through.

Gord started writing it down. Rather than the usual weary blog format, he chose scripture. He is Gord, third person, capital G. Customers are supplicants or transgressors. Store policies are laws. Punishments are visited upon the unrighteous. The whole apparatus of religious text, books, chapters, commandments, parables, gets applied to a man deciding whether to accept a return on a scratched copy of a hockey game.

The device works for two reasons. First, it is genuinely funny to describe a dispute over a five-dollar late fee in the register of divine judgment. Second, and more importantly, it creates ironic distance. Gord is not complaining, he is decreeing, which makes the stories land as comedy rather than as the exhausting grievance-dumping that most retail writing turns into.

Under the jokes there is real substance. The chronicles are a detailed, accidental oral history of how a small game store actually worked: how rental fraud was attempted and countered, why certain policies existed, what shrinkage looked like, how a shop survives customers who genuinely believe that buying a game entitles them to return it finished. Anyone who has worked a counter will recognize the specifics with an involuntary wince.

The site itself is a period artifact too. Plain HTML, minimal design, text organized into a table of contents and left alone. It predates the entire ecosystem of retail-horror subreddits and workplace-story YouTube channels that eventually grew up around the same material, and it is better written than nearly all of them.

What can you do on Acts of Gord?

• Read the chronicles in order. The main body of stories is organized into books and chapters, meant to be read front to back.
• Dip into the famous chapters. Certain stories, particularly around returns, rentals and shoplifting, have been quoted so widely that you may already know them without knowing the source.
• Study the store policies. Gord regularly explains why a given rule exists, and the reasoning is a small business education delivered sideways.
• Appreciate the era detail. Cartridges, rental late fees, trade-in economics, the specific chaos of a shop floor before digital distribution.
• Follow the recurring characters. Regulars, staff and repeat offenders appear across chapters, giving the collection an unexpected serial structure.
• Send the link to anyone in retail. It is the fastest way to make a former shop worker disappear for two hours.

Tips to get the most out of it

Give it three chapters before you judge the voice. The biblical register is jarring at first and then becomes invisible, at which point it starts doing real comic work. People who bounce off it almost always bounce in the first five minutes.

Read it as literature, not as testimony. The stories are stylized, the details are heightened, and the framing is a bald-faced device. Trying to litigate whether each event happened exactly as written misses the entire point.

Do not binge it. The material is repetitive by nature, one difficult customer after another, and the humor dulls if you read forty chapters in a sitting. It rewards being treated like a collection of short stories rather than a novel.

Notice the business logic. Behind each punchline there is usually a policy, and behind each policy a specific way somebody once tried to cheat the store. That layer is more interesting than the yelling.

Save it for offline reading. It is a plain-text site of a certain age. Copy the chapters you like somewhere durable, because sites of this vintage do not always stay up.

If you like Acts of Gord, also try…

• Peter’s Evil Overlord List: another long-running list-format comedy classic from the same era of the web.
• Real Ultimate Power: committed, sustained absurdity in a single unwavering voice.
• Fark: decades of headline-driven human folly, curated daily.
• MetaFilter: the community where stories like these were discovered and endlessly relitigated.

More classic internet writing is filed under Entertainment & Fun, with the stranger corners in Weird & Wonderful.