After 18 incredible years, Level Up is shutting its gate for the last time on January 26th, 2025.
Words alone cannot convey the sense of gratitude and love that we have for each and every person we had the pleasure of meeting from the day we first opened to today.
We hope to see some of you in the store before 1/26!
We will be extending our 50% off everything holiday sale through the 26th as well, so help us make packing up easier and take some cool stuff home with you at a discount!
That’s the short goodbye. For the long one, read on:
(Warning: what follows will be long, rambling, and mushy. Consider yourself warned.)
You can’t keep a business running for 18 years without doing a few things right.
And as far as we’re concerned, the number one thing we got right was building a community of some of the kindest, generous, nerdiest people out there.
Every success that Level Up experienced over the past 18 years has been a direct result of some amazing people going above and beyond. From our surprisingly frequent relocations (3 times between 4 different locations) to our events, none of it would have been possible without you.
We (Gregg and Sean) started Level Up in 2007 with some half-baked plans and a couple of bucks. We had this idea that if we combined everything we loved into one store where we’d hang out all the time, other people would want to come and hang out there too. And buy things, too. We had to make a living somehow.
And while things didn’t exactly start off with a bang, the support of our friends and community kept us going and convinced us that it was worth putting in the time and the effort to stick around.
That incredible support got us through some lean years and only grew as we did. When finally in 2011 a confluence of events led to a move to the Hamilton Mall and a surge in nerd culture that turned Level Up into a for real, actual business.
We expanded our staff to include managers and part-timers and even interns at one point! Over the years, dozens of people have worked directly for the store and dozens more have volunteered their valuable time for free to make our biggest projects happen.
We turned our Free Comic Book Day event into an honest-to-god mini comic con, with a peak attendance of around 4,000 people in 2015. We hosted a screening of Back to the Future 2 on the day that Marty travels to the (then) future in October of that same year. An event we shot a commercial for with a real Delorean! That’s a thing we got to do! Because of you!
There are simply too many amazing memories to recount here without accidentally creating a Level Up wiki, so we’ll restrain ourselves.
And while we’ve had many incredible memories, we’ve had our fair share of challenges and tragedy as well.
No farewell to Level Up would be complete without mentioning the lost member of our Level Up family, Harry Jackson.
Many of you know Harry as Doc Brown in the aforementioned commercial, or Indiana Jones in another spot. Or maybe you know him through your shared passion for pinball. Or maybe you met him at one of our events, since he volunteered for every single one once he found the store.
Harry is, after all, the reason there are pinball machines in the store. The reason there’s a “Harry’s Arcade” sign on the back wall. Harry is very much a member of the Level Up family. We met Harry much the same way we’ve met most of you, as a customer at the store. And like many of you, he went on to become a close and dear friend to each and everyone at the store. We miss him every day and in some ways, saying goodbye to Level Up feels like saying goodbye to Harry all over again.
Harry wasn’t the only member of the crew to pass over the years, unfortunately, and we miss them all dearly.
So, if you made it this far, you’re probably still wondering, “why now?”
The fact is, keeping something like this going takes a LOT of passion, time, and energy. It always has, but these days it requires more and more and more. 18 years is a long time to do anything, really, and after that long we simply do not have the fire in our hearts that we once did to give it everything it needs. After a lot of thinking and talking, we have decided it is time to wrap it up and start a new chapter of our lives.
There’s so much more we could say. We’ll end here though, and ask you to share your memories of the store with us on social over the next few weeks and we hope you’ll stop in to say “hey” before we close up shop.
With that, we’ll leave you with a quote that says goodbye better than we can:
“So long, and thanks for all the fish.”
-Gregg, Sean, and your friends at Level Up Entertainment
