HAPPYFUNLAND
“To start, I’m no smart ape, I have no wrinkles, and I am completely smooth. In saying that, I want you to tighten your tinfoil chin straps and slip on your diaper because this shit is bananas…”
–u/Necessary-Business-2, r/Superstonk, 10 February 2025
The GameStop at the Poughkeepsie Galleria does not seem to me like the birthplace of any revolution, but I’ve been wrong before. So I drove to the Galleria with my friend Naomi so she could go to Target and I could loiter around one of America’s finest gaming institutions, taking notes and photos, trying to understand how thousands of people have invested their hopes and their money into a GameStop-led collapse. It was the first day above 30 degrees Fahrenheit in fucking forever and I could have been going for a walk or frolicking with my pals, so of course I wasn’t gonna do that, I was gonna go do ethnographic research at a slowly dying mall.
Let me back up a bit. Remember 2021? Some called it “the greatest year on record” and they probably are stupid. It was the second calendar year of the COVID pandemic, which kicked off with a delusional mob storming the Capitol, and shortly after that fiasco the price of GameStop stock began to rise and rise and rise. Streamers buoyed the share price until it reached memetic status and your weird cousin heard it was a cash cow, “going to the moon” as they say. Millions of weird cousins got on the train, and by January 28, 2021, GameStop stock was $483 a share, up from about $17.25 at the beginning of the month. The narrative wrote itself—a group of Redditors on r/wallstreetbets successfully squeezed the hedge fund Melvin Capital, who bet recklessly on GameStop’s downfall, leaving them hemorrhaging over a billion dollars a day at the height of the mania. By the middle of 2022, with their investments not picking up the slack, Melvin shuttered its doors and gave all the money back to its investors. The forum-posting “little guys” of the finance world dunked on the fat cats of Wall Street, rallied behind a struggling retailer, and got out with a healthy sum of cash for their troubles.
Except for the others. Such a tidy David-and-Goliath story ignores what happens to the people who don’t cash out quick enough, who end up blowing so much money on shares of GameStop that the sunk-cost fallacy goes from an abstraction to a gaping maw that swallows up your kids’ college funds or whatever you can save from a part-time job. When the music stopped and a rather large group of lollygaggers found themselves without a chair to sit on, they congregated together on their own subreddit, r/Superstonk, and began convincing each other that the Real Game hadn’t even been played yet, that it was just around the corner, because of course the Real Game couldn’t end with them losing.
This sad scene of down-on-their-luck Redditors clinging to each other in the aftermath of some stock market shenanigans has blossomed into a quasi-religious doctrine involving buying as much GameStop stock as possible. The Superstonkers (or “Apes” as they call themselves) believe in the apocalyptic prophets of venture capital, who in return think of them as mindless lemmings ripe for manipulation, and as GameStop’s stock continues to fall, the Apes understand that the good Lords of the market are testing them like Israelites in the desert of the Dow Jones. One day, GameStop price will shoot up so high it will cost millions of dollars a share, leaving our humble Apes as the masters of a new economy, holding the world’s financial systems for ransom as they demand complete control over the creation of new governments, new banks, and entirely new lives for themselves. This process—and all the other conspiracies that overlap to form its structure—is known as the Mother of All Short Squeezes, or MOASS. Many Apes claim they don’t really believe in MOASS’ utopian dream. But they don’t sell the stock. They never sell the stock.
So of course, I had to visit the Poughkeepsie Galleria. If there’s even a chance that Heaven will come to Earth through the tarnished gray walls of a GameStop, I need to see the temple in all its glory. Some make pilgrimages to Mecca, to Jerusalem, to the Vatican. At least for this one I didn’t need to take a flight. All the planes these days keep crashing.
My journey through the mall towards GameStop closely resembled the drunken stumble home I embarked on the night before. Except instead of silver darts of moonlight, all was bathed in orthodontist-office fluorescence. And my liquor-warm fuzzies preaching goodwill to Earth curdled by that morning into hungover loathing. Loathing of myself and loathing of the goddamn metaphor surrounding me. Prefabricated opulence, bright enough to blind. It was Sunday, so the mall hummed with activity as upstaters prepared for the week ahead, though still too few of us to justify the immensity of the space. You can imagine, wandering amidst the glowing facades of Taco Bell and Sephora, why someone might think the mall would just keep growing, hungry and cancerous, until every American could only see the sky through atrium windows.
As I hurried to my destination with head down and backpack on, I felt the Stateside fear of seeming like a potential shooter; white guys with bulky bags in public places wind up on the news sometimes. Then I got nervous to use the touchscreen directory because I didn’t want a sign pointing out to passersby that I was beelining to GameStop—something about it felt viscerally embarrassing-–but I had to choke down my pride and use it anyway. Second floor, it told me, about midway along the main axis of the Galleria. Right in the thick of things.
GameStop, great chariot of fire that the Apes shall mount in the coming Judgement, sat between a Yankee Candles stall and a Journeys Kidz. There were a few customers inside, so my hopes for the poetry of a completely empty store were dashed. C’est la vie. Luckily, the presence of others meant I could take pictures and write my notes without attracting attention. Not that it would be attention I couldn’t handle, but I’ve had to explain my work studying the Apes a lot recently and wanted to avoid repeating myself.
What really caught my eye before even entering the store was its larger surroundings. GameStop stared at a Forever 21 with bold signs in the windows proclaiming “STORE CLOSING,” “ENTIRE STORE 10% TO 40% OFF,” “TOTAL INVENTORY BLOWOUT,” etc. The reaper descending on the hapless brick-and-mortar of the mall. The real evidence of modernity’s reaping lay in the massive, abandoned Sears that dominated the entire side of the mall where GameStop was located, as huge and shadowed as the River of Darkness sailed by Ra. Skeletal remnants of a neon sign read “AMERICA’S HOME APPLIANCE STORE,” as though it were the epitaph on a tombstone. Beyond its doors dwelt a corporate emptiness so vastly hollow it seemed to suck me in. Nietzsche said, “if you gaze for long enough into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you,” and as I froze at the threshold the giant carcass of the Sears gazed into me with the long-dead eyes of its glass. Murdered retail, everywhere you look. The Internet Age is like the Black Plague for chain stores. I lingered for a moment, then shook off the sight of Sears and finished my walk to GameStop.
The Temple of MOASS certainly held more life than Forever 21 or Sears, but when you’re used to rambling Reddit posts about the capitalist genius behind every move the company makes, actually stepping foot into a drab shop with a broken light fixture proved pretty underwhelming. When I was a kid, it seemed that GameStop was lined wall-to-wall with games for every console, and all the paraphernalia you could possibly need. While obviously there were plenty of games in GameStop (we’ll get to those), entire shelves now devote themselves to Funko Pops and plushies, with most of those being Pokémon or Five Nights at Freddy’s characters.
Immediately upon entering I made eye contact with a stuffed Foxy, whose horror-game jaws hung wide in a shriek that portended doom for my visit. The Funko Pops stood packed so deep they resembled a military formation. A woman arguing with the beleaguered cashier said, “You know, I used to work here myself!” in a speak-to-the-manager voice, to which the staff member replied, “Okay.” If he continued, I didn’t hear it. The broken beam of lighting hung at an angle that threatened to fall at any moment. A man entered the store as I took notes, and his friend waited outside, laughing—“You said thirty seconds, so I’m giving you thirty seconds.”—and petulantly counting each one out loud. Is this the cathedral of a new economic order? Is this the vehicle for anyone’s, much less a gang of Redditors’, deliverance from hardship? It grew difficult to believe that even the short squeeze that actually happened could possibly have occurred in relation to this small, humdrum room stuffed with mall-goers and merchandise.
But when I stopped to look at the other wall, lined with the video games that give the store a reason for existence, I understood in my gut what so many books about the nature of digital life, of that imitation world that surrounds and flows through us, are really discussing. Every game was just r/Superstonk, portals to other universes where there’s always a chance for the Good Guys to defeat the Big Bad, where you can play NBA-level basketball without ever standing up from your couch, where someday if you hit the right buttons you can get the U.S. government to give you Fort Knox as a payment for your GameStop shares. These doorways shone extra bright on the storm-colored walls of the Temple. How natural that this place became the only hope of financial millenarians. Like the exhausting experience of an overcrowded art gallery, a violent cornucopia of possible worlds which Are Not, only to be accessed through the flimsy tools of algorithms and our capacity to empathize with objects. You can be a farmer, a fighter, a pornstar, or just a scared child alone in the dark.
MOASS frees the Apes from whatever about their present is so unbearable, lets them hide in a corridor filled with other people who they never have to really see beyond the stories they tell each other to keep the dream alive. Many Apes believe that the SEC produces nonexistent shares of companies to artificially depress the market. Some compare it to burgers under a heat lamp. Oh, you don’t get it? Don’t worry. So goes the mirror realm, the funhouse of the virtual, where everything ends up a little bit fractured and distorted. Meatspace smoothie. Sacramental truths diced, breaded, and deep-fried until golden brown. Everything is a lie. Fake money, fake people, all just a game. Until you wake up and it’s been over four years since the squeeze but you still can’t bring yourself to sell the stock.
I know what it feels like to want the world to be Different so badly you abandon the real. An American sickness. When you listen to the Apes, you realize they feel as though the real abandoned them, sometime in between the original GameStop squeeze and the present moment. I find myself falling into the same trap. When did this world become what it is? Was I sleeping? Blissfully unaware of the claws enclosing us? No, aware, but the mall has been dying so long it feels like a dream or a joke. The old American Dream dies too, and some bullshit fatalism replaces it. I’ve grown to hate how much I sleep. Hear my mighty roar: HOOOOONK SHOO, HOOOOONK SHOO. It was always just my own ego, my own shortened sight. Only in the past year or so, as I’ve tried to seek out the more heinously disconnected echo chambers in the digital funhouse, have I felt like I might understand what is literally happening around me. Only by seeing the distortions in all their grotesquerie can we know what form lies beneath them.
Surrounded by these mirrors—the mirror of myself in the Apes, the mirror of the market in their Subreddit, the mirror of a dying America in the Poughkeepsie Galleria-–I found myself disturbed to the point of sickness. Despite all my notes and photographs, I lost some grip on the very reality I wanted to contrast with the Apes’ fantasies. My eyes fell on one of the PlayStation 5 games on the wall, named HappyFunland. Beneath the title, a strange creature glowered with a demonic grin. I Googled the name when I got home, and found a Reddit post explaining that it was a virtual reality horror game, with one commenter saying it included “dark humor, racial stereotypes, adult subjects, Janky physics, and other bad stuff.”
Of course it does. Some days I’m convinced I can’t leave the online shithole of dark humor, racial stereotypes, adult subjects, janky physics, and other bad stuff. The best and worst thing: I still believe it’s worth it. We tangle our humanity into this godlike spiderweb, this network of immaterial catacombs. Inside them rots the corpse of a Sears. Inside them the Apes pray for the Mother of All Short Squeezes. A thousand delights lurk in the stomachs of this underworld.
At some point, you have to leave Happy Funland; you take the goggles off and readjust to your living room. All its possible realities collapse into this one, our land of meat and machines. There’s horror in VR, there’s horror in the mall, there’s horror in the stock market. But there’s no horror in a nice drive back home. I walked out of GameStop and headed to meet Naomi, breathing deep and letting every step take me back to the real.
“HAPPYFUNLAND” was edited by Kat Mulligan.
MAXWELL NORMAN:
MAXWELL NORMAN’S ALBUM OF THE WEEK
DJ Screw - 3 N the Mornin’ Pt. 2 (1996)
As heat and humidity creep back into the Northern Hemisphere, take some time to melt your head with DJ Screw’s most famous mixtape. The lumbering, murky style he invented—one that came to define Houston’s rap scene and inspire legions of imitators to this day—oozes like codeine or bayou mud through your ears. Houston’s legendary Screwed Click of rappers like ESG and Lil Keke sound nearly demonic, slowed down and stretched into bass-washed caricatures. From shorter, more accessible cuts like “G-Ride” or the absolutely fantastic “Sailin’ Da South” to longer odysseys like “No Way Out” and “South Side,” there’s more than enough here to get lost in the swamp. RIP SCREW, a real Southern visionary.