What Happens to Your Used Games?

Belching, huffing and heaving, an 18-wheel UPS truck pulls up at the rear-end of a gray concrete (Cheap Diablo 3 Gold), out-of-town warehouse. The driver steps into dizzying 100 degree heat as, noisily, the warehouse's corrugated door rolls open. Forklifts glide into action, unloading pallet upon pallet, stacking them inside a massive loading area in the shade of the warehouse's docking bay.

Stacks of identical brown cardboard boxes totter on the pallets, each crammed with used video games, used games consoles and used cell phones. Men with clipboards scurry about checking dockets and making notes.

This is GameStop's used-game reprocessing plant, situated on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. Up to seven of these trucks will roll in every single day, depositing the games and the gear that you take into GameStop stores in exchange for cash or credits.

Around 80 percent of games traded in stores are resold in the same store. But 20 percent are sent to this Texas facility for refurbishment, usually because they are looking somewhat tattered. For personal information security reasons, 100 percent of all consoles, cell-phones and other devices come to be cleaned up and sent back out. Some 17 million games and one million hardware units pass through this plant every year.

What happens to the games when they arrive here? They are divided and distributed among small teams, each with their own name and game-related mascot (based on classics like Dig-Dug and Shinobi). Each disk goes into an unsightly machine that scrapes away the top 10 microns of cover-material, enough to 'clean' the disk of any superficial scratches. They are then buffed for that nice, shiny, sparkly look.

The disks are inspected by hand. Those that still show scratches are tossed into a terrifically noisy machine that breaks them up into tiny pieces, depositing the shards into a huge box that will later be taken away by a specialist recycling company.