GM Jon has been a full-time professional GM since May 2021, when he started building up the Game Shop’s Basement brand. The Game Shop’s Basement was built using the wonderful website StartPlaying.games as it’s official booking platform. GM Jon has been DMing D&D and other games since he was 11, forty years ago. For 10 months, Jon ran 12 to 15 3-hour game sessions per week (over 330 games). That was “version 1.0”.

The Game Shop’s Basement 2.0, streaming games, is the next evolutionary step in presenting awesome old-school flavored gaming fun and good times.

Our name is a homage to a real place that existed in the 80’s and 90’s when GM Jon was in high school and college.

Once upon a time, in a very magical time known as the 1980’s, in a town known as Warrensburg, Missouri, a group of retired military guys pooled their resources and opened a game shop. The basement was often open to gaming 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. One of the owners, although he did have a real home to go to with a real bed in it, would often sleep on a cot in the game shop office. Three different cultures met, mixed, and gamed together in that basement. First, there were the military folks from nearby Whiteman Air Force Base.  Second, there were the college gamers from nearby Central Missouri State University. Finally, there were quite a lot of townies, the people who would have lived and gamed in Warrensburg anyway because they either lived there, or lived a drivable distance away.

The basement became a home away from home for many. Several young people found an escape from varying degrees of dysfunctionality in their home lives. College students and military personnel got breaks from the pressures of campus life or military base life, respectively. And, since the pop culture explosion of D&D popularity from things like Big Bang Theory, Stranger Things, and Critical Role were still 30-some years away in the future, gamers of all stripes found their social set in the magical basement.

Now, the torch is being carried forth online, to a new generation of gamers, as well as to those old enough to remember the old ways, the old magic. Join us in our fantasy adventuring parties, our super-hero teams, our Star Wars rebel cells, our Shadowrun teams, and in whatever else we choose to be, as we play in The Game Shop’s Basement.