• 
• CLASS
• JOBS
• AUTO
• HOMES

Former GM worker driven to start gaming business

Photo

Aaron Leeder

Photo

Photo by Cat Szalkowski-Patneau

The warehouse of Noble Knight Games based in Janesville stores 50,000+ new and out-of-print war games, board games, miniatures and trading cards.

JANESVILLE — Aaron Leeder’s friends questioned his sanity in the late 1990s when the young man left the stability of the General Motors plant in Janesville to turn a hobby into a business.

Thirteen years later, the local GM plant is closed, and Leeder’s business has blossomed out of his basement and rented warehouses into an attractive, 9,000-square-foot building on Kennedy Road in Janesville.

Noble Knight Games buys, sells and trades new and used books, board games, cards, miniatures and hobby supplies associated with fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, super heroes, science fiction and military history.

“It raised some eyebrows when I left GM,” Leeder said. “It was a great job that was reliable, but putting a bolt on a truck for 10 hours every day was starting to eat at my soul.”

Leeder’s real passion was D&D and the small collection of game books he’d acquired through the years. He dipped a toe into the Internet and found other collectors interested in buying or selling their stuff.

“It was just a message board, nothing formal and certainly no company doing it,” he said. “I found that I had stuff that people wanted, and what I paid $5 for was worth $10.”

Eventually, Leeder cashed his first check and started down the road to used bookstores in the area, buying whatever he could and selling it online.

“My lists grew, and more and more people started to trade with me or sell me their collections,” he said. “Slowly, I became known as the guy who knew his stuff and did this.”

Gamers tend to be hoarders, Leeder said, and circumstances sometimes force them to sell their collections. That’s allowed Noble Knight Games to build an exhaustive inventory over 13 years.

Racks in the back end of the store are stacked with more than 100,000 hard-to-find games and components that are shipped domestically and internationally. Leeder has room for expansion, which he’s already contemplating two years after finishing the building.

Last November, he opened a retail operation at the front of the building to complement the company’s mail-order/Internet business. Its popularity is growing for the company that is one of the largest of its kind in the world.

“Thanks to book, TV and movie franchises like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Batman, Pokemon, Band of Brothers, Twilight and many others, interest in fantasy, super heroes, science fiction, militaria and other previously geeky themes is at an all-time high,” Leeder said.

The recession hasn’t hindered business. In fact, he said, more people have turned to games that provide hours of fun at a great value.

Leeder’s customers range from teen girls to men in their 70s. The stigma attached to many of his products is long gone, he said.

“Now we’re finding people are open minded and realizing that these games are not an unknown quantity, (that) they are excellent teachers of language, math, teamwork, problem solving and doing the right thing,” he said. “Plus they involve face-to-face interaction, not long hours in front of a TV or computer.”