08/27/2026
We have been selling games for nearly a decade and have shipped and sold them all around the country. We have always taken pride in the quality of our work, and in all that time never had one complaint. Sadly, we have now found ourselves in a situation I frankly never thought would happen.
In the beginning, this was a side gig in our pole barn that I did for enjoyment, but the work we did quickly caught on. I was offered a job in Washington, and we moved the family and the growing business to Washington. Instead of doing this work at our home, I rented a 3000 square foot facility and was there for about 3 years. In 2022, I left my full-time job and decided to do this full time. We then moved into a larger 10,0000 square foot warehouse. To support the size and scale, we added art printing and several other offerings on top of what we had always done. On paper, I thought this was going to be great, but we bit off more than we could chew based on what was about to happen. In November and December, I was diagnosed with three hernias, and at nearly the same time, I lost nearly $50,000 to a scam and was not able to recover the funds. If that wasn't bad enough, I was only able to work about three hours a day due to the pain and could not have surgery until February.
After surgery, it was nearly a month and a half or more before I could really do the work that I loved and that people were counting on me for. I was depressed after all of that and had a really hard time getting going again. I worked to bridge the gap left after all of this. I was so far behind on orders after my injury that I could not catch up. We had games we could not deliver and orders we could not fill. I damaged three very expensive games by being careless and rushing too much. I had to figure out how to refund those. Worst of all, I had friends who tried to help, and they got caught up in the mess with me. All of the orders that I was behind on, along with the financial strains that were on our business of nearly 10 years, were just more than we could recover from. The overhead of our location, and all the other expenses that were reliant on how we operated before all this, were now out of reach. In July, I signed a lease termination agreement with our landlord so that I could get out of my lease and leave the 10,000-square-foot facility that we had occupied, because we just couldn't support it.
To try and figure out a way forward so that I could make right with all those who counted me and trusted me with their orders, I decided to plan to take Pixels back to our roots and just do great restorations as I did in the past. By August, things had gotten much worse, and so I accepted a job down south, where the cost of living is much lower and I can work to get everything taken care of. The plan is to move all the inventory here and resume getting the rest of the games we have not refunded out to those that ordered them.
I have done an absolutely terrible job of communicating what was going on with everyone. I did not tell my wife what was happening, and it nearly cost me my relationship and my marriage to the one that I love the most and has stood by me for over 20 years. I had orders that were open, games I needed to pay for from people who also trusted me, and I just could not bring myself to tell them what was happening. I can't explain it. I have never been in a situation like this and had no idea what to do. I was just in a spiral and couldn't get out. I had a major panic attack in August, and I frankly thought I was going to die. It was the scariest thing I have ever experienced. Two ambulance rides, two hospitals, a CT scan, and an MRI later, I went home after 8 hours. Since then, we have approved a lot of refunds and have several people who are still hanging in with me while I sort this out.
I have had some people say that I am a scammer, and many other things that are just not true. I had one person today say that and some other things that just were not accurate. So, I decided to make this post to confront all of this head-on. I take responsibility for the decisions I made and what has happened here, but I have never stolen anything from anyone in my life. I handled this whole mess terribly. I wish I had done it differently and better. All I can do is try to make it right as best I can, and promise anyone who has an open order that I will figure out how to fill it or get your money back to you. That is all I can do. To those who believed in what I was doing and tried to help me financially and in many other ways, I am committed to making things right with you as well to the fullest extent possible. As I work through this I wanted to make all of this public so that I can stop this cycle of doubt and speculation. I should have done this a long time ago, I should have communicated better and more often with everyone. I still have some people I need to reach out to, and I will do that. This is the first step.
