We had a great time at last year’s Classic Game Fest but nothing could have prepared us for this year’s edition. More arcade machines, more guests, more panels, more tournaments, more crazy things to buy… it was incredibly overwhelming, somehow even moreso than last year’s con.
This is a good thing though. More events means more people and holy crap was it packed this year, even on Sunday when cons in general tend to be slow and depressing. Way more arcade machines were set up this year (pinball too, courtesy of
Pinballz Kingdom) and every single one of them had lines all day. I was lucky enough to spend some time playing
Baby Pac-Man (one of my personal holy grails, as finding a working unit is near impossible) though and it was everything I’ve dreamed of.
Atari Age was back too with their huge selection of homebrew 2600 titles set up and those had much bigger crowds than last year as well. Even our booth featuring
Dong Dong Never Die was packed through the weekend. Not in high demand for whatever reason was the
Super Glove Ball/Power Glove set up at Game Over Videogames’s Museum booth. Could the world finally be getting over its obsession with that abomination?
Saturday’s big guests were Texas game design legend Richard “Lord British” Garriot and the original development team he worked with to craft the original
Ultima. Garriot also did a post-mortem on Ultima Online as well as a meet and greet, and a booth set up with Ultima/Origin Systems Inc. (RIP) memorabilia drew a considerable crowd all weekend like everything else but that poor Power Glove did. A Costume Contest sponsored by the
Texas D20 Girls and performances by musicians like
Descendants of Erdrick,
Doug Funnie, and
The Returners capped off the evening at a reasonable 7 PM, giving attendees time to plenty of time to rest up for the next day (hahahahahaha “rest”).
AtariMatt, Droidekka, and a Marathon tournament (?!) in which players competed using old Macs (!!!) and not the newer 360 port kicked off Sunday morning’s festivities. Howard Scott Warshaw (of Yar’s Revenge and ET 2600) fame did a panel and a Q&A with Ernie Cline (author of Ready, Player One) and Mike Mika, which then turned into a meet-and-greet with a huge line but then also turned into a giveaway of 2600 cartridges rescued from the infamous New Mexico landfill they were buried in years ago as chronicled in the Xbox Originals documentary Atari: Game Over. No one expected that and it wound up, in my eyes, being the most mindblowing thing to happen the entire weekend. The guys behind the documentary Nintendo Quest screened their film to a packed crowd later in the day and did a quite informative Q&A moderated by Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News afterward, and the evening closed out with more music while congoers very slowly trickled out of the convention center.
I cannot overstate how packed this year’s convention was. It was great to see so many people completely engrossed in celebrating the videogame culture of yesteryear. Next year they’ll be expanding to almost double the area of the past few years so they’ll be able to pack in even more things to see and do, which will be insanely awesome. I’m looking forward to watching this convention continue to be the greatest gaming convention in Texas.
Photos by Ryan Cayari
