In between Wordstock events, I ran over to the other end of the Oregon Convention Center for the Retro Gaming Expo. This was my first time attending, and I really didn’t get to spend nearly enough time there. Half of the expo hall was devoted to vendors—people selling old video games, consoles, and controllers, as well as game-related art, shirts, and even soaps! The other half was the Supercade, a free-play area with old consoles, arcade games, and pinball machines.
Here are some photos from the weekend—click on any of the thumbnails for a close-up and captions!
Welcome to the Retro Gaming Expo! Would you like to play a game?
The Supercade: 20,000 square feet of classic consoles, arcade games, and pinball machines.
This Atari jukebox gave you lots of choices to play.
How about some Super Mario Bros 3 on the NES?
The Game Dock from Cascadia Games lets you play iPhone games with NES-like controllers
A close-up look at Cascadia Games’ Game Dock (here in conjunction with an Apple HD video cable).
Kickin’ it old school with Yars’ Revenge on the Atari 2600.
2.5d Sprites’ layered perl bead art was a great way to reproduce the parallax in classic side scrollers.
2.5d Sprites had very cool perl bead pixel art.
Behemoth had a large booth with several of their games free to play.
Jacob and Ashley of the Wooden Arcade have hand-painted pixel art for your walls.
The Wooden Arcade’s pixel art was very tempting.
The Super Retro Trio Console: play NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis cartridges with one console.
I played Lunar Lander and had to document one of my successful landings.
Digital Soaps: bars of soap shaped like cartridges and game controllers, and shampoo that smells like Mountain Dew.
One of my favorite games of the weekend: Typing of the Dead on Sega Dreamcast.It’s a zombie-shooting game on rails, except instead of firing a light gun you have to type words quickly. Hilarious.
At the end of the weekend, I was over in the Supercade area playing TRON, which I remember watching people play when I was a kid but had never tried myself. They gave us a few countdown warnings that the show was closing … and then pulled the plug on all the arcade games at once. I overheard somebody say: “That was so mean! But it’s really the only way you could do it.”
Next year I hope to spend a little more quality time checking out the Supercade before closing time.
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