Magazine #10.1 3/00

Classic Gaming Expo 2K
Part I

For the third year in a row Las Vegas played host to an exposition dedicated to all the fans of classic videogame systems. During July 29th and 30th hundreds of visitors from all over the US and from as far as Europe attended the Classic Gaming Expo 2000. After the great success of last year's CGE'99 my expectations were high and Lee and I decided to share a booth with the nice folks from Digital Press this year.

The expo was again held at Jackie Gaughan's Plaza Hotel & Casino in downtown Las Vegas, right next to the Fremont Street Experience. This hotel is a little dated (when compared to the hotels on the strip) but offered great accomodations at very reasonable cost and the location is unbeatable! And of course the Fremont SE is definitely one of the main attractions in Las Vegas...

The Plaza Hotel & Casino, casinos along the Fremont Street Experience.

I arrived early morning Friday and after a power nap met up with my friend Lee Krueger from the NWGCE. At that point most of the exhibitors and sellers had completed their set-up and I picked up my showpasses from John. It seemed that there were a few less booths this year but I had some good chats with many of the exhibitors and we set up our booth with Joe Santulli from Digital Press. Outside it was a whopping 115 degrees (yuck!) and after we met Geoff from Southern California and got invited to a video game party the evening was planned for. The party was great, they had an Intellivision, a Colecovision, a Bally Astrocade, Atari 2600, Vectrex, Odyssey2 and some other consoles along with snacks and some cold beer! The high point was watching two guys playing Combat with two Amiga Joyboards as steering controls! Also present that night was Chad Schell bringing along some of his cool Intellicarts. Hopefully we'll see the California guys at one of our Seattle meetings!

Video game party with the guys from California, playing Atari 2600 Combat with Amiga Joyboards (what a riot!), Jeff and Lee play Smithereens!

Slugging it out with Smithereens on the Odyssey 2!

Chad Schell showing his cool Intellicart.

Booths/Exhibition Hall

As early as 9:15 am Saturday the hard-core fans started to line up outside the exhibition hall and as soon as the doors opened at 10:00 am the crowds rushed in and quickly swarmed to the booths for goodie-hunting. There were plenty of goods ranging from the common to the extremely rare. Here is quick overview off the booths:
Telegames had a nice booth with plenty of Jaguar stuff and some Atari and Colecovision games. Their usually high prices were lowered for the show and I picked up some Coleco and Jaguar games. They also had some of the new Telegames releases for GBC and PlayStation.
Intellivision had the best booth again and everybody there was just having a good time. They had some special events (more on that later) and showed some new games (see further down). Lots of enthusiasm here - these guys just love what they're doing!
B&C Computervisions had their booth filled with hard to find treasures. I checked out a voice synthesizer for the Atari 8-Bit computers and took a closer look at an Atari Jaguar kiosk set-up. They also had plenty of hard to find Atari documentation and service manuals.

The gates open, Intellivision booth, Martin Lambright and friends and his goodies.

Just like last year Martin Lambright offered a ton of mint games for various Atari systems at unbeatable prices as well as many used items. This guy is great and his booth was a very busy place throughout the show. A prime opportunity to stack up on stuff!
Hasbro was back again and handed out 'Atari Arcade Hits 2' CDs for PC. The new rendition of Galaga for the Playstation was very impressive, Frogger II looked pretty good too.
Cosmi had some new games as well and gave out free C-64 emulator discs.
Blast From The Past had some nice videogames (Marble Madness!) set up in their booth and also sold arcade flyers, marquees and other items (one of which was a plush Q*bert that ended up guarding our shared booth).
Daily Radar was giving out some t-shirts but quickly ran out of good stuff and then tried to peddle jump ropes - why? One of their posters had a nice retro styling from some 50ies/60ies SciFri flick.

Hasbro, Daily Radar, Twin Galaxies and Billy Mitchell.

Intellivision booth, Blast From The Past, CGE Services, United Game Source.

Twin Galaxies was displaying some awards and they also had Billy Mitchell at their booth. He is the first and only player to ever achieve a perfect Pac-Man score and it was totally amazing to watch this guy play. He sat at a cocktail table Pac-Man with stop watch in hand and played with split-second timing - unbelievable! If you ever get a chance to see him play check it out, it's an experience. Lee and I also talked to Walter Day, the founder of Twin Galaxies - really nice guy and 100% dedicated to video gaming!
We shared a booth with the guys from Digital Press to form the combined DP-ResQsoft-CyberRoach booth. DP was selling back issues and they were taking advance orders for their new collector's guide coming out in October (which is a must have!). Lee had his awesome Trac-Mar system running and showed things like 'Save Mary' and many other ultra-rare games. I also finally met Jerry Greiner when he brought over some prototypes, I had been trading/selling games with/to him since the early 90ies but never actually met him in person.
CGE Services had very cool t-shirts (highly recommended!) and tons of classic games. Everything from Atari to Coleco to 8-Bit home computers! They also sold some newly released games at very reasonable prices. I bought most of the new games, stacked up on t-shirts and John Hardie brought me a LaserActive disc that I was looking for - thanks John, you're the man!!!

Lee and the Trac-Mar, Roloff and Q*bert, Ultracade and other machines at Blast From The Past.

Sarah Thomas and Chris Cavanaugh from Classic Gamer Magazine, Chad Schell and Lissa Ackerman, raffle items from Tim Arnold from the Las Vegas Pinball Club.

Right next to us was the booth of Classic Gamer Magazine, a high-quality, all-color magazine devoted to the games from the past. This publication is fun to read and shows the hard-core dedication of its writers. They were selling back issues and taking subscription orders.
One our other side was United Game Source, displaying plenty of goods. They sold a portable Famicon and other hard-to-find items like SuperVision and Virtual Boy games. Good selection and good prices.
Returning to this year's CGE was also Tim Arnold from the Las Vegas Pinball Club. He raffled off some great prizes including a Battlezone, a Missile Command and a Paddle Battle machine. I'd never seen the Paddle Battle arcade machine before and despite it's horrible controllers it was a lot of fun! Tim also produces some awesome Pinball videos that are worth checking out.

Space Ace items, John Dondzilla and wife, Jerry Greiner chatting with Lee, Jerry hunting for goodies.

John Dondzilla had a booth as well and sold many of the new Vectrex games as well as his other creations. It was great to finally meet this guy in person! John embodies the spirit of the classic videogaming community and it was great talking to him. This guy pretty much single-handedly revived the Vectrex by programming new quality games for this machine. Mark Shaker was there as well and I ended up buying a Tour De France for the Vectrex (recently released by Nicolas Sapin!). Also at their table were some Space Ace items for sale.
The Cyberpunks had a booth selling their great Stella At 20 video as well as the new edition of Stella Gets A New Brain.
Carl Forhan's Songbird Productions was selling new Jaguar and Lynx titles. If you own a Jaguar or a Lynx you owe it to yourself to get these new titles as they are some of the best to ever hit these systems. Carl also had a nice rapid-fire controller for the Jag.
Retroactive Games had a great classic adventure game for sale at their booth causing some serious flashbacks of endless nights spent playing Sierra Online and Scott Adams adventure games.
Howard Warshaw sold his One Upon Atari videos at his booth.

Cyberpunks booth, Vectrex with 3D-goggles, Lynx-fan, classic gamers.

Overall: lots of goodies although not enough sellers of classic goodies! Maybe that can be changed for next year. It would be nice to have more outfits like Marvin's to enable us collectors to buy stuff without having to pay Ebay-prices. And I'm missing Best Electronics back from the WOA '98.

Arcade Games

Both sides of the exhibition hall were filled with classic arcade machines set on free play. Favorites like Tempest and Zaxxon and many, many laserdisc machines like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, Cliffhanger and Cobra Command. Steven Hertz had brought most of these (plus a few more in the Blast From The Past booth from Damon Claussen) and it was my first chance to play Badlands (definitely not one of my favorites but interesting to see it in action). It was also the first time in many years that I could spend some time on a Thayer's Quest machine - thanks Steven! If you're into laser games check out the Dragon's Lair Project for more laser-specific CGE2K pictures.

Vanguard and Gyruss, Arabian, Badlands.

Left pic: Steven Hertz (playing Cliffhanger) and Dwayne Richards (right).

Other classics included Arabian, Vanguard, Gyruss, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Frogger, Reactor, Mad Planets, Toobin' and many more. Also present was a game called Attax (sp???), kind of an Othello of sorts - if somebody can mail (remove the REMOVEME part!) me a picture that would be great!

Continue with Part II

Thanks to:

The CGE2K staff - great show!
The DP guys for sharing the both!
MK for booth duty :)

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Classic Gaming Expo, World Of Atari and others are claimed and/or registered trademarks of their owners!