VGXPO 2009: It Was Good For Something

Nintendo - The only vendor with unreleased games.

VGXPO was easily the worst video game convention I have ever been to, including all of its previous versions.  In the early days it was okay to write off the sloppy layout and disorganized registration process.  It was the convention’s awkward time.  Its teenage years where it didn’t know what it wanted to be.  The staffers where busy lining up big name developers, manufacturers and vendors, too busy to deal with issues of convenience like booth layouts.  Last year, a lot of that changed.

2008 was the breakout year.  TV coverage, record-setting attendance, content spilling over in to meeting rooms, press badges, it finally felt real.  Then came this year, and it was back to substandard service, with an increased price no less.  The company didn’t even offer press badges this year.  Screw that, not even badges, just bracelets.  Those annoying bracelets that are impossible to put on without three hands, and tear off your arm hair upon application.  But who wouldn’t want to wear a neon bracelet straight out of the 80′s?  Oh right, everyone.

For all of the bad, one good thing did come of my visit to VGXPO, and it had a lot to do with the inability to fill the show floor.  Last year all of the floor booths were taken, relegating vendors and theRetrocon to severely cramped quarters.  The anemically sized meeting rooms to be exact.  Bodies were so close that browsing became an impossibility, causing me to quickly lose interest in one of my favored gaming pastimes, looking for (retro) deals.  Due to the lack of, shall we say eventful booths, the former meeting room delegates snapped up the extra floor space.  With a wide open show floor I was able to schmooze with the vendors, talk shop, throw around and receive business cards, and cartwheel to the next vendor hawking their collectible plastic-encased products.

There's 10 NES Cases Under That Pilotwings & A Pin Replacement

As I browsed vendor after vendor, querying for prices, information and exchanging tender for wares, I came across something most impressive.  A large table full of homebrew software, homebrew software for ancient and newer hardware.  My bag full of of NES, SNES, Genesis, Dreamcast, and repair loot – all for just over a Jefferson – paled in comparison to the electronic marvels offered at the Good Deal Games booth.  Not only did the table tease me with hundreds of homebrew items, including titles for Dreamcast, NES, Saturn, ColecoVision, Atari 2600, basically any machine that has been put to pasture, the company also takes it a step further.

On offer were games that quite frankly, aren’t supposed to exist.  The intrepid salesman, seeing my appreciation for 8-bit systems, pulled out a handful of titles that they had reclaimed, rebuilt and made real.  I’m talking about titles that were developed, or partially developed, but never commercially released.  By some form of human sacrifice the purveyors of the website acquired the ROMs to a select handful of titles, completed the development and crafted unique cartridges for these never released titles.  Talk about going the extra mile.

Michael Thomasson, the slick salesman behind the booth, almost had me sold on the just-released Atari 2600 game Strip Off (seriously, GDG released the game at the convention, with only fifty numbered carts available), but I was able to maintain self control.  Had the game been original, rather than a rip off of Rip Off, I would have made it the first Atari 2600 purchase in over a decade.  It would have looked nice next to my brand new copies of River Raid and Maze Craze.

Time will tell home much damage attending VGXPO 2009 will do to my wallet, especially with the homebrew cartridges games costing so much.  Crazy that full blown CD-based titles cost so little, while cartridge-based media remains astronomical.  It’s certainly going to be painful.  I’ve already returned to eBay and fired up my old forum accounts across a scad of collecting sites.

Screw the bad economy, this stuff is better than gold.