Greetings, geeks!
I decided to check out a retro gaming convention right here in Austin, Texas! Classic Game Fest first popped up in Austin in 2008! This was my first time at this particularly convention, and I had a good time! I checked out all of their events that happened on Saturday. There were a lot of cool vendors, old game systems, and tons and tons of game cartridges!
Gaming tournaments all day!
Day long tournaments were held for SUPER SMASH BROS, MARIO KART, DUKE NUKE’EM 3D!
MUSIC!
They had some rad as heck bands playing throughout the day, including DJ ROCKMAN, ZERO WOLF, CREATIVE MINDFRAME/1UP, BITFORCE, and my favorite video game themed band: THE DESCENDANTS OF ERDRICK. I took a picture with them after we chatted for a bit.
There were a handful of vendors with varying artistic talents that I felt deserved some notice!
RadiusZero This girl does some amazing original and fan art!
ZombiesGoRawr Kawaii Clay Creations I bought a lot of cute earrings from her!
Pixel Paintings By Ryan Barrett This guy had some amazing paintings, especially that one of Morrigan behind him that wish I could have taken home!
Video Game Coffee Tables+ Just text 956-309-0757! Have you ever seen such cool game cartridge tables? Some opened up!
Sprinkle Bat This girl has some super cute creations and stickers for days. I now have her stickers all over my PC and Laptop!
The Panels:
There were some fun panels that happened on Saturday. One of which I found rather insightful, was Women in Game Development. Here are some of the things I learned:
They talked about a lot of the things that women have to deal with in the game industry, which were fairly applicable to any other business that is male dominated, such as any kind of engineering. Some women found that they were treated with more respect if they dressed more masculine to their jobs, in many cases if they didn’t they didn’t dress that way, they were assumed to be artists instead of developers. It can be confusing to be a woman in game development, because it can be hard to tell if they were hired as for the sake of diversity or if it was really for their skills. One speaker said that being assertive as a woman is taken differently (assumed to bitchy) than when a man is assertive, which adds to the everyday frustrations of just trying to acquire basic respect so that work can get done.
Sadly, their advice to young women who want to go into game development was sad, but realistic: be prepared for bias. You’ll often have to work harder and prove yourself. Both introverted and extroverted women have made it into the business, and how you present yourself is key. You can get in having a large network, or sometimes your portfolio will do the talking for you. By that extension, you do not necessarily need to go to school get into making video games.
The next panel was about the development of Q*bert, by the creator of Q*bert Warren Davis. He broke down a lot of how Q*Bert came into existence, as you can see from the photo he was able at least break it down for slides. He’s been clearly telling the same story for so many decades, I just kind of tuned out. But it was real neat that he were there talk about it.
The next panel was SURVIVING INDIE, with game audio legend Alexander Brandon. He too like the women’s panel had a lot of great advice about what you need to get into the gaming industry. Networking, networking, networking! He says to brand yourself, and that it’s easy to get into the game industry these days, but hard to get noticed with all of the competition.
The last panel I may have wandered away from. The guy lost his slides and showed us pictures he probably found on google that morning. The subject was all about terrible designs of gaming controllers over time. While some were fun to look at and tilt make your head to the side and think “hmm”, it wasn’t enough to keep me around as I could just as easily watch a top 10 whatever video on YouTube about the same thing.
What else?
There was plenty of other cool stuff to look at, aside from the costumes that showed up. One girl had a costume on she had a TV screen on her head and you could play retro games on her face!
There were a lot of old game systems to enjoy looking at. When I spoke to a teenager, I found that they were somewhat viewed as ancient artifacts. Tons of game old arcade game machines that were all free to play all day long!
There was even a center for retro PC gaming!
A fun aspect that I didn’t expect was Pecos Pete’s Natural Tea and Soda that sold their own collectable and exclusive to Classic Game Fest silver and bronze mugs. Being a renfaire nerd, I couldn’t help but get one.
Classic Game Fest was a rather small, and chill kind of convention. I had a good time for a few hours, and the tickets being approximately $35 makes a trip to it well worth it. They’ll be back in 2019, so check it out, in Austin Texas!
~Big Eyes
