“Did Sega have its own console?”
That was a devastating comment I heard while I was sitting playing. Sonic the hedgehog 2 on a Sega Genesis Mini at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo (PRGE) this weekend. He Sonic The Genesis games were my favorites when I was a kid; I once played a lot Sonic that I peed my pants. How is it possible that this person doesn’t know about Sega consoles?
Fortunately, that person’s friend was more charitable than I would have been. He took it as a teaching opportunity and showed her the game he was playing. (And later I realized that the person might have been asking about mini consoles.)
The entire event was filled with that wonderful spirit of sharing the joy of classic games and, in general, nerdy things. I saw four friends huddled around a classic. X Men recreational machine. Tons of younger children played older games with the same awe I felt for them as a child. Rows of vendors sold things like retro games and elaborate art (my favorite: Blue Bomber Pixel Art, which remade my favorite famous sprite characters from pixel-shaped Perler beads). In a room next to one of the auditoriums, I sat and listened to someone belt out Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” backed by Rock band musicians.
A fun attraction at the expo was a giant NES-style controller billed as the “world’s largest video game controller.” It’s truly enormous, measuring 18.5 feet long, 8.5 feet wide and three feet high, and weighing almost a ton. In the show, it was connected to a television so people could team up to play. Super Mario Bros. Several people had to coordinate through the controller to try to get through the suddenly challenging level 1-1. The first goomba turned out to be a fearsome monster. The first high tube was an almost insurmountable obstacle. But somehow, by climbing the controller as if it were a playground structure, children and adults could advance in the game.
There was a GoFundMe announced at the show to help “save” the controller; Its enormous size makes it difficult to transport.
One area was filled with old game consoles connected to televisions. I went straight to a konga donkey station, where I played (badly) Blink-182’s “All the Small Things.” As I neared the end of the song, a kid who definitely wasn’t alive when the song was written looked at me in amazement, and I happily handed him the controller so he could play the drums and clap too. (His mom really tried hard to help him through it.) Then, I headed to my Sega Genesis Mini station with Sonic the hedgehog 2, which has a lot more nonsense than I remembered. (Tails is a passive during special levels).
My favorite part of the show was watching some of the early rounds of the Classic Tetris World Championship competition, where players competed in the NES version of Tetris. A particularly intense battle between two players, Sharky and Hydrant, reached the last game of a best-of-five match, and when Hydrant was overwhelmed by the tetrominoes, the crowd roared: standing up and singing Sharky’s name.
I was a regular and (eventually volunteer) attendee at PAX West for years, so I thought PRGE would be that but smaller. I made a mistake; While PAX always felt like a celebration of video games to come to me, PRGE felt like a show that honors the good in what we already have. Yes, I should have expected it; it’s a retro game show, after all. But in a year absolutely packed with huge games, and some that missed the mark, it was nice to be surrounded by excitement and joy about what you can already play right now, even if some of the games are decades old.
These types of events are important. Video game preservation is a multi-pronged initiative, and when nearly 90 percent of classic games are “critically endangered” and major hardware manufacturers are seemingly slowly moving away from ways of reproducing physical media, Groups of people gather at PRGE to share and celebrate their love for older people. Titles are a valuable way to keep your story alive.
I’m planning to return next year.
Photography by Jay Peters/The Verge
