Despite the story from yesterday, some days it feels good to be old. I do a lot of promotions and events with Momocon (
www.momocon.com), which is the largest free fanrun Anime/Gaming/Miscellanea convention in the USA (possibly the world). For the actual convention I just run boardgames and play backup medic, but I use to run a smashing retrogaming room. The last time we did it I brought out about a 1000 titles on 20 platforms. Well we ran out of space for my little side room (and my second in commands wife had a baby on that weekend) so we made do with what we could.
So the convention creator, a small staff, and myself, created a side event that we called a Gameday. Simply we rented several of the big rooms that we normally hold the convention in, setup some tvs and tables, and played boardgames and old videogames with whoever decided to come in (it helps when the convention is on a college campus Georgia Tech). Subsequent Gamedays have lost the retrogaming room due an illness I had and the fact that I dont have access to a van anymore, but we still host them (ie this Saturday [and yes we realize we are crazy to do it a week before Dragoncon]). And no we dont play games like Sorry and Monopoly. Its all about Dominion, Cosmic Encounter, and Pitchcar this weekend, atleast for me we will have around a hundred games there. But lets get back to the story.
So at one of these events I was running the retro room and these two kids walk up to me, no older than eight. They are obviously brother and sister and their eyes are wide. We had the fourswords setup going, a Genesis, two SNESs, an NES, a N64, a 7800, a Dreamcast, a Saturn, and Two PCs (one running doujin games the other dosgames). The sister, the older, came up to me and asked if they could play anything. I said that they could play whatever console they wanted, aslong as no one else was playing, and we could change the games out if they wanted. She and her brother look around, most of the room is filled. They tried playing a couple games, Bubble Symphony on the Saturn is the only one that I remember specifically, but then they saw the 7800. It had Defender loaded up and they tried to play it. After a few minutes they gave up and came back to me, what they said almost made me tearup. They asked if they could play a different game, so I pulled out the box of Atari games with me and before I could open it they said Like Galaxian or Millipede. I set them up with Millipede and they went back and played. It was just like when I was a child playing with my older brothers (actually they were playing on the same Atari I use to play on, probably the same cart now that I think about it).
A little while later their father comes in visibly upset. He walks up to them in a huff and saying how they were playing something bad for them, then he sees what they are playing. He comes over to me and asks if I had Joust as his other son walks up. The NES was currently vacant so I said tell you what, give me five minutes and all four of yall can play. I setup both the 7800 and the NES with Joust and sticks (ok so Advantages on the NES) and the entire family lit up. They started goading eachother on from one machine to the other and the entire room got in on it. It was just like being in an arcade again. Afterwards, when I was cleaning up, the father came up to me and thanked him for keeping the classics alive.
Somedays it feels good being old.
