I just spent the weekend at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, the largest retro gaming expo in the US. Gerald Levinzon, one of the organizers, is a huge fan of Jeff's work and he invited me to present to exclusive footage from Heart of Neon as part of the event. I didn't really appreciate the scale of the whole affair until the fire alarm went off just before the end of the Llamasoft panel and the entire event was ejected from the building onto the sultry afternoon Portland sidewalk, and thousands of gamers, collectors, cosplayers and miscellaneous families choked the streets surrounding the venue. It was mind boggling.
I did feel dropped in at the deep end, hosting three panels when that's not really a thing I do, but it turns out that I quite liked it, even if it's not my primary skill. Everybody was working towards the same goal, so as long as I was asking questions I was getting the support I needed. No need to feel helpless, it all got sorted. I met a bunch of the original Atari Jaguar devs and really enjoyed their company, and it was a unique opportunity to hang out with Jeff on this side of the Atlantic.
I abandoned the game biz, and coming back is a weirdly conflicting experience. Or perhaps not that weird: I miss the things I enjoyed, the people I liked, and I don't miss the things that sucked and the mistakes I made. Actually, that sounds pretty normal.
One of the things I enjoyed back in the day was going to arcades with friends, and I had a little taste of that this weekend. Gerald and the guys at PRGE accumulated over 200 arcade cabinets for the arcade section of the Expo. I got my personal best on Robotron, played games I'd never seen before like Black Widow and Phoenix, I cursed stiff fire buttons and my own clumsiness with the stick. All of this while being surrounded by the cacophony of the arcade and the tournament announcers and the hooting of kids and adults alike all around. It's magical, but it's not for everyone, I can see that.
The featurette I presented at PRGE attempted to communicate that magic, and to connect Jeff specifically to the cherished memory of that magic, and Jeff's mission to communicate that joy to a larger world. At the risk of sounding weakly sycophantic, I saw a mountain of arcade artifacts old and new at that expo but none of it holds a candle to the arcade infused fever dreams Jeff creates. And Jeff wants so little in return, he's just happy that he makes other people happy
The humility is not an act. Before Jeff presented his own panel at PRGE he expressed concern that he didn't want to come off sounding arrogant or pretentious talking about his own history. As if he could. His presentation was light and humorous, half a lecture about the earliest history of video games and the early UK scene, half self-deprecating stand up comedy. The audience at the Portland Ballroom ate it up.
I'm glad this kind of event exists. It's not the same as it was, which is fine. In some ways it's even better, because it's an event made by and made for people who genuinely love classic gaming on original hardware, and that experience is only going to become rarer as equipment ages to the point when it's unrepairable and unreproducible.
I recommend you visit one of these events if you haven't already, and the Portland Retro Gaming Expo is an excellent one to choose. Maybe I'll see you there in 2025.