Long Island Retro Gaming Expo Report: Greetings from Your Premium Sponsor
Long Island Retro Gaming Expo Report: Greetings from Your Premium Sponsor
Old games, old planes... what’s not to love?
Did you attend Long Island Retro Games Expo this weekend? We didn’t, at least not in an official capacity (though you may well have encountered quite a few Limited Run Games-adjacent individuals there). However, we did help sponsor the show, as you probably noticed from the big LRG signs that kept popping up around the floor...
Rumor has it that a good time was had by all.
The Long Island show continues to be one of the world’s coolest gaming conventions. It takes place in a pretty small space, but it packs a lot of material into that square footage (and a lot of people). With a truly breathtaking hands-on museum of consoles, arcades, and vintage computers (lent to the show for public enjoyment by very trusting collectors), LIRGE is in fact a museum within a museum, quite literally.
It also has the usual vendor floor where you can buy old games for present-day prices, fan-made games merch, and more. Interspersed with the sellers, you can also find interesting pop-up exhibitions like this miniature recreation of the original Wild Gunman:
Everyone knows Wild Gunman either from the NES or from the fake “baby toy” version that Marty McFly played in Back to the Future Part II’s Cafe ’80s. But before it was a video game, it was a groundbreaking arcade cabinet that combined a light gun with a 16mm filmstrip array that allowed players to go head-to-head with footage of real actors dressed as cowboys in an attempt to outdraw and outshoot those desperados. Recently, someone acquired a set of those original film reels, then scanned and restored them in 4K!
And then he brought it to the show so that you could enjoy a tiny mockup of it! In person!
As for the “museum in a museum” thing, that’s not some metaphor. Long Island Retro Gaming Expo literally takes place inside the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Nassau, a space dedicated to the history of flight. Grumman was based nearby, and the Cradle of Aviation Museum contains an incredible array of actual airframes, from primitive single-seater prop planes to actual lunar excavation modules that were built (though never deployed) for the Apollo program. The convention sprawls into the museum space, so attendees enjoy their retrogames in the shadow of real aerospace vehicles from the 20th century.
So you could, for example, fight someone in Guile’s stage in the Street Fighter series with one of the actual F-14 Tomcats that appear in the background of his level in the background of your match. As seen above! It’s very meta.
“But Limited Run blog person,” you protest, “those candy cabs are playing Street Fighter III, which as we all know did not feature Guile as a character!”
Yes, well, the event hosts rotate the selections running on their cabs, so it’s possible! This photo was simply taken at an inopportune moment. Uhhh... look! What’s that, over by the nose of the Tomcat?
Ah ha! A Street Fighter Alpha cab! There you go.
“Listen, you blog-creating fool, Guile didn’t show up in Alpha until Alpha 3!”
Yes, fine. But, um, check out the way the F-14 is arranged next to an A-10 Warthog! It’s like G.I. Joe’s Skystriker versus a Cobra Rattler in real life. That’s cool, right? Right.
What’s even cooler is standing in the presence of an actual Lunar module from America’s 1960s space program. And then using a computer that’s almost that old to play Lunar Lander.
The point is: Long Island Retro Expo was great, and we were thrilled to be a part of it. If the stars align, maybe we’ll see you there next year!