Venture
The Game: Trapped in a maze full of HallMonsters, you are adventurer Winky, on a mission to snatch incredible treasures from hazardous underground rooms inhabited by lesser beasts such as re-animated skeletons, goblins, serpents, and so on. Sometimes even the walls move, threatening to squish Winky or trap him, helpless to run from the HallMonsters. The deeper into the dungeons you go, the more treacherous the danger – and the greater the rewards. Just remember two things – the decomposing corpses of the smaller enemies are just as deadly as the live creatures. And there is no defense – and almost never any means of escape – from the HallMonsters. (unreleased prototype, 2017)
Memories: There may be nothing quite as bittersweet as an unreleased prototype that turns out to be awesome, we gladly would’ve paid full retail for it back in the day had it ever gone to market. It’s not that it was hard to find a good port of Venture back in the day – there was an excellent port on Colecovision and a more than passable version for the Atari 2600.
Rally
The Game: As the driver of a high-powered race car, you rocket around corners and down straightaways, trying to pick up every yellow flag in the maze-like course and avoiding deadly collisions with pursuing red cars. Watch out for rocks and oil spills, and use your smokescreen only when necessary to distance yourself from the red cars. (AtariAge.com, 2015)
Memories: Now that there’s a homebrew version of Rally-X, I find myself wondering why this didn’t happen back in the day? Especially if Atari and Namco had “an arrangement” (one which, famously, landed the home console rights to Pac-Man in Atari’s lap).
K.C. Munchkin
The Game: As a small blue spherical creature whose sole sensory organs consist of two eyes, two antennae and an enormous mouth, you are on a mission to eat twelve dots which are floating around a small maze. Pursuing you are three multicolored jellyfish-like horrors who will gobble you up on contact. (AtariAge.com, 2015)
Memories: The Atari 7800 was the Rip Van Winkle of the classic console world. Put into deep freeze by the incoming Tramiel administration, the 7800 was awoken by that same management regime when the whole “Atari does computers now, not video games” strategy didn’t work out; when the 7800 – developed and market tested in 1984 – was revived, it was thrust into a late-‘80s world where it had the more powerful Nintendo Entertainment System for competition.
OVGE (Oklahoma Video Gaming Exhibition) 2014
The 11th annual Oklahoma Video Game Exhibition (OVGE) has come and gone, and as has been the case since the first year of the show, I was there with goodies from my game collection for everyone to try out, as well as some stuff to sell.
Arkadia Retrocade
Arkadia Retrocade is a retro-themed video arcade – yes, you heard that right – located in Fayetteville, Arkansas, just a half-hour’s drive from theLogBook.com’s secret world domination headquarters. For five bucks per person, you can play their very impressive selection of well maintained (and original) vintage arcade games all you like – they’re all on free play.
Where the Phosphor Dot Fossils database collides with Arkadia’s lineup; I’ve created an “Arkadia Retrocade” category to give you an idea of some of what’s on the arcade floor.
Arkadia Retrocade’s current hours are from Tuesday through Sunday. There are also areas set aside where you can crash for a bit in front of an old-school console TV and enjoy some old-school console action – one TV has an Atari 2600 set up to play, and the other has an Intellivision, both with several cartridges to choose from. Parties can also be booked in advance in a separate party room.
Disclaimer: neither this webmaster nor this site are associated with, employed by, or compensated by Arkadia Retrocade… the webmaster and his family just go there. A lot.
OVGE (Oklahoma Video Gaming Exhibition) 2012
The 2012 OVGE event in Tulsa has come and gone, and it was another good year. I was an oddball at this event in that, in and among my usual sales of video games and game-related swag, I was debuting a new book that has nothing to do with video games whatsoever. It didn’t exactly fly off the table, but that’s okay – I wasn’t as much of an oddball as I thought, because there was plenty of sci-fi in the air at this year’s OVGE. Get ready for drool-worthy sights both game-related and otherwise.
The scene from the wide-open space in the center of the dealers’/exhibitors’ area
Just a part of Brandon Staggs’ awesome display of Star Trek games.
More from Brandon Staggs’ Trek game display; he told me this little display was his son’s idea. The boy must be firing on all cylinders, because if I had a miniature model of a Star Trek TNG pinball, I would have done *exactly the same thing* with it.
More Trek gaming swag, advertising the 1982 Star Trek arcade game.
Vintage 1982 pins and buttons, again advertising the arcade game. I have entertained the notion more than once of doing a Star Trek game display, and have backed off every time I see Brandon’s display. Now if we collaborated one year? That might just be a showstopper.
Brandon Staggs also does these retrogaming T-shirts. They are awesome. Inevitably, as the day wears on at each year’s OVGE, you find people have bought one of these and then changed into it before roaming the floor again. The just-about-official threads of OVGE.
More of the Staggs family’s excellent (and shiny) Star Trek setup: these were various vintage Star Trek games set up to play, including the Vectrex Star Trek: The Motion Picture game, the 2600 version of the Star Trek arcade game, Starfleet Academy on SNES, and the never-released Star Trek V game for the NES.
Close ups of the Trek gaming gear.
More close ups of the Trek gaming gear.
Last year, I took home one of the red ghost monster hats for my son. It’s reversible into a “scared” ghost monster. He still wears it. You can too: visit their Etsy shop to see these and their other goodies. They also had Portal companion cube plushies. Just too cute. I have to be very careful at their booth, or I wind up spending a lot of money.
Game Xchange was a presence at OVGE this year, and did pretty well. They were next door to my table. I thought I had my marketing act together with my VWORP! t-shirt and artwork print, but what I really need is a rug.
Some of Game Xchange’s offerings included a CD-i (with some educational games for it), quite a few NES and PS1 games, and a mouth-watering but rather expensive Turbo Duo.
Part of Holt Slack’s massive setup. Just about any system you can think of was represented here in his sale items.
More of Holt Slack’s sales table.
But the part of Holt’s stuff that I was really eyeballing was this jaw-dropping collection of original Firefly promo items, props, cast/crew shirts and jackets, and other goodies.
For one thing, I was glad to not be the only one showing off seemingly out-of-place sci-fi goodies at a gaming convention, and for another… you just do not get to see this stuff every day, period. I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s all worth – Holt was a fan of the show from day one, and collected a lot of the promo material while it was still running on Fox.
Drew Stone’s awesome arcade marquee light boxes. I need to book him to design a floor-to-ceiling enclosure for my marquees at home. I know I’ve figured out a well-documented way to backlight my marquees on a budget, but these are classy.
Rob O’Hara has a knack for doing the most eye-catching table at OVGE, in any given year. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world, and yet why was no one else showing off vintage video and computer basketball games?
You could almost hear a rumble of Thunder at Rob’s table…
Intermission: Tweet Tweet
I live-tweeted intermittently throughout the show, chronicling moments both wonderful and weird from behind the scenes. (The oldest tweets are at the bottom, for those not familiar with Twitter.)
I’ve never live-tweeted anything before (in fact, I’m still not sure if Twitter and my long-winded tendencies are compatible). How’d I do?
Also at Rob’s table were Robb Sherwin and copies of Robb’s original text adventure, Cryptozookeeper.
Deann Stone had these hand-painted Christmas ornaments for sale. Little E doesn’t know it yet, but Q*Bert’s going to be hanging on our tree this year…
An original Infocom Suspended game at Ed Martin’s table. Finding one of these intact is about as hard as beating the game that’s inside the box.
Original animation cels from the Pac-Man Christmas special “Christmas Comes To Pac-Land” at Drew Stone’s table.
An original Don Bluth Dragon’s Lair II production sketch, also at Drew’s table.
Original animation cel from a Donkey Kong cereal commercial at Drew’s table.
One more cel from Drew’s table: this one’s from the Donkey Kong Jr. cartoon that was part of the CBS “Saturday Supercade” cartoon block in 1983.
Arcade action. These were packed all day long.
Do. not. tell. my. kid.
Nifty original video game-inspired art by Megan Swartslander.
Very few of Megan Swartslander’s artwork pieces were still up for grabs by the end of the day.
Pesky ghost monsters guarding the wares at Game Over Games.
Boxed Atari game heaven at Game Over Games.
Just a few rare titles at the Game Over booth…
Just for the record, the robot takeover began at Jeff Cooper’s tables. I, for one, welcome our new discounted plastic overlords.
Talk about a chronological spread. I know which one I’d choose. This was at Jordan Hamilton’s tables.
Trade ‘n’ Games had a few treasures just for show and not for sale… like Cubicolor and an Atari 2600 Air Raid cart, an ultra-rare game that fetches into the thousands of dollars any time it shows its face on eBay.
My single-table setup was modest this year – books, DVDs, and quite a few games. I unloaded two boxed systems, and half of the White Bucket games lived to fight another day! But the really cool oddity was over at the far left, supplied by my friend and frequent OVGE cohort Kent Sutton…
…an exceedingly hard-to-find Dimension 68000 computer. Built around a Z80 / CP/M core, the Dimension had hardware cards that could emulate an IBM PC XT or an Apple II+ – quite a coup back in the ’80s. This is the first time one has shown up in working order at any of the retrogaming events.
Much to my surprise, an LCD projector was popping up this wall-sized ad for my book, in the middle of the usual rotating sponsor and general info messages throughout the course of the day.
Moon Cresta
The Game: As commander of the three-stage fighter rocket Moon Cresta, your job is to ward off endless varieties of evasively weaving space attackers. Every time you knock out two consecutive screens of assailants, you’ll have an opportunity to dock your ship to another one of Moon Cresta’s three stages, until all three portions of the ship are combined to create one bad-ass weapons platform. But you can also lose stages very quickly, ending your game – a bigger ship makes a bigger and easier target. (AtariAge.com, 2011)
Memories: Quite simply one of the most superb arcade-to-console ports ever made on an Atari platform, whether cranked out professionally or as a homebrew, Moon Cresta is a knockout on the Atari 7800.
Doctor Who: The Adventure Games, Episode 1 – City Of The Daleks
The Game: Promising to take his time-traveling sidekick Amy Pond to London in 1963, the Doctor is shocked when the TARDIS actually gets there – and London, and the rest of Earth, is in ruins. The human race is extinct and the Daleks have taken over. Completely unarmed (except for the Doctor’s trusty sonic screwdriver), the Doctor and Amy have to avoid the unstoppable Dalek patrols, make their way back to the TARDIS, and do whatever it takes – no matter the risk – to defeat the Daleks and set history back on its proper course. This means setting the TARDIS on a course for the heart of Dalek power: Kaalann, the capitol city of the Dalek planet Skaro. (BBC, 2010)
Memories: Offered for free in the UK and Wales (and for a fee everywhere else), Doctor Who: The Adventure Games not only sets out to bring an interactive component to the spectacularly revived long-running British science fiction series, but it also aims to make the games an official part of the show’s ongoing story, and tries to stick to the underlying premise of the series – namely, that the Doctor employs wits and words in lieu of weapons. And for the first time in the history of the franchise, we have, in City Of The Daleks, a game that succeeds spectacularly on all of these fronts.
Tron Evolution: Battle Grids
The Game: In the era before Clu’s forceful takeover of the grid, Tron is kept busy with securing the digital world, leaving a vacuum from which a new champion can emerge in the grid games. Various factions have their own champions, who now battle each other on the game grid in various contests: light cycles, hyperball, disc battles, tank battles, and various vehicle races. (Disney Interactive, 2010)
Memories: Though tied into the new Tron movie, Tron Evolution: Battle Grids shows strong signs that its DNA is infused with the original movie and its associated games. Scenarios that didn’t even appear in Tron Legacy are front-and-center in Battle Grids, despite the story mode that sets up the era between the two movies.
Namco Museum Megamix
The Game: Join Pac-Man as he rolls around the carnival-like grounds of the Namco Museum. Six “remixed” games are featured: Galaga Remix, Rally-X Remix, Gator Panic Remix, Pac ‘n’ Roll, Pac-Motos, Grobda Remix – as well as a healthy selection of Namco arcade classics: Cutie Q, Galaxian, Pac-Man, King & Balloon, Rally-X, Galaga, Bosconian, Super Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Xevious, Grobda, Motos, New Rally-X, Dig Dug II, Pac-Mania, Gaplus, Pac & Pal and Mappy. None of the games are hidden away as “unlockables,” achievements or Easter eggs, and all can be enjoyed freely. (Namco, 2010)
Memories: A Wii exclusive, Namco Museum Megamix elicits both suspicion and joy from this reviewer. On the “suspicious” side of things, the Wii has already had Namco Museum Remix, which had five of the six “remixed” games listed above, and maybe half of the arcade games that appear in Megamix; even Megamix‘s manual seems to acknowledge that you’ve already been suckered into buying Remix and therefore you already know the control scheme for the selection menu (which is almost a game unto itself). But on the good side, for the first time in quite a while, Namco has finally acknowledged something else: the media on which Namco Museum Megamix arrives has a much greater capacity than the 74-meg Playstation CD-ROMs that carried the first iteration of Namco Museum in the 1990s. Let’s fill that open space with… more games!
OVGE 2009
I missed the 2008 Oklahoma Video Game Exhibition due to perfectly ordinary domestic circumstances: there was just a collision of events that left me with no babysitter. As my son wasn’t quite one year old at the time, there was just no way I could tend to him and run any kind of display at the same time. OVGE 2008 was skipped, and when OVGE 2009 was announced, I pretty much signed up then and there. I was working on what I was going to bring to the show for quite some time in advance; I made the decision to postpone a book project I had in the works in favor of finishing up another DVD set (oddly enough, focused on another retrogaming convention) that would be more likely to sell at OVGE, and, still being out of work, I started to make quite a few hard choices about what was for sale. As it turns out, the list of things not for sale was far, far shorter than the list of things I was willing to sell. It was time to do some serious wheeling and dealing. I was pretty stressed about this in the run-up to the show itself.
Of course, when Kent and I rolled a massive cart containing everything we’d brought with us into the show floor from the loading dock, and I saw a great big 1978 Space Wars machine sitting there working perfectly, that’s when I relaxed a bit and remembered that it’s all good fun too.
In an unusual break from my wild-eyed panic at these things, the Phosphor Dot Fossils booth was actually up and running and ready to do business before the doors opened to the public.
The best word for the PDF tables was: busy. Very busy. (I almost typed “busty” there, and I think that’s the only thing I could’ve added that might have brought in more business.) On Thursday I published my price list and posted it to various forums; I was startled by the sheer number of people – some of whom I had no idea who they were before or after they showed up at my table – asking for specific stuff on the list. At times I was doing well just to keep up with it all.
Not that all the action was at my table. Brad Prillwitz had a Pac-Man tournament, and while I was mightily impressed with his copy of Pac-Man Collection for the Colecovision (below), I was drooling with lust over these lights.
Author Brett Weiss had his new Classic Home Video Games book for sale too, and I made sure I grabbed one by the end of the show; this is a companion volume to his incredible all-encompassing volume covering the early years of the industry; this volume covers the NES (a huge library which takes up a lot of the book), Sega Master System and their contemporaries. Very highly recommended.
This was the Cortez family’s “Gamezilla!” display – a table centered around games and memorabilia that involve giant monsters crushing stuff. Paul “Pantechnicon” Cortez is a regular on several forums I frequent, but he was the first to admit that “Gamezilla!” was the brainchild of his son, who was on hand to show everyone how to crush, crumble, and/or stomp. His daughter was also there, dressed most appropriately for a video game convention (she was Yoshi!) and amazing me with her ability to make up for the lack of “show floor exits” in the dealer area by rolling under the tables to the other side. 😆
I also had a unique perspective on Godzilla himself from behind the tables!
At times, the Godzilla tournament made for a packed house.
Paul took time out from helping introduce passers-by to the joys of stomping Tokyo to try out the Power Glove at a nearby table.
Classic video game board games on display…
…along with some awesome hand-drawn sketches of various Transformers.
A Vectrex homebrew on display.
If there was a single drawback to the show, as much as I hate to single out any particular party… the live music show that ran from 10am well into the afternoon was, at times, deafening. I’ll put it this way: I had two TVs showing my DVD demo loop at my tables. I was no more than 4 feet away from either one of them, and they were turned up to a level that I hope was unobtrusive to my neighbors. When the live music was playing, I couldn’t hear either of my TVs, 4 feet on either side of me. Maybe he didn’t quite understand the requirements of the gig or something… I don’t think I ran into anyone who didn’t complain about how loud the music was. I’ve already seen on the OVGE thread at DP where the vendors on that side of the room said their business evaporated completely when the loud music started up. Eek. I think having the vendors there is much, much more important than having the music there.
My only regret about my own setup is that I left very little room to display anything just for fun that wasn’t for sale – it was wall-to-wall stuff for sale, and yeah, maybe it was a bit cluttered. I was still very satisfied with my sales for the day.
Here you can see Kent hauling everything out of the showroom in one trip – what a guy!
The drive home was uneventful other than a real-world demonstration of why they test cars’ ability to slalom (eek!), and the fact that when I got home, instead of going into my house to relax, I had to find a runaway cat outside after dark (also eek!).
Hopefully all the attendees had as much fun as I did, and hopefully all the vendors did mad business. When’s the next one?
Oklahoma Electronic Game Expo 2008
The first Oklahoma Electronic Game Expo was held at Oklahoma City Community College – a place which, with everyone referring to the city as OKC, logic would seem to demand be abbreviated to OKCCC, but is instead referred to as OCCC, possibly by those with OCD – on Saturday, April 26th, 2008. The show’s organizer said that he was inspired by Tulsa’s OVGE gathering, and since that show was dormant in 2007, he decided to put on such a show at his college campus at home. OEGE was backed by the college’s Computer Arts & Technology Society (or CATS for short), which had a display showing off various elements of actual game designs being prepared by the students there, ranging from concept art to full renderings, level maps and so on. I understand that the plan was originally to have a much more elaborate display on behalf of the school’s game design courses, with at least semi-playable works in progress on display, but hardware issues intervened. Still, the stuff I saw in the CATS booth was enough to convince me that, if I lived in Oklahoma City and was the same age as most of the people on the show floor, I would probably be all over those courses.
I laughed, I cried, it was better than CATS
The best way to describe OEGE’s attendance would probably be the words “thin crowd”. But that doesn’t just apply to the attendees – several sponsors didn’t show, including Coca-Cola and including some vendors who I’d seen in Tulsa before. Two OKC comics and collectibles stores were on hand, as well as representatives of the OKC Vintage Stock…and us. Situations like this can work out well, because I paid for a single table and wound up with a six-table island to myself, which I promptly all but carpeted with the DVDs I was selling (a fine product about which you can discover more here, he said pluggingly). The culling of the vendor herd also made sure that attendees had just a few places to focus on (though I only sold about a dozen DVDs, and I know that Vintage Stock didn’t exactly do gangbusters business either). Many people come to these shows precisely to see what they can find for their collections, and a shortage of vendors can drive them away from the door, resulting in a shortage of buyers for the vendors who are there. It’s a vicious cycle. I’d be more in-your-face about saying “shame on you” to the no-show sponsors, but between the Arkansas/Oklahoma state line and OKC proper, we sluggishly drove through about a zillion construction zones (okay, slight exaggeration – it was only a bajillion). I can sorta see where they’d get discouraged driving in from Tulsa or further.
Your official OEGE board game and collectible card game source.
Comics & manga at OEGE.
Not that this stopped everyone, mind you – plenty of regulars from the Digital Press and Retroputing forums were on hand, from as far away as Joplin, with massive tradebait boxes that would’ve required tank treads if they’d been any biger (the trade boxes, that is, not the aforementioned regulars). I had forgotten my own trade box – a.k.a. The Place Where Common Cartridges Go To Die – and in fact I had no games at all with me, since I was trying to focus on the DVDs. I’d made a last minute decision to leave the battery-powered Coleco tabletops at home, and I realize now that I probably should’ve brought them.
Digital Press forum regulars at OEGE.
I’m trying to be a little more conservative with my expo wares these days, precisely because with a child to take care of, I just don’t have the energy to pour into preparing a massive display a la OVGE 2004, which is still, for my money, as good as it’s ever gotten on my part. If it would have needed to be unplugged from my shelves in my game room to make the trip, it wasn’t going this year. Which explains the cranky DVD player and TV I pulled out of self-storage to bring with me so I wouldn’t have to yank that equipment from my game room – both threatened not to work at one point, and it’s a bit difficult to sell a DVD whose contents can’t actually be seen beforehand.
The Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD on sale at OEGE.
There was a four-player Wii setup with a large projection screen, as well as a Guitar Hero setup with an Xbox 360 not too far from our tables, and those were occupied almost non-stop throughout the day (especially Guitar Hero). Vintage Stock had a Vectrex setup for sale, as well as a Virtual Boy and, sadly, a 3DO that could never quite be coaxed into working. The other two vendors focused on different areas, one stocking a sizeable amount of comics and manga, the other concentrating on board games and collectible card games.
Wanna-be guitar gods swing the axe in OEGE’s Guitar Hero corner
Wii few, Wii happy few
Vintage Stock at OEGE. I carnally craved their Vectrex Web Wars cart and overlay.
Despite Coke being a no-show, their new energy drink Full Throttle made a good showing, carting around a huge mobile cooler full of the stuff. I don’t too much product placement/endorsement stuff, but I will offer you this: I don’t think I truly woke up and talked to people until I had at least one can of this stuff flowing through my veins. The funny thing is, the sparse crowd wasn’t enough to handle all the Full Throttle on hand, so those of us working tables wound up with huge quantities of it – Kent and I each wound up with about a case worth of the stuff, roughly half of which we consumed during the course of the day! So a big thanks to the Full Throttle folks – I probably would’ve been asleep by lunchtime if they hadn’t shown up.
Is that enough Full Throttle for ya?
After I’d had a few cans of Full Throttle, I started seeing stuff like this. No, wait, that’s actually Toejam & Earl on the Wii.
In talking to OEGE’s organizer, I learned about some of the things that went wrong behind the scenes, namely in promoting the event. Though it provided a place to gather, the college managed to hamstring a few things promotionally, including insisting that the school’s IT department handle any website launched for the event. Since it was close to the end of the spring semester, no site was ever put up, which put a serious crimp on promoting OEGE. Equipment failures on the eve of the show cancelled one display I was looking forward to, the actual playable demos of the CATS members’ work-in-progress games. I’m not sure I can stress enough how cool it is to have a little school in Oklahoma City offering courses in game design – how many people in OKC even know about this? – and this very likely cost CATS its best publicity opportunity of the year. I don’t even know how well-represented the club was at the show – there were four or five students with CATS T-shirts – but once again, one suspects that it was probably more to do with end-of-the-semster bad timing than anything else.
The show simply died at lunchtime for a bit, and pizza was offered to all of the vendors and show floor workers, though I’ll admit that I passed because, while I love pizza, this was one of the greasiest pizzas I’d ever seen. I have no doubt that it was delicious. I also have no doubt that I would’ve been in the men’s rest room down the hall for the rest of the day if I had partaken. Things picked up again around 1:30 or 2 in the afternoon, though shortly after four even the show’s organizers started to close up shop. OEGE was a memory by the time show’s officially announced “5pm-5:30” closing time rolled around.
There are plenty of lessons to be learned from running a first-time show, and few first-timer lessons are learned without a few bruises. Better promotion would’ve made a huge difference, but even finding the show once we were inside the building was a challenge. (It didn’t help matters much that there seemed to be some kind of trade show filling the entire hallway that one had to walk down just to get to OEGE.) There was a distinct lack of signage, but on the campus itself there was also a shortage of signs pointing one toward such places as the student union until you were almost on top of it anyway. (That’s really the school’s problem, not the show’s, however.) Hopefully OEGE will survive into its own sophomore year and learn some of these lessons, because it has the potential to be quite an interesting show that could offer things that one doesn’t get from other shows.
Lead (Atari 2600)
The Game: Players pilot a ship barrelling relentlessly down an enclosed tunnel. Turning around simply isn’t an option, and through various stages the player has to blast away at everything in sight, avoid everything in sight, and catch objects without blasting them. This all probably sounds easy, but the tunnels are rather twisty, and the ship is picking up speed constantly.
Memories: Bearing some resemblance to certain stages of games like Vanguard, Lead may not be the most original shoot-’em-up, but it’s one of the most addictive. With the Vanguard-inspired ability to keep exploring once the game has ended (at, naturally, the cost of zeroing out your score), Lead certainly has depth. But, strange as it may sound, the game’s audio makes it a whole different beast. An organically evolving techno beat pulses in the background, its rhythm and melody influenced by the player’s actions and performance.
The Odyssey2 Trackball Controller
The story of how I came to own one of only three Odyssey2 trackball controllers known to exist is about as unlikely as you can get, because I didn’t set foot near one of the major retrogaming shows held around the country every year – or, at least, the show in question wasn’t major yet. An attendee at the 2003 OKGE show noticed my Odyssey2-centric collection on display and mentioned he had a trackball for that system, and asked if I wanted to see it. At the time (September 2003), only one other specimen was known to exist, so I admitted that 
yeah, I definitely did want to see this. I half expected it to be a 2600 trackball.
But lo and behold, it was the real deal – a second Odyssey2 trackball by Wico, in the box no less. (A third has since surfaced at CGE in 2004.) The trackball’s owner, James LeBlanc, then proceeded to leave it with me for a bit while he and his son roamed the floor. I immediately set about hooking it up to one of the Odyssey2 systems I had on display and gave it a spin, as it were. Sadly, I wasn’t able to get it to do much because I discovered it needed its own separate power adapter – the 9-pin ports of a detachable-controller Odyssey2 just don’t put enough juice through the line for anything but a digital joystick. And the AC adapter for this trackball was AWOL. It did, at least, send my UFO straight to the bottom of the screen in UFO! – so it was doing something. I took a few pictures for posterity, boxed the controller back up, and when James dropped by to retrieve it, I gave him my web site’s business card and told him I’d be more than happy to take the trackball off his hands.
The only problem was that I had already let on that this gadget was officially in the “priceless” category – one or two of a kind. Rarity 10. ER (extremely rare). Whatever you want to call it. I figured I probably hadn’t done myself any favors.
A few weeks after OKGE, James got in touch with me again and gave me first dibs on the Odyssey2 trackball. I consulted with a couple of friends “in the know” about a reasonable price, and if there was a way you could hear a sharp intake of breath via e-mail, this is a time where you could imagine doing so. Nobody cared to put a numerical dollar value to the thing. While I was waffling on what to offer James, he surprised me with an asking price that was…well, let’s just say lower than anyone sanely expected.
Then came a gap of several months – James was having computer problems, and I was trying to buy a house with my wife, something which certainly pushed other financial considerations 
aside, certainly anything related to video game collecting. In 2004, having bought a new house and moved in, I tried to get back in touch with James to see if he was still interested in doing the deal – and I held my breath and waited for word that it had been sold to someone else.
To my surprise, James still had the trackball (“I figured you had probably found another one,” he said in an e-mail – I hope he can forgive me for laughing long and hard at that point.) I made arrangements to pay for the trackball, and it arrived not long afterward in my mailbox. Now I just needed to figure how out how to power it up with blowing it up or otherwise ruining it. After all, I only had one shot at this.
To determine the trackball’s power requirements, I asked a friend of mine at work – a TV station engineer – to help me out, because I can barely tell the difference between volts and amps. I expected it to be a spare-time project, but a fortuitously slow work night meant that he was able to do the testing with the station’s equipment – hardly what it was intended for, and better than I’d hoped for. To my amazement (and more than a little bit of trepidation), he and one of the other engineers on staff basically field stripped the trackball. As in, one of the only three specimens known to exist was taken apart and put back together. (As scary as this was to watch, it had a nice side-effect – they were able to clean everything inside and basically restore it to right-out-of-the-factory condition.) They determined that the trackball ran on an unusual 5 volts of power, not a rating for which there are many off-the-
shelf AC adapters. It also took a bit of time to figure out if the tip of the required adapter was “hot” or “ground.” I got a universal multi-voltage AC adapter from Radio Shack and proceeded to take the trackball home and plug it in.
Nothing. To say that my heart sunk here would be a major understatement. It didn’t matter if this was the only Odyssey trackball specimen if it didn’t work. After a while, I worked up the nerve to actually increase the voltage on the adapter. 5.5 volts did finally did the trick – I was in business. The first game I tested out was UFO!, which seemed to lend itself naturally to the kind of free-floating movement that the trackball promised. I wasn’t disappointed.
What follows is a game-by-game report of games that I’ve played so far with the trackball. As of this writing, I haven’t exhausted the entire Odyssey2 library, mainly due to time as much as anything else. And there are common-sense exclusions as well – with keyboard-only games like Math-A-Magic! / Echo! and Keyboard Creations!, the controller of choice obviously wouldn’t matter one way or the other.
Cosmic Conflict! – Holy cow. Just when you’d thought this game had limited replay value, the trackball certainly puts a new twist on it. There’s a learning curve to it, but the controller makes this one rather interesting again – it lets you roll your targeting sights as smooth as that message from Star Command. The biggest hitch is trying to make the airplane-style control scheme of “up is down and down is up” instinctive.
Freedom Fighters! – This is the first time I’ve liked this game in 20 years. The trackball offers very slick control – best used in a one-controller game played entirely in hyperspace, becasue you can drop “out of warp” on a dime, take care of some business, rescue some hostages, and get back on the road in short order. The only drawback being that it takes a lot of rolling for a sustained hyperspace trip, but avoiding obstacles during that trip is much easier.
Killer Bees! – This game rocks and rolls with trackball control. Killer Bees! author Bob Harris himself said that this game was meant to evoke the same feel as Centipede, and with a real live trackball controller, the whole balance of the game shifts – sometimes in the player’s favor, sometimes not. It’s a very interesting game-play experience, probably the best Odyssey game to play with the trackball.
Power Lords – It’s tempting, in a slightly sadistic way, to pair the rarest Odyssey2 controller with one of the rarest Odyssey2 games, but after putting these two together at the 2004 OKGE show, I realized how ill-suited the game is to trackball control. It’s vital, in Power Lords, to be able to keep yourself pointed in one particular horizontal direction while having a great deal of flexibility in the vertical plane – and put simply, a trackball is not the way to achieve that. Not a recommended pairing, to say the least.
Turtles! – Oh, what the hell. It would’ve been crazy not to try this thing out on at least a few games that were absolutely unsuited for trackball control. Now, here’s the weird thing – it was actually kind of interesting. I was able to get into the thousand-point range with the trackball, though if you’ve played Turtles at all, you know that’s not anything to write home about. The biggest problem with the trackball is quick getaways, especially when you roll Mama Turtle into a question mark that turns out to be an extra bug to chase you around, or if there’s a bug hot on her tail. The trackball definitely adds an interesting “expert handicap” to Turtles.
UFO! – It certainly makes the game more interesting, that’s for sure. With the trackball, UFO! becomes a ramming game, not a shooting game (honestly, I’ve always found that element of the game more interesting than keeping my guns blazing the whole time anyway). Depending on what kind of game you’re in the mood for, though, having to keep the ball rolling (so to speak) might make UFO! a bit tedious. And to put things in perspective, I managed to rack up a top score of 27 points in UFO! with the trackball, that being the top score out of about eight or ten games. Then I left the machine sitting to walk over to my PC to jot down these notes, and it scored 68 points just sitting there, not moving. I’d recommend this only for expert UFO! players.
There are several other games I plan to try out with the trackball, including Invaders From Hyperspace!, Kill The Attacking Aliens, War Of Nerves!, Showdown In 2100 A.D.!, Balao Travesso! and many others.
Why there are only three of these known to be out there is a complete mystery. It seems like there must be more of them – a prototype run doesn’t get foil-printed boxes with warranty cards. But perhaps the answer isn’t as mysterious as it would appear. A limited test-market run of Odyssey2 trackballs isn’t out of the question, but let’s look at another likely scenario – Wico also manufactured another trackball that required its own AC adapter, for the TI 99/4A computer. It’s possible that the Odyssey trackball was a limited run of specially modified TI trackballs to see if the market was there for Odyssey2 support – and it’s also possible that, in any case, with the crash of the video game industry in 1983, Wico recalled the existing Odyssey trackball controllers to retrofit and repackage them for the TI market, since the computer industry didn’t suffer quite the same catastrophic shakeout that the game industry did. The Odyssey2 trackballs may still be out there – but rewired for the TI.
Aside from writing this article, I’m not keeping the trackball to myself. One of James LeBlanc’s requests when I bought it was that it wouldn’t be locked away in a trophy case somewhere – he hoped it would make the rounds of the retrogaming conventions so people could see it. For 
this controller’s public debut, I tried to do even better than that, and actually had the trackball plugged in, powered up, and ready for anyone to play at OKGE 2004, and numerous people did indeed give it a spin, including James himself (without the adapter, he’d never seen it in action before). (For the record, I offered it as a display item to CGE and ECGX in 2004, since I know the organizers of both shows personally; I didn’t get a response in either case, which is probably more due to the barely-controlled chaos of trying to put one of those shows together than anything else.) I plan to continue showing off the Odyssey2 trackball at future OKGE shows, because this hobby isn’t about sitting back and admiring something like a sculpture. It’s about playing – rather hard to do when you can’t get your hands on the games and their accessories. So while I’m sure some collectors are sucking in their breath disapprovingly at the mere thought of letting everyone get their fingers all over such hard-to-find gear, I agree with James that the trackball should be seen – and played.
A Big Ball Of Thanks To:
- James LeBlanc – for first dibs, a great deal, and a few months worth of patience
- Matt Stallsworth – for invaluable tech assistance to make sure I didn’t “fry the grail”
- William Cassidy – for an outstanding site (which features photos of one of the other one of these known to exist, by the way, as well as the all important electrical specs); visit his the Odyssey2 Homepage for more O2 goodness.
- Jesse Hardesty & family – for putting together the first OKGE, without which this would probably still be sitting in James’ garage
Handheld, Tabletop & Portable Games
In the beginning, home video games were at a bit of a crossroads – everyone wanted to play their favorite games at home, but parents didn’t want to tie up the only TV in the house. (This, of course, being back in the day when there was only one TV in the average American household.) The solution seemed simple: battery-powered electronic handheld games became a big hit. Though they used the same basic operating principles as their video game counterparts, and in some cases the same processors, the handheld games often relied on LEDs or matrices of pre-drawn, fixed character shapes. Often, this meant those graphics might be fancier than those that could be achieved by, say, the Atari 2600, but there was little or no fluidity to those graphics. In some games, such as 
Merlin or Mattel’s enduringly popular Electronic Football, there were no “characters” at all to speak of, only grids of tiny light-emitting diodes.
Often, these games were retired as the novelty wore off, but the basic concept endured through endless permutations. Nintendo’s liquid-crystal display Game & Watch series not only 
brought Donkey Kong and other Nintendo games to the pockets of schoolchildren everywhere, but they introduced the “plus pad” control configuration that Nintendo still uses on the GameCube and other platforms. Coleco turned the same basic shape into a series of immensely popular – and somewhat pricey – “mini-arcade” versions of licensed games. And Milton-Bradley seized on a revolutionary idea of introducing interchangeable cartridges to handheld games with 
their LCD-based Microvision system.
This was classic gaming without the TV. Whether they fit in our pockets or not, handhelds made their mark – and in 1989, when Nintendo revived the same basic concept as the Microvision, gave it a higher-resolution LCD display and crisp stereo sound, and called it the Game Boy, handhelds developed into their own critical niche of the video game industry.
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Game Boy
Introduced in 1989 as a big, neutral-grey brick of a B&W portable game machine, the Nintendo Game Boy may have been considered instantly obsolete by some. It was powered by a Z80 chip, something which had fallen out of use with personal computer manufacturers halfway through that decade. Its display was monochrome and LCD, and in an age when late 80s arcade games had spoiled players with stereo sound, the only way to get stereo out of the Game Boy was with its headphones.
But the “killer app” of the Nintendo Game Boy was its portability. But hadn’t this been tried before, with the Milton-Bradley Microvision around 1982? Sure it had. But the Microvision didn’t 
come packed with what was, at the time, the most popular game in the world: Tetris.
Nintendo and a few other manufacturers released a whole slew of Game Boy titles, and it seemed uncertain what genre of gaming would be the machine’s strength: puzzle games, like Tetris? Decent classic arcade adaptations such as Qix and Super Mario Bros.?
This confusion was intensified by the Super Game Boy, a module fitting into the Super NES cartridge slot, allowing the machine to play Game Boy games encoded with minimal color schemes.
It was 1997 before the next true compelling application of the Game Boy was discovered: a little Japanese creation which every child in America now knows as Pokèmon.
The Game Boy Color was introduced in 1999, sprucing up the same basic machine with a non-backlit color LCD display, and with the arrival of the Game Boy Advance – a much more powerful but, very wisely on Nintendo’s part so as not to alienate a dozen years worth of loyal customers, backward-compatible color handheld – it seems as though this platform is joining the hallowed and rarified ranks of game consoles that can survive a decade. The Game Boy shares this distinction only with Atari 2600.
With the 2004 release of the Nintendo DS handheld system, however, Nintendo moved away from the Game Boy legacy. The DS included a secondary cartridge slot that allows it to play Game Boy Advance games, but this time backward compatibility only went so far – the ability to play the original monochrome Game Boy games or Game Boy Color titles was left behind. Software was produced for both systems for a while, but Nintendo eventually shifted all of its efforts to the DS system. It’s possible now, having reached the end of the Game Boy line, to look back and see the system for what it was – a trendsetting game machine which became nothing short of a cultural icon unto itself, and a machine that set a new benchmark for the longevity of a single family of hardware (at least 16 years). The Game Boy also boasted one of the most widely varied game libraries of any platform, ranging from the 80s arcade simplicity of its launch titles to the deeply immersive quest games of the Game Boy Advance’s heyday, with stops at nearly every gaming trend that has emerged along the way. It truly was the sole survivor of the classic 80s video game systems, coming to rest at a time when gamers were only beginning to wax nostalgic about its very first games.
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A note about screen shots in this section: At long last, the Game Boy section of Phosphor Dot Fossils has real live screen shots to accompany its game reviews. Games hailing from the monochrome Game Boy era have, for authenticity’s sake, been reduced to greyscale images and then tinted to a yellow approximating the background of the original Game Boy’s screen. Some of these games have color encoding intended for the SNES Super Game Boy module, but I’ve elected to take the greyscale-and-tint approach to preserve the flavor of the hardware of that time.
Nintendo Entertaiment System
It was the dawn of the third age of home video game consoles, a couple of years after the Great Crash came upon us all. The first age – the tidal wave of dedicated Pong-like consoles – ended with little innovation and a growing disdain toward devices that took over the TV but could play only a single game. The second age – consoles like the Atari 2600 and 5200, the Odyssey2, the Intellivision and ColecoVision (among others) – had collapsed in a flood of cheap games, many of them derivative or even plain boring, from which the makers of the consoles often got no revenue. The third generation marked the passing of the video game industry torch from America to Japan – but the machine that started the transition almost bore the name Atari.
Introduced in Japan in 1983, the Nintendo Family Computer, or Famicom, quickly established a foothold as that country’s home video game console of choice. Packed with Super Mario Bros., the Famicom boasted arcade-quality sound and graphics, as well as the well-respected Nintendo game library. Nintendo saw potential for the Famicom in the U.S., and originally approached Atari with the idea of licensing the Famicom to them. However, Atari was swept up in a changing of the guard from Ray Kassar’s management team to the post-Warner Bros. Tramiel era, and what’s more, a dispute over rights to the computer version of Donkey Kong erupted between Atari (which had made the game for computers like the Commodore 64 and Apple II) and Coleco (which was demonstrating the ColecoVision version of the game on their ColecoVision-compatible Adam computer). When Atari executives angrily confronted their Nintendo counterparts after happening upon Coleco’s Adam demo booth at the 1984 Consumer Electronics Show, the deal was off – and Nintendo was faced with the daunting prospect of trying to launch a video game system on its own in the American market, which had yet to be penetrated by a Japanese company.
In the end, they needn’t have worried. The arcade-perfect version of Super Mario Bros. alone helped to sell the system, and soon the Nintendo Entertainment System – which had almost been renamed the Nintendo Advanced Video System – was a household word.
In many ways, the NES marked the end of the classic video game era. The NES was the last non-portable game system for which the arcade hits from the early 80s through the end of the console’s lifespan were readily available without being relegated to multi-game “greatest hits” compilations (which would become prevalent in the SNES and Playstation years). The NES was the last console to feature as many simple, classic-arcade-style titles as it featured miles-deep RPGs or gritty fighting games.
By the time the Super Nintendo appeared (based upon Japan’s Super Famicom, naturally), the face of video gaming had seemingly changed forever, and the kind of games we celebrate in Phosphor Dot Fossils were few and far between.
Journey with us now to revisit the twilight of the classics.
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TI 99/4a
Launched in 1979 by the company that mass-produced the first integrated circuit, the Texas Instruments 99/4A computer gave the famous calculator makers a fair shot at the burgeoning home computer market. With a video chip that displayed high-resolution graphics in 16 colors, and a polyphonic sound chip (hardly standard equipment in the late 1970s), the TI99/4A gave its contemporaries – Tandy’s TRS-80 family, the Apple II, the Commodore PET and Atari’s newly-introduced 400 and 800 computers – a run for their money. It also raised the bar of what could be considered a baseline feature rather than a luxurious add-on, and this would affect such future machines as the Commodore VIC-20.
TI was also ahead of the curve in providing its own family of peripherals, including an external speech synthesizer (one of the very first such devices for the home computer market) and a massive expansion box which included disk drives and extra peripheral slots. TI also made joysticks available, along with a copious amount of games developed both in-house and by third parties such as Imagic and Parker Bros.; educational titles were available, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that the majority of the TI99/4A’s software library consisted of non-educational games which took advantage of the machine’s audiovisual hardware. Arcade-style games and groundbreaking titles which were the sole domain of home computers, such as Adventure and Tunnels Of Doom, were the mainstay of the cartridge-based library. The game-playing power of TI’s video chip wasn’t overlooked in the industry either – Coleco used the same chip in its high-end ColecoVision video game console.
When the video game industry suffered its massive 1983-84 shakedown, TI persevered and tried to reposition its computer as a serious tool for learning and business, even going to far as to redesign its external casing in a more austere grey-white color. But by 1984, the battle for the home computer market belonged to IBM, Commodore and Apple. Though they maintained what might be described as cult followings, the TI99/4A and other minor players – TRS-80, Coleco’s Adam and Mattel’s disastrous Aquarius – retired from the fight.
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Odyssey
An electronic game of thought, action and reaction. (Released May 1972)
In September 1966, Ralph Baer was employed by military contractor Sanders & Associates when he had a bright idea: a device to allow interactive games to be played via an everyday TV set. By the end of that year, Baer sketched out a workable design and began putting together prototype hardware. The prototype, dubbed the Brown Box because of its faux-
woodgrain casing, initially played a simple game of tag between two players’ cursors, but before long Baer added more game variations, including a tennis game. Other innovations included the first video game light gun, used for very simple shooting-gallery games, and interchangeable circuit boards that would trigger different game variations.
It’s this last bit, a design which was carried over to the production-model Odyssey, that makes it easy for some to mistake the first home video game for the first cartridge-based system as well, but there is a distinction: while cartridges utilized by such systems as the Atari VCS or the Odyssey2 carry a ROM chip on board with a unique program accessed by their respective consoles, the original Brown Box and Odyssey circuit boards contained no programming. The game programs were native to the hardware itself, with the boards acting as a “key” whose gold contacts would activate one of the game variations. Thus, the distinction of the first ROM cartridge-based home game console still rests with Fairchild’s Channel F.
Narrowly avoiding having his game research nipped in the bud by Sanders & Associates numerous times, Baer began shopping the idea of home video games around to the venue he thought it suited best: the nascent cable TV industry. Baer prepared a version that could be played through the existing cable system without much additional hardware. Though there was some interest in his project, there were no solid offers to license Baer’s technology, and the early cable companies passed on what could have been – in 1968 – a killer app (to say nothing of what could have been the beginning of online gaming).
Next, Baer began pitching the idea to television manufacturers GE and Zenith without much success. RCA was a different story, but their interest in the Brown Box led them to suggest buying out Sanders & Associates, and winning ownership of its employees’ patents in the process. Sanders backed out of the talks at this point, but Ralph Baer’s invention had made an impression upon an RCA executive who later defected to Magnavox. When Baer demonstrated the Brown Box to Magnavox, he finally had a sale – though it would be many months before a production model was ready.
When the first Odyssey rolled off the production line in January 1972, it had been given a look drastically different from Ralph Baer’s Brown Box. Like the Brown Box, Odyssey contained no microchips, instead relying entirely on discrete components and transistors; but unlike Baer’s prototype, the production model was housed in a sleek, streamlined white-and-black case with woodgrain inserts. The Odyssey was powered by six C batteries (or an optional AC adapter), and came complete with poker chips, playing cards, game boards, and numerous colorful acetate overlays which needed to be taped to the television screen to provide color and “graphics”; the machine itself was capable of generating only large squares, rectangles or lines in black & white. With all of these extraneous trappings, Magnavox put the Odyssey on the shelves with a price tag at around $100 – when, in fact, the game’s creator had envisioned putting it on the market for only one-fifth that price.
Additional games, each with their own TV screen overlays (and, where applicable, additional playing pieces or cards), were sold separately, as was an add-on controller, the Odyssey Shooting Gallery. Basically copying the design of Baer’s early light gun, the Shooting Gallery connected to the Odyssey console via a cord with a bulky connector and included additional games and overlays.
In 1972, consumers weren’t worried about compatibility with other game systems, because there were none. It could be argued that they weren’t concerned with Odyssey’s audiovisual capabilities for the same reason. The main concern for a public who had never before heard of this new invention called a “video game” was whether or not it would harm their television sets – or whether they could comprehend the pages of instructions that covered hooking it up. (In fact, if played often enough and long enough, the Odyssey was capable of doing harm – its high-contrast B&W graphics were just the sort of thing that could cause “screen burn-in,” an irreversible condition where the outline of a constantly-displayed image would forever remain “ghosted” on a TV’s picture tube and screen; manufacturers of future consoles such as the later Atari Pong units took this into account, though future Odyssey consoles did not.)
Once the public was made aware of the fun factor, however, the Odyssey was a hit – among those who could afford it. It’s estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 Odyssey packages were sold, with only 20,000 or so of the Shooting Gallery packages leaving retail shelves. Those may seem like weak sales figures at best, but for 1972, and keeping in mind that the consumer market and the general public had never seen a video game before (Atari’s Pong coin-op was still yet to come), it was a surprisingly rapid acceptance of this new technology that most people knew so little about.
Magnavox still wanted to sell more Odyssey consoles, however, and their efforts to move those units off their dealers’ store shelves had mixed results. During the 1972 Christmas buying season, the Odyssey was marked down to only $50 – if you bought it with a new Magnavox TV. Magnavox marketing and sales reps also hatched a less successful plan that may have done much more harm than good: they began telling consumers that Odyssey would only work with Magnavox TVs. While perhaps not a fatal mistake, this move may have curtailed Odyssey’s popularity among those looking to spend only $100 on a video game system, rather than a bundle more for a TV to go with it. (And the proof to the contrary is in the screen shots in this section: captured from a real live Odyssey, and composited with scans of the screen overlays, literally nothing involved in taking the snapshots had anything to do with Magnavox hardware beyond the Odyssey itself.)
The promotional push continued through the 1973 Frank Sinatra comeback special, Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back. Bankrolled by Magnavox, the special included a contractually-obligated on-air demonstration of Odyssey by the Chairman of the Board himself: Sinatra was the first-ever video game TV pitchman. (Take that, George Plimpton.)
During the early days of selling the system, though, one of Odyssey’s most enthusiastic pitchmen in person was still Ralph Baer. And it was the early public demonstrations that led to one of the strangest twists of fate in the Odyssey story. In 1972, Magnavox demonstrated Odyssey to consumers and industry types alike in Burlingame, California. Among the members of the audience was young Nolan Bushnell, who had tried – and failed – to break the coin-op video game market wide open with the relatively complicated Computer Space at Nutting & Associates. After seeing Odyssey’s no-frills ping-pong simulation, Bushnell instructed his friend, engineer Al Alcorn, to take the idea and run with it as a coin-op (though both have since said that their first choice would’ve been a driving game, but they couldn’t achieve such a game to their satisfaction). Atari found itself facing a lawsuit it couldn’t win (especially with Bushnell’s signature on the guest register from the Burlingame demonstration), and settled out of court, paying a reported $400,000 (some source place the amount as high as $700,000) for a “favored licensee” status that was probably less profitable for Magnavox and Sanders in the long run. Atari took off and became king of the U.S. video game market at home and in the arcades. Baer became a mere footnote in video game history, as Odyssey production and marketing ceased after two years. Odyssey was supplanted by Atari’s succession of lower-priced, no-frills home Pong consoles.
Even Atari fell victim to some copycat tactics as a horde of imitation Pong games flooded the market. Two years after ditching the Odyssey, Magnavox revived the name, though not the original console itself, and hopped aboard the video ping-pong bandwagon. The first precursors to modern-day console wars were about to begin.
OKGE 2004: People To Meet, Stuff To See!
One of the highlights of OKGE 2004 was the special guest appearance by none than one of video gaming’s first full-time musicians, George Alistair “The Fat Man” Sanger. He’s worked on everything from Thin Ice in the Intellivision days, to PC DOS-era classics like Wing Commander, Star Trek: Judgement Rites, Master Of Orion, The 7th Guest and Ultima: Runes Of Virtue.
Along with a fellow member of Team Fat whose name I failed to catch, George not only made the rounds to see what was on display, but played bluesy covers of everything from “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” to “Dixieland” to “Word Up” (!). To say the guy’s a hoot and a holler is an understatement – as is saying he’s a damn good musician.
Brad and Carrie Strahle of Messiah Entertainment (they’re the ones in the jersey-type shirts) were on hand to demonstrate the amazing new Messiah wireless NES and Super Nintendo controllers.
A complete collector’s set of working Messiah controller prototypes was raffled off as well – and for some reason it doesn’t seem like people bought tickets like I did, so your chances of winning if you entered were pretty darn good. As it turned out, the winner was a young man whose trip to OKGE was his birthday present.
Getting the next generation hooked on classic gaming – the first hit’s free, kid, but the second one’ll cost you.
But the AtariAge tables weren’t a bad place to pick up the habit, with homebrew games aplenty. Debuting at OKGE 2004 were Seawolf and a BurgerTime-ish Atari 5200 game called Beef Drop. AtariAge was also selling copies of Tree Wave’s outstanding Cabana+ EP CD.
Also playing at AtariAge’s table were work-in-progress versions of Fade Out, Reflex, Incoming! and the eagerly awaited Homestar Runner RPG for the 2600 and the amazing Pac-Man Collection for ColecoVision.
AtariAge boss man Albert Yarusso also made the rounds, camera in hand, capturing the OKGE action.
Collector Brad Prillwitz held a Space Invaders tournament at his table, with all contestants qualifying on a Japanese import Space Invaders 25th anniversary edition.
I didn’t even come close to winning with my measley score of just over a thousand, and that’s a great pity, because check out the grand prize…
…it’s a very cool controller housing shaped like an original Space Invaders arcade cocktail cabinet. You just put a standard Playstation or PS2 controller inside, and the miniature joystick and fire button on the arcade cabinet tap the appropriate buttons on the controller. COOL.
Mad props are also due for Oklahoma City video game collector Rob “Flack” O’Hara and his unique theme – console-based gadgets that can make copies of whatever’s in the console.
From Super NES cartridge copiers to a PS2 with the ability to rip games to the machine’s internal hard drive, Rob had an excellent selection and an untiring enthusiasm to explain and show off his gear. All that was missing was a parrot and an eyepatch!
Meanwhile at Brad Prillwitz’s table, the next generation gets to grips with the Gamecube – but some kids didn’t find it quite so thrilling.
That’s okay, daddy’s there to take over.
Brad also had his Atari Jaguar and a Vectrex on display, the latter with an amazing custom controller featuring real live arcade controls. This was the first time I’ve ever actually played a Vectrex. Now I want one. It’s all Brad’s fault. (I also want one of those controllers, but from what he told me about the going price on eBay for that out-of-production gem, I think it’s safe to say I’d rather be able to eat.)
Fellow northwest-Arkansan Brian Green and his wife had loads of Commodore goodness, with a C128, a C64, and even the obscure Amiga CD32 console on display. Brian also donated a Commodore 1541 disk drive and cable to the Phosphor Dot Fossils collection so we can finally get that Commodore 64 section going here (thanks, Brian!).
More About OKGE 2004:
OKGE 2004: The Phosphor Dot Fossils Booth
Various views of the Phosphor Dot Fossils display at OKGE 2004:
All set up and ready to go (though the Pac-Man record collection disappeared early in the day so we’d have a place to sell arcade marquees). Below, Kent mans the PDF booth.
Now playing: Crazy Climber on the Playstation with the double joystick (the way God intended us to play Crazy Climber).
Now displaying: Japanese game music CDs and remixes rarely seen on these shores, including the Xevious 3D/G+ and Namco Classic Collection remix CDs, Taito Game Music and Konami Game Music Volume 1, and the Namco Classic Collection Volume 1 sound effects CD.
Our collection of Tron Kubricks toys from Japan was also on display in its entirety, with Light Cycles zooming around the Phosphor Dot Fossils booth and even the MCP overseeing things!
Other vintage video game toys made a showing at the PDF booth, including a complete collection of original 1982 Tron action figures…
…as well as several figures based on Q*Bert and his crazy capers.
Other rarities on display included Odyssey2 Power Lords and the ultra-rare Odyssey2 trackball controller by Wico – one of only three known to exist, and the only one you can walk up to and play without it being “behind the ropes.”
Also on display were our Coleco tabletop arcade machines, as well as the Sega Star Trek arcade poster, a Doctor Who pinball backglass, and a poster signed by the fine folks who programmed the classic Intellivision games.
So many of my early gaming memories involve my family sitting around the Odyssey2, so I was thrilled to see so many families drop by and sample our offerings.
But they weren’t the only ones who dropped by – Larry Dixon, formerly of Origin Systems and responsible for the 3-D “sets” in the Wing Commander games, stopped by (and signed Kent’s copy of Wing Commander 2, which vanished from the buck-a-game PC DOS game sale and went home with Kent after he also had it signed by “The Fat Man”!
The Magnavox Odyssey fascinated nearly everyone who saw it for the second year in a row – including some who played it at last year’s OKGE!
They were also fascinated by the various Pac-Man and Donkey Kong collectibles. This picture was taken before it happened, but Lynda Baker added to the Pac-Man toy collection shortly before the show.
Ah, there’s the little fellow now. I used to have one of these Pac-Man wind-up toys some 20 years ago, and right before the doors opened to the public, Lynda from Lynda’s Action Figures in Stillwater, OK came up to me and offer me the first shot at this little guy, and at a discounted price too. Just another example of the great friendly atmosphere at OKGE 2004.
The back of the Intellivision poster, signed by George “The Fat Man” Sanger himself. We couldn’t find a silver ink pen for him, but he came up with the gag of signing the backboard because “the music is the last thing on the list…again!” (One of George’s earliest video game compositions was the theme for the Intellivision game Thin Ice, back when having music in a cartridge game was a luxury.) I would’ve gotten a picture of him signing it, but I was having such a great time chatting with him that I completely forgot to grab the camera.
One of these things kept the Phosphor Dot Fossils booth up and running. Another one of these things kept me up and running. I’ll let you guess which did which.
OKGE 2004 Pictures:
OKGE 2004: The OKGE Arcade
A sampling of the crowd attending OKGE 2004 at various times of the day.
The OKGE arcade had a nice sampling of classic and more recent coin-ops, from Battlezone and Gorf to a Neo-Geo cabinet and Namco Classic Collection. There was also a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pinball machine on hand, and many of the coin-ops were for sale.
The rarest arcade game on display was the incredibly rare cocktail version of Joust, on sale for only $1,400 – a steal for that particular version of that game.
This Gorf cabinet was a beauty too – and played like a champ. Kicked my butt sixteen ways to Wednesday.
The busy OKGE tournament table offered high-score contests as well as plain old door prize drawings, held every hour.
OKGE 2004’s mini-musuem included some classic consoles, from the original Magnavox Odyssey to specimens of the Fairchild Channel F, Bally Astrocade and Atari 2600, to nifty memorabilia like the Coleco tabletop arcade Pac-Man game and a Dragon’s Lair lunchbox.
At left, OKGE organizer Jesse Hardesty announces yet another prize winner. Hopefully Jesse’s grand prize after the show was over was some uninterrupted sleep – he’s earned it!
And maybe after that, he can play some games on the Ivory Tower – a high-powered thing of beauty that he’s put together solely for the purpose of getting the biggest oomph out of DOS games.
One of the funniest sights of OKGE 2004 was the opening of an observation window that I didn’t even know existed on the second floor, as people from another event peeked in on our show. Hey! Buy your tickets and get your hand stamped like everyone else!
More About OKGE 2004:
OKGE 2004: Gaming In Green Country
The second – and I really hope I’m not stepping too far out of line into the realm of wishful thinking in saying second annual – Oklahoma Gaming Exhibition was my only shot at making it to any of the retrogaming events in 2004. As much as I had wanted to go to CGE as well, I also became a homeowner in 2004 and learned the art of prioritizing, and a trip to San Jose just wasn’t possible this year. OKGE is only a two hour drive to Tulsa, however, so there was no way I was going to miss it. I don’t want to get any debate going by comparing OKGE to CGE, but I will say this: if the only gaming event one could attend in 2004 was OKGE, it’d be hard to ask for a better show.
OKGE ’04 was held in the much larger facility of the Marriott Southern Hills in Tulsa, actually not too far from the site of the previous year’s show. For a relatively small event like OKGE to effectively double its size and add such features as working arcade games and special guests of honor in the space of a single year is a quantum leap forward. This is a show that’s going to stick around. With the curious absence of the Austin Gaming Expo after its seemingly successful debut in summer 2003, OKGE is poised to become the mid-south classic gaming event.
There were more vendors and exhibitors this time around, with old pros and new additions among them. Jesse Hardesty and his wife Angel were tirelessly making sure everyone was set up (and fed too, thanks to show sponsors Subway and Krispy Kreme) and ready to go, and I can’t even begin to express how much their efforts were appreciated – they both ran themselves ragged the whole day.
For my part, I once again brought three primary systems to the show – the original Magnavox Odyssey (a specimen of the first-ever home video game console), its underdog descendent known as the Odyssey2, and the Playstation with some retro arcade goodness, both import and otherwise. I also brought a boxload of working, battery-powered Coleco tabletop arcade machines, which were a huge hit, as well as numerous game-related toys and other memorabilia from my collection. Anyone who wanted to strike up a conversation or wondered how much anything was worth, or how it worked or its history, promptly got their ears talked off by yours truly. Kent Sutton came along again, holding the booth down while I stalked the OKGE floor snapping pictures.
The centerpiece of my display this year was meant to be an elaborate video loop chronicling the entire early history of video games, with key arcade games and home consoles front and center…but to my shock, the DVD player I brought along with me to play this loop was defective (it was a spare that we hadn’t taken out of the box and tried out before, and I didn’t bring a backup, so my apologies to those who wondered why the display went no further than 1980). This project will been seen in its entirety at next year’s OKGE – and I think you’ll like it even more. Loads of vintage commercials, clips from game-inspired cartoons, and well over a hundred shots of games in action that you may not have seen in years. So again, to anyone wondering where the display went – my apologies. It’ll be back next year.
As will I, after yet another great OKGE experience – there’s something about the southern-midwestern mindset that makes this show feel like home to me. When Kent and I hastily rearranged my display at around lunchtime to drop the video loop and get some real games going on that screen instead, the nice folks at Game Crazy loaned me a Playstation A/V cable when I discovered I hadn’t brought one. (Why I’d brought the PS1 to begin with, but no cable, is a mystery even to me – I’m not sure what I was thinking!) So, for the entire afternoon portion of OKGE, I was using a cable that someone else could have sold from their table – that’s the kind of friendly atmosphere that makes OKGE stand out, and that’s why I’ll keep coming back for more as long as the show is held.
That said, I’ll let the pictures tell the story now.
OKGE 2004 Pictures:
Wii Play
The Game: Wii Play gathers a collection of mini-games in one place, from fishing, billiards and target shooting to a futuristic hockey game and tank battles, each showcasing different ways that the Wii remote controls can be used. (Nintendo, 2007)
Memories: As with Wii Sports, Wii Play is an easy-to-pick-up but hard-to-put-down grouping of fairly simple minigames. Some of the games in Wii Play simulate real sports, while others delve into more abstract areas of game play. That’s the good news, and the even better news is that just about all of them are fun, making this another all-in-one first-party home run for Nintendo – if anyone knows a dozen different ways to use the Wii controllers, it should be the folks who made the things.
Puzzle Piece Panic
The Game: Interconnecting puzzle pieces are spewed out of the sky by the Tetrad Ejection Device (T.E.D.) and drift down the screen in a pre-defined area. You can rotate them for better placement (or at least rotate them to achieve the least worst effect); filling an entire horizontal line clears that line and lowers the amount of clutter left on the screen. As more lines are cleared, the pieces fall faster – and it doesn’t get any easier for you to catch up. (Ted Szczypiorski / PackratVG.com, 2007)
Memories: It doesn’t take a master’s degree to see that this game is clearly a version of Tetris for the almost 30-year-old Odyssey2 console, but that doesn’t make it any less fun. Puzzle Piece Panic is a combination of a great game with a fond tribute to the finest Magnavox/Philips tradition of changing the name and some minor details to create a “near-beer” version of a popular title. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit to having had a hand in some of these homages to the hyperbolic Magnavox marketing style, including the game’s name.)
Red Dwarf: Beat The Geek
The Game: Holly (and Holly) tax your brain with trivia questions about Red Dwarf (at either “viewer” or “geek” level) or about any number of other things (at “general knowledge”), with a time limit on each multiple-choice question. Some Red Dwarf-specific questions ask players to identify elements of scenes or even pieces of soundtrack music from the series. There are eight levels of six questions each; players who complete a round with no wrong answers will be given a code to enter at the main menu for a bonus game, and players who complete the entire quiz with no wrong answers will be given a two-point bonus question. Along the way, Holly (and Holly) offer helpful advice and critique your knowledge. (BBC Video / 2|entertain, 2006)
Memories: This interactive DVD game contains the first new Red Dwarf footage shot since the BBC’s cult SF comedy series bowed out in the 1990s; that along is cause for some small celebration at the very least. Granted, it’s not a new episode or the delayed-until-it’s-vaporware feature film, but it’ll do. Norman Lovett and Hattie Hayridge reprise their roles as the two incarnations of Holly; that’s got to be worth the price of admission alone.
Mr. Roboto!
The Game: Robots, commanded by the CPU which is in turn commanded by you, take up positions on a battlefield grid. The two opposing armies converge, and if two robots lae square, the action zooms in on that portion of the battlefield so the two can fight it out. When one robot’s energy is exhausted by the other’s attacks or by coming into contact with energy pulses bouncing around the arena, that robot is forfeited and the action returns to the grid. The CPUs can transmit viruses to any enemy robot on the grid, stealing half of that robot’s speed or hit points, or halting it altogether. Robots can attack the enemy CPU, but the CPU has a more robust defensive mechanism at its disposal than the average robot… (Ted Sczcypiorski [published by Packrat Video Games], 2006)
Memories: Yet another Odyssey2 homebrew is charting impressive new territory for a classic console that many consider to be underpowered. And yet, what we have here in Mr. Roboto! is essentially Archon – a classic computer game that didn’t appear on a console until the NES. And yet here it is running on one of the 8-bit era’s underdogs, and running quite nicely, thank you very much.
Millipede / Super Breakout / Lunar Lander
The Game: Relive exciting arcade action on your Gameboy Advance with the latest game pack from DSI Games. Millipede, Super Breakout and Lunar Lander, three classic games from Atari, are waiting for you! (DSI Games/Atari, 2006)
Memories: DSI Games‘ latest game pack consists of three games, Super Breakout (1978), Lunar Lander (1979), and Millipede (1982). DSI has a consistent track record of offering gamers two newer games (Gauntlet/Rampart, Paperboy/Rampage, Spy Hunter/Super Sprint) or three classic games (Pong/Asteroids/Yars’ Revenge, Centipede/Breakout/Warlords) per pack. This pack contains three classic Atari games, although none of them will hold your attention for long.
Gauntlet / Rampart
The Game: DSI strikes again with Gauntlet and Rampage, two nearly perfect arcade conversions for the Game Boy Advance. In Gauntlet you’ll trade shots with ghosts, demons, and Death himself. In Rampart you’ll defend your ground and exchange buckshot with more worldly enemies. (DSI Games/Atari, 2006)
Memories: Gauntlet will be forever imbedded in my mind as the first four-player cooperative quarter eater. From the day I first saw it way back in seventh grade, the game has always held a special place in my heart. At least that’s the story I told my wife as I was moving a vintage Gauntlet arcade cabinet into our home gameroom.
Conquest Of Mars
The Game: The enemy in an interplanetary war has gone underground, and you’re piloting the ship that’s taking the fight to him. But he hasn’t just hidden away in a hole; he’s hidden away in a very well-defended hole. As if it wasn’t already going to be enough of a tight squeeze navigating subterranean caverns on Mars, you’re now sharing that space with enemy ships and any number of other fatal obstacles. (Fortunately, the enemy also leaves copious numbers of helpful fuel depots for you too.) Once you fight your way to the bottom of the cave, you plant charges on the enemy mothership – meaning that now you have to escape the caverns again, and fast. (John Champeau / AtariAge.com, 2006)
Memories: As much as Caverns Of Mars caught fire on the Atari home computers, you’d think it would’ve been a shoo-in for the company’s consoles. Now, at least, 2600 owners who resisted stepping up to the mighty Atari 8-bit computers can reap the reward for 20+ years of patience. John Champeau, the programmer who finally made good on Coleco’s unfulfilled promise to bring the arcade sleeper hit Ladybug to the 2600, has struck again.