CGE Saturday highlights

Here’s how I’m bringing you these exciting, action-packed reports.

Here’s someplace I’ve gazed upon fondly with great frequency, but just haven’t had a chance to visit.

I brought a few things to loan to the CGE Museum, including – what else? – their Odyssey2 section.

Ralph Baer’s Brown Box prototype. We’re not worth.

Somehow I’ll get a handle on it.

I brought some vintage video game toys too, but they weren’t still in their packages like these puppies are, so mine are on display in my room. 😆

Overhead wide angle view of the whole show floor, taken from the skybox. (It may not look crowded, but there was actually quite a crowd.)

A CGE exclusive release, programmed in the ’80s, unreleased until now: Lasercade.

The famous DP Living Room, ready to play a game of Warlords. If only I’d had three other people with me at the moment…

Jay Smith, inventor of the Vectrex. His keynote speech was absolutely fascinating – in addition to creating one of my favorite underdog game systems, he also worked on propulsion systems for the Apollo lunar module (!). He could’ve talked for three hours and I still would’ve been listening.

Garry Kitchen at the Activision panel.

David Crane (Pitfall) at the same panel.

Brett Weiss’ incredibly tasty new book. Kudos to him for getting it written and published. And wow, textbook binding. Total class!

I admit it – before they admitted folks to the show floor, I ran down two whole rows of arcade games with the fisheye lens on. It looked kinda like this.

This is just one of those rows. Those are some rows.

Pong engineer Al Alcorn’s keynote. This year he had a Powerpoint presentation and tons of pictures he had left over from the early days of Atari.

Nick “Drexel923” takes a good-natured ribbing from his neighbors at the CGE auction after winning the auctions on not one but two Mystery Boxes O’ Crap – literally, cardboard boxes resembling the question block marks in Super Mario, containing either treasures that you paid too little for or insanely common stuff you paid way too much for – which contained…well…crap. At least he got a free beer for his trouble.

Add five hour-long tapes of auction action to this stack, and this is what I’ve shot since I’ve been here.