Digital Nationz - Auckland - 28th / 29th Sept.

Reminisce about those old games and dedicated gaming hardware

Re: Digital Nationz - Auckland - 28th / 29th Sept.

Postby YetiSeti on Thu Oct 03, 2013 10:06 pm

Here's some photos as well. It was a great weekend. I stayed at Nomad's backpackers, which is just a 1km walk to the Arena was a great convenience. Although I had to go stay at the relatives on Sunday night as the noise from inside the room (big group of people together in my dorm up and talking and watching a movies till all AM hours) and from outside (thoomp thooomp) of the hostel was pretty intolerable.

https://plus.google.com/photos/10061976 ... 7214347873

I have photos showing the VIP queue on Saturday morning, some general public queuing on Sunday morning, lines outside the Retro Gaming exhibition (which were about 40-60 long all day Saturday), and some others about the expo. It's time I got a decent camera. I wasn't even going to bother getting a booth babes photo because I knew it would come out blurry. I didn't get to tackle Kim DotCom about my own museum proposal but did listen to him on the panel discussion and watching him pretty much slaughter 99 out of the 100 challengers in the Call of Duty game.

I lurked around the retro expo across the two days. I reckon it was the unexpected (from the expo organiser's viewpoint) show stealer of the event. There was a lot of genuine interest and astonishment in the collections, so big ups to Mark & Michael. I knew there was going to be a bit of disappointment echoed from hardcore gamers with the rest of the expo as the consoles were pre-launch and they couldn't really show anything good on them yet, but I only heard positives on the vintage displays.

Unfortunately due to the congestion, people were prematurely ushered by security/helpers from playing on some of the working consoles/computers, and were not able to stand around as long as they liked on some of the tables. Having good playable games on machines possibly even made people less aware how old some of these items were, but that might just be my forgivings and love of these old machines. Everything on the Vectrex was awesome, there was Pong on the Philips Discoverer (helmet) tv, Commander Keen on the (Mega) PC, Pssst on the ZX Speccy, Pac Man & Adventure on the Atari 2600, and a bunch of contemporary titles on the Megadrive, Dreamcast and NES. Although not connected up, people were itching to shoot something with the Pong rifle, and Atari XE zapper.

The age demographic across the expo seemed to clump around the 18-25 mark, and 80%+ male. A lot of the Sony and Microsoft exhibits were R16 and R18 with their gaming titles, and the expo wasn't pram friendly (as my cousin had to be turned away), and there was plenty of floor room really for getting around despite their citing health and safety risks. What was an interesting observation is that across the different age groups, both young and older recognised a lot of the consoles and computers. People that were of the next Nintendo/Sega generation knew of the older computers and consoles because their parents had them.

If you get the opportunity to try an Oculus Rift, it's worth a go. I'm a bit sceptical of whether it will take off. I think it may fail for completely opposite reasons, the hyper-real experience is so dizzying, and I couldn't handle it for too long. If they could ever get a wireless one working without latency problems, then that would solve some tripping/strangulation problems too.

I was fortunate enough to have an interview with Melanie Swalwell to talk about my story and collection on Sunday morning before heading to the expo. I seem to have left everything too last minute in organising the trip to catch up with anyone else on this site who were also at the expo.
YetiSeti
 
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