Brandon: The Midwest Gaming Classic
The
Midwest Gaming Classic was held this last weekend, May 22-23 2004. Myself, and a couple of my
S+F cohorts went down to pimp our game Inhabitants for the Sega Dreamcast, which is being published by
The GOAT Store. The short story: it rocked.
I was really excited about getting down there, seeing my work published, being able to sound like a carnival barker as I tried to draw people in to play at the demo kiosks. I hate people, but I love gatherings. We flew down a day early so we could get our wits about us, check in with the GOAT Store crew, and generally check the place out. By the way
Midwest Airlines is awesome if you ever need to fly from DC to the midwest, or vice versa.
We got in touch with Dan Loosen of the GOAT store that Friday evening and helped setup the 16 or so Dreamcasts and monitors, getting 4 just for Inhabitants, and 2 to demo the Helibomber DC port, and any other projects we wanted to show off. It was a lot of work getting everything done, and we were a bit disappointed that due to a manufacturing glitch, the pressed CD's of Inhabitants were not there. Oh well, we did the job with CD-R copies, and took pre-orders. Still, having the discs probably would have helped us sell a few more copies. Well, anyways.
We went to sleep that evening, and woke bright and early to get down and make sure everything was plugged in and running. After running into some trouble with the Dreamcast VGA boxes, we finally got all the kiosks working. We had an awesome display, with large format prints of the box art of Inhabitants, Maqiupai, and Feet of Fury, the three homebrew releases that the GOAT store has done so far. They really went all out in getting everything set up. It was really busy that first day, but the Dreamcast section started out a little slow. Throughout the day it picked up and we got a chance to wander around the show. I drank some Bawls from the Bawls girl, and bounced around with my caffeine high. I talked to a lot of people, was proud to show off the game, had a good response from Helibomber, even having one guy who played it suggest changing the army guys into women heading to a shoe sale.
I guess the highlight of of my day was meeting the guys of
Guild Software and checking out their new MMORPG Vendetta Online. It's basically Wing Commander in space, but massively multiplayer. I spoke at length with their network programmer. He was awesome, and gladly answered my n00b questions and such. I even understood his answers, I wasn't just saying 'yes' all the time. The awesome thing about the game, and Guild software is that it is just four guys working on it. The game looks fricking awesome.
Later, before S+F was to speak about indie game dev, I met their graphics programmer, and talked to him for a while. We had a great time talking with these guys, and told them about some of our projects. When we mentioned GBA programming, they gave us a contact that might be able to get our game published, when we do it.
Oh yeah, we also spoke about indie game dev. If we were able to get in there on time, I think we might have had a bigger audience, but hey, that's OK, we did have some people there just for us on both days.
After the first day, we hit up the
Atari Age after party, and got some sweet-ass name tags. We also got a chance to chat with Walter Day of
Twin Galaxies. He was there with Billy Mitchell doing some sort of documentary. He was really cool and down to earth, he was even decked out in his referee stripes. It was cool. We were tired though, and retired early.
The next day was much like the first. We did leave the booth a little more that day though. The GOAT store guys were trying to break Inhabitants by playing endless puzzle mode. I think we figured it would take 4 billion points or so to overflow the score variable. They did get over 300 bonus though. That was a nice little stress test that the game passed with flying colors.
I also kicked ass in UT2k3, although was barely beaten out by S+F fanboy Jason.
The rest of the day was kind of a blur. We had to rush to sign who knows how many covers for Inhabitants, Steve got his Pac-Man shirt signed by Billy Mitchell, and got a copy of the Twin Galaxies record book from Mr. Day. I drank a couple more bottles of Bawls, talked to a cool guy named Orlando right near the end of the day about devving and such. It was a little surreal to have it all end, but it had to.
Then mother nature had to be a bitch. Tornado watch in the area as our flight was supposed to take off. You Kansans know what that means. Anyways, we got home about three hours late. I did get to play with my laptop some though, wrote a little more code and played some Doom.
Well, all in all I had a wonderful time. I hope to do it again next year, and this also has to be the longest vent post I have ever made.
Look for pics of the event soon.
Mood: Repored
Music: Fans blowing
Browsing: The Midwest Gaming Classic
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