Oklahoma Video Game Exhibition Wrap Up

The Oklahoma Video Game Exhibition took place over the weekend on Saturday, October 24th. The event has been held annually since 2003 and features exhibitors showing off their collections of classic gaming memorabilia.

For starters there are a number of arcade machines that are all set to free play for anyone to enjoy while they are there. They ranged from vector graphics machines, such as Space Wars to Frogger and Joust. Only one machine was not playable, the Star Wars arcade game, and that was due to some interference from the Dark Side according to the Out of Order sign.

My daughter, Katy attended the event with me and we spent about half an hour playing Space Wars. For anyone that doesn’t know, this was an arcade machine created by Larry Rosenthal, a graduate of MIT and featured two player space combat. One player controlled a ship that looked like the wedge ship from Asteroids and the other controlled a ship resembling the Starship Enterprise. These ships were controlled with five buttons, one to move left, one to move right, a thrust button, a button to fire your ships gun and a hyperspace button that would teleport you to a random spot on the screen. The object of the game was to destroy your opponent the most in a time limit. Each credit would get you a minute and a half of time. There were a number of gameplay options that could be selected at the beginning of the game. You had the ability to change the speed of the game, the amount of gravity or a combination of those two and the different options varied widely from each other. The only objects on the screen besides the player’s ships were an asteroid that would randomly move around the battlefield and a star in the center that would destroy any ship that touched it. This was also were the gravity was centered and would pull player towards. The game play was super simple, but extremely addicting. Space Wars was available for purchase, but I did not have the $1000 that the owner was asking.

There were a number of vendors present as well, many who had playable systems from the late 70’s and early 80’s all the way up to the early years of this century. One man, Joe Hamilton, had a history of Nintendo that featured nearly every console the company has released, including the Virtual Boy. It was the first time I had a chance to see what that system was all about and I have to say that after playing it for about fifteen minutes I didn’t want to play any more. Mainly because it was so uncomfortable leaning forward to put my head in the giant binocular display that the Virtual Boy had. The owner of the system said that if he plays it for any extended period of time he lays back on the couch and just rests the system over his eyes, which didn’t seem too comfortable to me either. I was also able, at that booth, to get my hands on a Famicom for the first time and aside from being essentially the exact same thing as the NES I didn’t like the controller, only because the wire sticks out of the side and my hand was pushing against it the entire time.

It seemed that the most popular display at the show was the history of fighting games that had somewhere around 100 different fighting game titles all on display. Greg Little, the man behind the collection said these were only his one on one fighting games and he didn’t not include his extensive of multi player fighting games. Even though, I’m not a fan of the fighting game genre, outside of some casual Street Fighter action, the collection was impressive and it really showed off just how fighting games have evolved throughout the years.

I also had the chance to get my hands on some time with the Vectrex. The first game I played was Minestorm, which is essentially an Asteroids clone. You controlled a ship that you could move around the screen and you were tasked with shooting mines that were floating through space. The game featured controls that I liked a bit more than Asteroids. The ship did not float around the screen after a booster thrust and, while not being as “realistic” as Asteroids I liked better because I had more control over what I was doing. The Vectrex featured a screen that displayed simple black and white graphics, but to get around that game designers would include color sheets that you would place over the screen to give the game the appearance of color graphics. The game I played that showed that off to its fullest effect was a Space Invaders style game. The screen featured three different areas of color and as the invaders would pass over them they would change color. It gave a very impressive illusion of a game with color graphics and it really did enhance the game over the simple black and white the Vectrex could produce.

I also learned a lot about the thriving Atari 2600 community from Brad Prillwitz. He was there showing off his collection of new and homebrew applications for the Atari 2600. I mentioned, on the podcast, a game called Chunkout 2600 that is a new puzzle game that was just released for the system. The screen was filled with a number of colored blocks and you have to remove them from the screen. You can remove any group of two or more colored blocks that are the same color and the object was to clear them all from the screen. The game featured four different difficulty levels that you would select by adjusting the switches on the back of the system and the higher difficulty levels were very challenging. It was a lot of fun and if I had the system and the $30 for a new Atari game I would have bought a copy right then. He told me that new games are coming out for the system all the time and the community of 2600 developers is quite large. I thought the system had died long ago and was simply a jewel for collectors. Apparently I was wrong.

The event brought in just over 500 people and it was quite interesting to see the number of dads that were out with their younger children showing them what gaming was like when we were younger. I know my daughter enjoyed it and said she was already ready to go back again next year. She was introduced to a lot of gaming’s past that she found very entertaining and I had the chance to try out some systems I had only heard about. The game play for many of those older systems was simple, yet completely addicting even today. It would have been very easy to spend thousands of dollars in there adding to my gaming collections, but for the sake of my marriage I had to restrain myself.

It was a great event and I encourage anyone in the area to attend next year’s event. You’d be pleasantly surprised.