The Expo Floor

Hanaho

Here are some very cool Arcade Cabinets for the Home Computer. Two different types of stand alone cabinets. One has a trac-ball, joystick, buttons, etc. . . every type of controller needed to play the 50 emulated arcade games. Cost: $3,995 / $2,995 ($1,000 less without the computer). The games played flawlessly and the unit is really very nice. More information can be found on the website www.hanaho.com.

Intellivision Productions

Keith Robinson, our Burgertime chef, worked for Intellivision from 1981 to 1984. The apron and the hat are from the original release of Burgertime!

Keith was able to buy back some of the game rights which included some unreleased titles. Thus, the Intellivision Lives CD was born. The CD includes 50 games with the history of each game and interviews with the designers. It's a very complete compendium. The 2001 Expo debutes a new Intellivision Productions CD, Intellivision Rocks. This CD includes Activision and Imagic games. Both CD's are available for purchase from the Intellivision Productions website.

Keith's favorite game is Astrosmash. It takes up less than 2k of space on the standard Intellivision cartidge. There is a second game on the cartridge, but it was too close of a clone to Asteroids and was pulled. Keith demonstrated Astrosmash, and I must say it was an addictive little game. Simple, fun, and gets your heart pounding.

We also played Anteater, which was an unreleased game for the Atari 2600. Again, this game was a lot of fun. Intellivision Productions is trying to gain distribution rights for this game.

Intellivision Productions released Sea Battle and Swordfight in cartridge form at last year's Expo. They were selling some leftovers at this year's Expo.

When asked his opinion of the current game market, he said that the market seems to be split between games designed solely for the gamer versus games that are family oriented. He also sees a resurgence of nostalgia of the old Intellivision style games with the increase of games developed for the web, cell phones, and PDAs.

Intellivision wanted to find out if the console would melt if left in a hot car. So, the engineers put a console in the oven and set it at 150 degrees. They came back after a couple of hours to a totally melted console. When they checked the heating settings, they realized their mistake. They set the oven at 150 Celsius; not Fahrenheit. Needless to say, the console did not work.

Digital Press.com

These folks are celebrating their 10th anniversary and they thought they needed a unique way to commemorate this milestone. So, they wrote a brand new game for Colecovision, Ms. Space Fury (Daniel Bienvenn wrote the code, Sylvain DeChantal designed the graphics). The official mascot of Digital Press is Space Fury, a bigheaded, one-eyed, green alien.

If you haven't guessed it already, Ms. Space Fury bears a striking resemblance to Space Fury, with the addition of a bow. It took four weeks to code the game and four weeks to test. They built the cards themselves. Labors of love abound on the Classic Gaming Expo floor.

Combat Two

Marc Oberhauser is a German fan whose latest labor of love released Combat Two to the public for the first time ever. The game was completed in 1982 and was never released. Marc was able to get the code and hand manufactured each cartridge himself. Only 250 copies were made (each one is numbered) and Marc sold out at the convention.

Atari2600.com

For folks who have been collecting cartridges for a while, the name Jerry Greiner is a familiar one. Jerry (far right in the picture) used to have email auctions where you could get some good deals. Jerry G has expanded and has one of the most comprehensive booths for game collecting.

Bizarre bands

Occasionally on the Expo floor, strange and bizarre music would blare and any ability to be able to hear anyone talk was impossible. Here's a picture.

Dragonstone Software

Dragon's Lair 3D is being released this year and Don Bluth showed up to help promote its release. He signed posters and anything folks could convince him to sign. The line was huge.

Atari

Atari was demonstrating an anniversary edition CD for Dreamcast. The CD was nice. Here's a picture of one of the games being demonstrated.

Panel Discussions