Retro Reunited Review

Last weekend I had a fantastic time at the Retro Reunited event up in Huddersfield. Organised by retro community stalwart Gordon Sinclair (AKA SirClive) the event gathered over 250 gamers together for a weekend of gaming, drinking and lots of great conversation.

My weekend actually began at 1pm on Friday as I took the afternoon off work to hire a large Transit van, which was filled with several MAME arcade cabinets, boxes full of consoles and games and virtually every TV from my house and garage. Having picked up my good friends Rob and James, we hit the road at around 5pm and enjoyed a relatively painless trip up the M6 to arrive at the venue, the Cedar Court Hotel, just before 7...

 
After checking in we then had a quick look around the venue, which was already shaping up nicely. Our first major concern was access - the main room was above ground level and with two full-size arcade cabs to shift up several flights of stairs, it looked like we were going to be in for a 'fun' evening! So we headed off to a nearby pub for some food to charge us up for the work ahead. Unfortunately the pub was a Toby Carvery, with only a carvery to choose from on the menu - not the ideal preparation for lugging heavy equipment around!

Nevertheless, we filled our stomachs and headed back to the venue to unload our stuff. By this time darkness had descended, which was a blessing as it had been an incredibly hot day so shifting all the stuff in a cooler atmosphere was very welcome. So we emptied out the van, taking the smaller items first (TVs, boxes of consoles etc) before facing the daunting task of getting my full-size MAME cabinet and the incredibly heavy multi-emulator driving cabinet up two flights of unappealing concrete stairs, through the fire exit and to the far end of the room... Thankfully all went relatively smoothly with no damage to the machines and only minimal pain to our hands and backs!

Having spent a couple of hours setting up all my kit, which included an interesting selection of obscure systems, we retired to the Hotel bar for a few well-earned beers with some of the other attendees that had supplied equipment. At around midnight we popped back to the exhibition room to do a few last-minute checks and were on the verge of retiring for the night when a new contingent of people arrived - several members of the Retro Gamer staff had just arrived, having set out from Bournemouth some 6 hours earlier! Much chatting and showing off of consoles and exhibits ensued until finally at around 1:30 SirClive told us all to bugger off to bed!

Saturday morning came around all too soon, and after waking up in a daze and having a much-needed shower followed by a reasonable full English breakfast, I headed up to the event room again with my pals at around 9:30 to start switching everything on and help with the final preparations. Over the next hour or so more and more interesting equipment arrived and the familiar sound of dozens of video games began to fill the air, and shortly after 11 o'clock the event was officially opened by Retro Gamer editor Darran Jones.

So, on to the event itself, and what a cracker it was! Spread across two rooms was what can only be described as a gamer's wet dream, with arcade machines, computers and consoles spanning over 30 years of gaming history. The main room played host to everything from classic arcade cabinets to dedicated zones for Sega, Nintendo, Atari, Commodore and Sinclair, to a special 'Weird Zone' (which I'll come to later) and of course the now-expected Rock Band setup on a stage. This room was also home to several dealer tables (including my own) and an impressive exhibit by the Centre for Computing History.

The second room was home to a theatre-style setup that hosted various Q&A sessions held throughout the day, which featured industry veterans such as Archer Maclean, John Ritman and Charles Cecil. However the majority of the second room was dedicated to Acorn World, a veritable Aladdin's Cave of impressive exhibits related to the BBC Micro, Archimedes, Electron and RISC architecture. On show was everything from new homebrew Beeb games, clever devices interfacing old Acorn hardware to new technology like Compact Flash drives, to the BBC Domesday system (a kind of 80's version of Google Earth) and even a selection of Robot arms controlled by RISC computers!

After barely playing any games at my own event Byte Back earlier this year, I promised myself I was going to do more gaming at Retro Reunited. However, as usual, beer and lost of interesting people to talk to got in the way of that and by the end of the weekend I may actually have played less than I did at Byte Back! I've made quite a few friends at these events in the past and spent plenty of time waxing lyrical with them, but also got the chance to chat to a few new faces. It was a pleasure to speak to everyone I met over the weekend - whether it was in-depth conversation about gaming or pissed-up chat about utter nonsense, there are so many interesting and funny people in the retro gaming community that it really is a joy to spend time with them.

Anyway, I digress... I did of course get to do some gaming during the weekend, the highlight of which was playing Pac-Man, Missile Command, Battlezone and Asteroids in their original cabinets. Ironically I spent more time playing Pac-Man on UK record holder Jon Stoodley's awesome restored cab than anything else. I'm not quite ready to challenge for a world record yet but I definitely got better at it as the event went on! Talking to Jon and also Missile Command world record holder Tony Temple about their passion for the games was great too. It turned out Jon is a bit of a demon on most arcade classics as he also laid down some impressive scores on Track & Field and 1942 on Rob's bartop MAME cabinet during the weekend!

As I mentioned earlier, one of the areas of systems was dubbed 'The Weird Zone' - this had some truly obscure stuff to behold, including a PC built into a SNES (with CD drive cleverly contained in a permanently-inserted Mario World cartridge!) and rarely seen items such as the Fairchild Channel F and Panasonic 3DO. This area was also home to most of the kit I brought, including the NEC PC-FX, Sega SG-1000 and Nintendo Block Kuzushi, one of the earliest Nintendo systems. Last but not least I provided the ridiculous Action Max system, a lightgun shooting console whose games run from VHS videotapes. Falling solidly into the 'so bad it's good' category, this got quite a lot of interest during the weekend and was even sold to a fellow Retro Gamer forum member on Sunday afternoon.

I'm really pleased to get some positive comments about the obscure Japanese stuff I took, as in the past I've taken that kind of gear to events and nobody has seemed to appreciate it (or at least they haven't told me) so I'm quite chuffed and it made all that lugging TVs and boxes around seem a bit more worthwhile!

Later in the day I ran the event's Shoot Em Ups competition, which around a dozen people had entered. I imagine those people were expecting to play some fancy bullet hell shooter like Dodonpachi or Ikaruga, but instead I decided to go totally old-school and have them play River Raid on the Atari 2600 in the first round! The top four highest scorers then went into an elimination tournament, with the semi-finals played on bizarre Saturn puzzle/shmup Twinkle Star Sprites before going back to the beginning of gaming with the final, playing Space Wars on the Vectrex. The final was contested between Retro Gamer forumite Shaun Scott and hardcore gaming guru John Szczepaniak, with Shaun recovering a 4 point deficit to claim the title 10-9!

As the evening progressed and the quantity of beer drank by everyone increased, I got the chance to crank out a few tunes on Rock Band with Rob on the drums and Retro Gamer writer Andrew Fisher (AKA Merman) on the guitar. I attempted to show off by playing the bass AND sing at the same time, which had mixed results - Queens of the Stone Age tune "Go With the Flow" went pretty well, but Kiss classic "Detroit Rock City" was best described as messy. I do recommend you give it a try sometime though - it's not as easy as you may think!

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