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Lines of brightly costumed gaming fans wrapped around the side of the Oncenter’s Nicholas J. Pirro Convention Center this weekend to enter the 10th annual RetroGameCon. The convention brought tabletop, card and video game enthusiasts from across the world together in Syracuse for a two-day celebration of pop culture.

In the age of discless consoles and virtual reality headsets, throwback games like the ones RetroGameCon honors might seem out of style. But John Riggs, a gaming YouTuber who appeared at the event as a special guest, observed that the community was alive and thriving.

“RetroGameCon is a great thing and it brings people together,” Riggs said. “I’ve talked to people who are coming in from Pennsylvania, coming in from Ohio, I spoke to someone who came in from the Netherlands. Just to hang out in Syracuse for a weekend and enjoy the camaraderie.”

Neopets and TCGPlayer sponsored the convention, which featured a variety of vendors, guests, events, contests and panels. It ran from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. this weekend. Major events included a “Rocket League” High School Invitational, a “Modern Warfare 2” tournament with a $1,000 prize pool and Q&A panels with industry figures like voice actor Nolan North.

Gaming equipment and memorabilia filled the convention floor, and visitors could play vintage games on TVs ranging from boxy relics to top-of-the-line flatscreens.

Arcade cabinets lined the back wall, next to a pop-up booth designed to look like a 1970s living room, complete with a shag rug and wood-paneled walls. A giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man loomed over the main hall above the tabletop gaming section.

Booths featuring everything from video game gear to vintage VHS tapes surrounded the center of the convention floor. Clarissa Wilbanks, who has attended the festival for years, sold pins, prints and stickers of her artwork. Wilbanks is a native of Watertown, NY, which makes the trip to RetroGameCon an easy one.

Though Wilbanks rarely does conventions and mainly sells her work online, she returns to RetroGameCon each year because of its convenient upstate location and consistently high turnout. Known online as Toku Arts, her work has reached a wide audience on social media for its lighthearted depiction of animals and other creatures in hectic situations — particularly frogs.

“My motto is ‘inappropriately chaotic,’ so basically anything that comes to my mind,” Wilbanks said. “Just a little bit of everything. Mostly frogs. They’re fun. They’re cursed in a little bit of a way. You can do so much with a frog.”

Teddy Hudson | Assistant Copy Editor

The 10th annual RetroGameCon focuses on games of all kinds. From video game memorabilia to vintage consoles and competitions, the convention has something for everyone.
Teddy Hudson | Assistant Copy Editor

Some exhibitors brought rare games for attendees to play at themed booths. John Denman hosted a high-score competition on “Star Fox: Super Weekend” with his colleagues. Only an estimated 2,000 of “Super Weekend” were ever produced. They were distributed over one weekend in 1993 for “Star Fox” marketing events, and only sold for a limited time through Nintendo Power magazine afterward. The actual competition at RetroGameCon was played on a replica cartridge to avoid damage to the original, which was on display.

The “Super Weekend” competition at RetroGameCon, now in its fourth year, offered a playable Super Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge of “Star Fox 2” to the winner. “Star Fox 2” was never released on the SNES, making the prize a rare gaming experience. The runner-up received the “Super Weekend” replica copy.

“We had some people that just showed up for the first time and cleaned house,” Denman said. “I look forward to this every October.”

In addition to big-name games like “Star Fox,” RetroGameCon hosted a selection of independent games, some created by local developers. The convention’s Game Dev Showcase, sponsored by SUNY Polytechnic Institute, showed off projects created by independent developers from upstate New York and beyond.

To be featured in the showcase, developers participated in a 48-hour Game Jam between Sept. 29 and Oct. 1, where teams of up to four developers collaborated to make a game in less than two days. Eight of the final products, two of which SUNY Poly students worked on, hosted demos at the convention.

Ibrahim Yucel, an associate professor of interactive media and game design at SUNY Poly, designed the program to give students and independent developers a chance to show off their work to thousands of other passionate gamers. He hoped his students used their love of games to expand the boundaries of digital media beyond traditional games.

“We try to emphasize that we’re not just in video games,” Yucel said. “We try to teach our students about gamification and how we can use game-like thinking in fields such as healthcare, advertising and all sorts of education.”

Brad Taylor, a gaming and technology specialist at Upstate Golisano Children’s Hospital, also uses video games to impact the healthcare field. Taylor’s position is funded by a grant from Child’s Play, a charity that provides video game technology to hospitals, and involves playing games with patients and maintaining gaming equipment for the hospital.

A few months after starting at Upstate Golisano, Taylor became involved with Extra Life, a charity that encourages gamers to participate in fundraising events for Children’s Miracle Network Hospital. Extra Life had a booth at the convention where they offered wristbands, Pokémon cards and other items for donors. They ran raffles throughout the day.

“Games are universal. They’re playing at home, it’s the same one we have,” Taylor said. “So it’s a good way to normalize the state of the hospital and also be a distraction. There are a lot of therapeutic purposes for it. People in long-term stay, so relieving boredom.”

Beyond the world of video games, RetroGameCon hosted fans of tabletop and card games. Play the Game Read the Story, a local game store, provided a free library of board games to play and hosted sessions of games like “Dungeons and Dragons” and “Magic: The Gathering” at the convention.

Jason Engle, the events coordinator for Play the Game Read the Story, provided the games in the free library. Engle said board and tabletop games were important to include in the event because they provide a sense of community and face-to-face social interaction that online gaming often lacks.

“The industry has, since the ‘90s, been putting out better and better content, almost a renaissance for board games. There’s something for everybody, there’s so much variety,” Engle said. “When you have a board game, and you’re in front of someone else, there’s an inherent social contract. There’s a certain level of politeness.”

Published on October 8, 2023 at 10:24 pm