The Brookfield Sheraton is jammed today with thousands of gamers and almost as many video game systems, pinball machines and arcade cabinets rattling with the pings and ker-pows of joy. It’s truly a sight to behold. A morning rain and a brief power outage threatened to dampen the mood, but a few curious souls gravitated toward the board game demonstrations (“No power required here!”) until We Energies had finished re-routing enough juice to meet the demands of approximately 13,000 8-bit microprocessors. The hotel is a fever dream of free arcade gaming, Quake 1 LAN games, stationary bicycles that double as game controllers and more, more, more.
We snapped a few shots of the right proper Classic Gaming & Computing Museum, part of the Midwest Gaming Classic, which runs through Sunday.
TRS-80 with cassette tape drive (late 1970s)
RCA Studio II console (1977)
ColecoVision (1982)
Macintosh SE (1987)
Commodore PET (1977)
Atari scratch-off games, buttons and badges
Atari 5200 (1982) and ads with Pac-Man
“Hello World!” programmed via BASIC
Compaq Portable (1983)
Compaq Portable PC Ms. Pac-Man screen
IBM 5150
