After two blog posts highlighting events in the spring, how about some summer events? Originally I had different plans for this post, but as I alluded to in an update in early July, schedule conflicts amongst other factors led me to drop Defend the North Retro 2025. Whenever the “Retro” event was done because the main event couldn’t happen, or they intended to have it alongside the main event later in the year, I’m unsure. Even then, this is not the blogpost for the surprising lack of major FGC events in the northeast, particularly in the New York and New Jersey area. Maybe in the future I’ll make a blogpost that discusses my thoughts on that matter, but for now, we have other things to talk about.
Like conventions! The beginning of summer was a quiet one, as I had opted to skip Brooklyn Comic Con this year to see if the event would improve in time for 2026. According to a friend of mine that tables at some of the bigger events and various others across the US, it seems like the new venue it found itself at this year was an all-around improvement from where it was in 2024, with food being more easily accessible than the year prior. Thus, it is very likely that I’ll be attending Brooklyn Comic Con next June, as long as I can fit it within my schedule. There may be some other shakeups next year, but I’m waiting until this year is done and we have dates conformed for events next year before I begin plotting and building the schedule, just as I did for 2023 and 2024. The beginning of this year was packed in events to attend, and I’d like to find some new events that are more spread out and not piled on into the same month(s), although it’s inevitable given how many events I travel out to each year. One of the events in this blogpost did take place within one of the busier months this year, but I’ll get to that when I cover AnimeNYC in Part 4. For now, it’s time for my insight on the first event of this post.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Eternal Con was back from hiatus, ready to commence at the Mack Sports Complex. For those that missed the coverage from 2023, Eternal Con is a general pop culture event focusing on comics and popular long-standing American media franchises. It’s very much like Cradle Con in that sense, with many of the same kinds of vendors and artists on the show floor. This year however, the announcement that Eternal Con was returning was on very short notice, surprising many of the local artists that were contacted to table at the event (according to what I had heard at Cradle Con). All of this led to the event having one of its smallest Artist Alleys in years, filling only part of the second floor with obvious gaps between each booth. Its vendors area on the lower floor fared a bit better, but we’ll talk about it further as we dive into the event. Parking at the event was easy and attendance was just the right size. The entry fee and the accompanying badges were inexpensive purchases, which in this day and age is very welcome with prices for both attending events and purchasing goods from them climbing steadily over time (especially when taking into account outside factors).
Once you got your badge, it was time to head in, and proceeding through the row of auditorium doors led directly to the Artist’s Alley, which was divided into three sections: Left, Middle, and Right. The center section was by all accounts the “main” section and where most of the big artists tabled. It was also the only section to be completely filled with artists and their tables. Contrast the left and right sections of the Alley, which didn’t fill up completely even with the right side also doubling as a small auditorium for panels. Even if the Artist’s Alley was smaller than usual for this event, it was still about 20 or so artists to chat with and purchase goodies from at the end of the day. The big haul of commissions that this event brought in past years did not happen, but I still went home with four commissions total and some books from other vendors that caught my eye, including one from a vendor that I previously met at Garden State Anime Fest two months prior. The artist section was decent, though I believe if vendors were given greater time to prep for the event in advance, the greater of a chance we would have seen the whole floor filled with booths of authors and illustrators much like Cradle Con earlier in the year.
The lower floor of the event had all the vendors and special guests, and anyone who has gone to a comic or general pop culture event can likely guess what was being sold. It was, to keep it brief, a mixture of pretty much everything: Comics, movies, games, collectibles, etc. For me, it was nothing new, though I did browse it a fair bit throughout the day. One vendor dressed in doctor getup showed me a custom wind-based instrument that was designed to be easy to use, though since I was saving my funds for commissions (and two very big events the following month) I didn’t return later on to purchase one. One thing that did peak my curiosity was a statue of Simon Belmont from the Castlevania franchise, using his design from the not-so fondly remembered Wii fighter Castlevania Judgement. I was very tempted to grab it, but at 120 dollars it was too steep and was also being sold online for similar prices anyways. The very same booth with the statue also had a set of 2000’s anime DVD’s you could look through and I took some snaps of them for research post-event. Some big names in live action and voice acting were positioned along the back wall of the event’s vendors section, but I didn’t interact with them since I knew I would have had to spend further funds just for pictures with them.
The end of the event was, admittedly, very anticlimactic. Since everything closed down all at once at 5PM sharp, I pretty much had no choice but to say my goodbyes to the artists and bail from the event. In conclusion, I had an overall good time, but schedule conflicts with three other things that were happening that weekend made me much more exhausted than usual after leaving from EternalCon. In addition, the event had some growing pains to shed after skipping last year and not giving its vendors enough time in advance to prep. Lastly, the current venue is still not ideal for an event like this given the odd transitions between the two floors and how the panel rooms seemed out of sight from the rest of the event. And sadly, it seems as if there aren’t really any big convention spaces on Long Island that are of the same size and cost as the exposition complex Eternal Con has been stationed at since 2022. Thus, options are limited for how the convention can grow given those limitations. Still, it’s a really inexpensive event to attend and easy to slot into a schedule for a few hours, and at this rate I’m practically required to return next year given that I’m buddies with a fair number of other artists that attend and table at the event each year (and other local events in the area. Only time will tell where the event goes in the next few years.
Alright, it’s been long enough of a wait, it’s time to talk about none other than Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. You know it’s always one of my anticipated events as it’s nothing like any of the other events I put into my schedule each year. And given that retro games are one of my biggest interests, I could not ignore an event like this happening just a short drive away from my house. And this time, the event was celebrating its tenth anniversary since its first show in 2015.
Since the event was fundamentally the same as last year’s, I’m going to focus the coverage on what had changed as well as any new additions made to the event. Entering the building through the first floor, the vendors’ marketplace remained the busiest section of the floor with people setting up shop to sell all kinds of retro games, consoles, and merchandise. Unlike 2024, there was a much bigger effort to have an Artist’s Alley at the event! The back side of the marketplace had eight artist booths total, stationed into two squares of four artists each, and there were a few spread around the main font area of the marketplace as well. In total, I counted around twelve artist booths total, which is a major improvement from prior years where you could count the number of artist tables at the event on a single finger. As for the rest of the marketplace, everything was pretty par for the course: people selling retro games, game consoles, and official and homemade merchandise. The rest of the marketplace area was home to an Indie NES Games exhibit and the return of Mario Kart Double Dash!! 16-player tournaments. And well, to say the Mario Kart Double Dash tournaments were popular would be an understatement. People _crowded_ around the booth to watch 8 duos team up and race each other across four Nintendo GameCubes and four widescreen TV’s. It truly is the chance of a lifetime, given how rare and expensive it would be just to do a similar setup at one’s own home. Beyond that was the Hangar Arcade stocked full of pinball machines, arcade rhythm games, and candy cabinets filled with fighting games and SHMUPs. No matter what time of the day it was, this section was always busy with players playing across the many machines that were laid out.
Moving into the gaming areas on the first floor, the four quadrants all returned: Console Freeplay, PC Freeplay, Tournaments, and the Museum. The Console Freeplay is very self-explanatory, featuring a large number of playable titles on consoles of several different eras and categorized into different “corners” based on genre. Of interest in this section was a computer with a whole Forza Motorsport arcade racing controller hooked up and used to play Sega’s Indy 500: it had a racing car seat, a gear shift lever, and gas and brake pedals alongside the usual steering wheel. I can only imagine what price point this would fetch for in today’s money… or even in late 90’s or early 2000’s money that. The signature attraction of the freeplay section, and to coincide with its 40th anniversary, was an exhibit on the history of the Nintendo Entertainment System. It would end with a look on early emulation efforts and homebrew scenes and how they would evolve into the modern day, including a Windows PC running the 1997 NES emulator “NESticle” that visitors could play. Walking over into the neighboring PC gaming section, the lineup featured a lot of returning classics from last year playable on real hardware or a close approximation of it. Turns out the NES was not the only system celebrating its anniversary, as the fabled Windows 95 turned 30 this year. For this special occasion, two Windows 95 computers were set up for free browsing. Visitors could pick one of the games on the desktop to boot into, or even kick back and doodle in good ol’ Microsoft Paint. Another computer present in the section could boot into an archive of the World Wide Web as of the year 2000 and included a listing of archived websites to load into to ease the process of having to memorize a bunch of different websites that existed at the time. What caught my interest the most in the PC Gaming section was a Compaq laptop with a monochrome screen running Chip’s Challenge, though sadly it would be removed from the section partway through the day as it was difficult to keep running at all times due to its age.
The Museum returned in full force from the year prior, with many of the same rare and exotic consoles and imports from over the years. A few systems were rotated out, but the main lineup had all of the same highlights as 2024 and allowed attendees to demo some hardware that either never caught on or went unreleased in the USA. British microcomputers, Japanese monitors and TV sets (and even karaoke sets!) with consoles built in, it was all here. Admittedly, the “PC Museum” component of the Museum, which housed various gaming computers of the 80’s and 90’s, could have been configured a bit more neatly but it was still filled with a lot of cool setups you don’t see much elsewhere. And last but not least was the Tournaments, returning along with the High Score Challenge that now resided inside the Console Freeplay. This was probably the one part of the event that felt like it didn’t fully deliver—there were less tournaments compared to prior years so the tournaments could last more hours into the day. The overall lineup, while solid overhaul and having some popular choices for games in various genres, didn’t feel like it rose to the heights of prior years. A common genre to see in tournaments, fighting games, was seldom non-present with only three games: Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Smash Remix, and the infamous Shaq Fu. All of the modern fighting games that appeared at 2023 and 2024’s events were phased out entirely. Instead, the event’s tournaments mostly consisted of sports titles: Tecmo Super Bowl, NHL ‘94, NBA Jam, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4. The other tournaments were made up of puzzle games (Puyo Puyo Tetris and Super Puzzle Fighter II) and competitive Pokemon Generation 3, the latter of which seemingly ate up most of the tournament scheduling. While this is only speculation on my part, I believe this sudden departure from previous events’ tournament areas was because of the lack of people submitting tournaments to the event and the absence of streaming equipment to livestream, record, and archive the tournaments. The roster of games in the High Score Challenge was a bit more varied in genre, and with its fair share of unexpected presences at the show. It wasn’t flawless, and there were some games that maybe would have fit better in the tournaments area, but overall it was a good selection of games to try and set the best records on at the event. The tournaments section also served as the new home of the Pokélab, allowing for players of retro Pokemon titles up to Generation 5 to receive long-gone legendaries and mythicals and add them to their cartridges.
The second floor got a few changes since the year prior. The Timeline exhibit, serving as a display of the chronological history of consoles and handhelds released in the Americas, returned with mostly the same lineup. I believe a game or two did get added, but I did not analyze the Timeline in-depth to compare it to last year. Many of the consoles were now hooked up with flash carts to allow for easier swapping out of games during the event, which made it better to demonstrate the kinds of games a console was capable of pushing with technology at the time. Next to the Timeline exhibit was the Arcade Age Exhibit, featuring American arcade cabinets in a mix of 80’s and 90’s machines set to free play. Many of the machines that were absent at least years event returned, including some very crucial titles in America’s arcade history that were absent from last year’s show. Would you believe me when I said that last year, there was no original Pac-Man machine? Anyways, the rest of the second floor was made up of special guests relocated upstairs from the first floor Marketplace, a section devoted to the game company Retroware in place of last year’s indie gaming section, and the new home of Panel Room 2. I will admit, going from a big and well-developed indie section (especially one that featured one of my childhood gaming idols) to a section completely dominated by one company felt like a step down from the last year. The relocation of the panel room and special guests, on the other hand, were decisions for the better, I’d say. Especially to get them away from the huge crowds and overall chaos of the marketplace on the lower floors. There were other guests that attended the event for panels, including some very wild and interesting subjects. Among the list of panels that took place in the big auditorium and the second floor’s Panel Room 2 were subjects like “What is retro game streaming like?” or “Tell me about some British microcomputer mascots”. How about “Give me the best Neo Geo games to play”, “How is designing new Atari 2600 like?” And of course I couldn’t forget “How does print media play a part in game preservation?”. There were lots of good panels here across the three days of LIRetro, but I only really had time for two of them due to everything else that was happening at the event.
The third floor, the last big section of the event, was the “Floor of Oddities”. Here, you could find various miscellaneous LCD handhelds, niche and gimmicky platforms like LJN’s VideoArt, Tiger’s Game Com, and Mattel’s Hyperscan, along with obscure accessories and setups such as two Sega Genesis “Tower of Powers” linked for Doom 32x Resurrection multiplayer. It was a great showcase of when hardware developers tried to get creative and innovative with their products, and probably my first time ever being able to pick up and try them out in person. The Hall of Oddities did have some small room for improvement—one of the tables was stashed with some leftover hardware that was not fully set up and/or operational. You could still read and learn about the histories of each piece of tech, so there was that, even if these consoles/handhelds didn’t get to sit on a table by their lonesome, waiting to be discovered. Aside from the Floor of Oddities, all that’s really left to talk about is the cosplays and some smaller loose ends. I didn’t really pay attention to the cosplay at this event all that much, but there was a sizable number of them across the two days that I attended. I didn’t really take many cosplay shots at the event, but I wanted to give special shout outs to a duo of cosplayers that cosplayed as Beat and Gum from Jet Set Radio Future for repping one of my personal favorite Sega franchises and one that is generally overshadowed by other, bigger franchises. While not a full-on cosplay, one person came to the event and was a puppeteer for a giant two-dimensional Mother Brain cutout on the second floor, complete with LED eyes, sounds, and confetti to simulate drool. It was quite the insane sight, let me tell ya, and something that was pretty much impossible to miss. Lastly, the main auditorium featured two musical guests: Lacey Johnson on Friday, and Super Thrash Bros on Saturday. The two performances marked the end of each day’s roster of activities, and everything else would find closure around that time.
Unlike prior years where the market place closed at 7 PM and the gaming sections at 10 PM, everything in the event would be shut down by 9 PM. Consoles were being turned off, CRT’s were being powered down, and the marketplace booths were being tarped up until the next day. As for me, I wrapped up the way these convention coverages usually end, bidding farewell to the people I have known for years that were helping run the event, and exited through the front doors. Overall, the improvements to the show were very welcome and LI Retro remains one of the premier destinations for retro gaming enthusiasts year by year. It is, however, an event that is still limited in some way by its venue choice. The Cradle of Aviation, as much as I love it, has a very irregular layout where it’s hard to accidentally walk into certain sections of the event. Its size is able to accommodate for pretty much everything the event needs at this point in time and serves as part of the show’s current identity. However, I wonder if the show will grow to such a size that it will need to abandon the Cradle and look elsewhere. And given that this is Long Island, options are limited.
And that’s pretty much all I got for you all today. Sorry that this post took me two months to write; I ended up with a lot of back to back projects following the end of AnimeNYC that all needed my attention, forcing me to put this blog entry aside for most of the rest of the month as well as September and October. I intend to do something different with Part 4, which will cover AnimeNYC and NYCC, to get back on schedule with these blog entries. And speaking of the blog entries, I originally intended to end the year of events with DerpyCon this weekend, but since I was in the mood to attend an extra event after not being able to make it out to Defend the North, I am currently looking into adding one more event to the schedule for mid-November. In addition, a surprising sight came to my eyes not long after I arrived at Long Island Retro Gaming Expo this year:
…The Festival of Games? Is it really and truly back for 2025…?
