2024 Long Island Retro Gaming Expo: introduction, guests, mishaps, panels August 21, 2024

Posted by Mike C. in Audio, Aviation, Books, Computer, Education, Game Shows, History, Internet, Media, Personal, Photography, Podcast, Radio, Technology, Travel, Video, Video Games.
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Feel free to skip ahead to the second post (touring the expo) or third post (conclusion and pickups).

INTRODUCTION
2024 was my sixth year at Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, held in the Cradle of Aviation Museum, on the right end of Museum Row in East Garden City. This was also the first year that Flagstar bank had naming rights. That’s evident in the first photo below, taken as my mom pulled off Charles Lindbergh Boulevard at 9:45 AM on Saturday, August 10.

LI Retro, the expo’s shorthand, launched Friday, August 9, at 4PM, but since the expansion to three days (or 2 1/2) in 2022, I’ve forgone the Friday leg.

Tickets went on sale all the way back at the end of December and I was quick to secure my weekend badge, even though it would be months before attendees even knew who the guests would be.

Once announced, Long Island Retro Gaming Expo’s 2024 guest list was a mix of mainstays, newcomers, and returnees. Naturally, author/publisher Leonard Herman, Mark Baer (middle child of videogame pioneer Ralph Baer), Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation) and Jeremy Parish (Retronauts, Limited Run Games) would be there. G Gracin (G to the Next Level) returned for the second year in a row, this time with Greg Sewart (Generation 16). Pat Contri and Ian Ferguson were back for their fourth consecutive LI Retro. (There was a gap between their first and second years due to COVID postponements in 2020 and ’21.) The Immortal John Hancock was back for the first time since 2018. (I met Lenny Herman through the panel he and John co-hosted that year.) And it was the second appearance of Coury Carlson and Marc “Try4ce (‘triforce‘)” Duddleson of My Life in Gaming, having first appeared in 2019.

If you remember my disappointment last year when spotting Clint Basinger (LGR) walking through the vendor marketplace after the expo while editing photos, I was pleased to see he was a guest this year!

Two other notable guests were Warren Davis, the creator of Q*Bert “and other classic video arcade games” (as his book title notes), and legendary Nintendo marketer Gail Tilden. I was not able to attend Warren’s Saturday evening panel, though I met him at his table in the morning as you’ll see in that portion of this post. Gail had a free-form panel on Saturday evening and an interview panel on Sunday, the latter of which I attended.

Ahead of Saturday morning, I packed a printout of my badge retrieval code, my Canon EOS R7 with RF-S 18-150mm lens and Speedlite 430EX II, TASCAM DR-05X, and stenographer pad with pen. (I never used those last two.) I was anxious that my compulsive nature would lead to as many photos as last year. The bad news is I was right. The good news is the total over three cameras (you’ll read the why of that quantity later in the post) was 697 photos. This time, however, 617 were chosen to spread out over three blog posts, not counting scans or photos taken after Sunday.

Since last year’s Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, I have begun streaming on Twitch at least four days a week. Gaming is the channel’s main focus with occasional “media production” streams where I work on radio shows or edit photos from events like this. I spent a whole week editing photos in April after returning from Smooth Jazz for Scholars. While the initial plan was to do the expo photo editing off stream and go on hiatus until I was finished, I opted instead for occasional streams to report on my editing progress and show all games and merchandise I picked up. Thanks to a quicker editing process, only two of those streams were required before returning to gaming. The first stream – Wednesday, August 14 – dovetailed into saving smaller versions of watermarked photos (“© Mike Chimeri” on the lower left) edited that day. And with only 96 photos left to edit going into Saturday, August 17, that became the sole photo editing stream.

ARRIVING AT THE MUSEUM
Several paragraphs ago, I said I arrived at the Flagstar Cradle of Aviation Museum at 9:45 AM Saturday. After my mom dropped me off in the parking lot to the left of the roundabout, I took an establishing shot of the museum, unaware that my folded badge code printout was visible in the bottom left. So, I took another shot Sunday morning:

The photos in this gallery are from Saturday.

On the way to the guest table area, I ran into Timothy (a.k.a. Sho), a fellow My Life in Gaming fan. We met in person in 2019 and I had to get a selfie this time:

GUEST TABLE PHOTOS

Photos in this section were taken Saturday and Sunday. You can tell which day by what we’re wearing.

Warren Davis
Warren and I didn’t talk much – so, no magic tricks – but I introduced myself and gladly bought a copy of Creating Q*bert for him to sign. I told him on Sunday that I bought a copy of Q*bert’s NES port in his honor. He thanked me for that. (More on pickups in the third post.)

Clint Basinger (LGR)
It was honor to meet Clint in person. As I told him, I’ve been a fan of LGR for years, and that we both have the distinction of reading quotes in Gaming Historian videos. (I was in The Story of Link’s Awakening, per a blog post.) We commiserated over Norman Caruso’s April announcement that he was stepping back from pursuing his YouTube channel full time (but not retiring). (Norm went out in style with his magnum opus, The Story of The Oregon Trail, a video years in the making.) I told Clint that I unknowingly photographed him last year and thought about printing a copy for him to sign, but opted not to.

8/23 UPDATE: Today, that future video became a present video.

Thinking Clint would be at the expo on Sunday, as well, I brought my PlayStation 3 copy of Duke Nukem Forever to sign. Alas, he had left after Saturday.

A recent LGR video made me think of my psychologist of 27 years, known to patients like me as Brad. In the mid ’90s, Brad had an Acer Aspire. If I remember correctly, it was the same color as Clint’s. (Brad retired in 2018 and I’ve had another therapist since 2019.)

9/6 UPDATE: Clint went into greater detail about LI Retro in the vlog below.

The Immortal John Hancock
I reacquainted myself with John on Saturday – fresh from Retrocon in São Paulo, Brazil! (John’s Retrocon vlog) – and proudly bought the Genesis port of his original game, Block ‘Em Sock ‘Em, seen in the second photo.

Check out John’s LI Retro vlog. He saw exhibits that I missed, and thus won’t be seen in my second post.

Give Adam Koralik a look, too.

Pat Contri and Ian Ferguson
I was not a fan of either Pat or Ian prior to their LI Retro debut in 2019, but I got to know Ian and his wife Vani at their Luna Video Games table, placed between the My Life in Gaming table and Pat’s table. I worked up the courage to meet Pat, buy Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library and all DVD volumes of early episodes of Pat the NES Punk. That led to an interest in Flea Market Madness and The Video Game Years, and The CU (Completely Unnecessary Podcast). I was even hyped for Pat’s next Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the SNES Library. I wrote reviews for both guides after reading them later in 2019 (NES, SNES).

So, of course, I was thrilled to see them again this year, and ask a question for the third year in a row at their panel/podcast recording.

9/2 UPDATE: The latest Flea Market Madness video is embedded below photos of the CU Podcast panel.

G Gracin and Greg Sewart didn’t have a table, but did have a Saturday panel. (Check the “Panels” section of this post for photos.) I posed with them in this photo on Sunday.

I also got the Sonic selfie treatment, in digital form…

…and in thermal print form. I scanned that (left) and used Photoshop’s photo restoration filter to limit the vertical banding (right).

G posted a few YouTube Shorts at LI Retro:

[The first short was removed in 2025.]

There really is so much to see at Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. John Hancock and G saw things that I missed.

I really liked Greg Sewart’s Ridge Racer series retrospective:

I’ve had Ridge Racer 7 since I bought a slim PS3 back in 2018. The video made me seek out Ridge Racer 6 for Xbox 360 when scouring the marketplace at the end of each day.

Since you saw Daniel and Alex Greenberg (Winterion Game Studios) in Pat and Ian’s photo gallery, here is a photo Alex took of Daniel and me after Pat’s CU Podcast Live panel.

Let’s skip ahead one table to the My Life in Gaming duo of Coury Carlson and Mark “Try4ce” Duddleson:

I spent a lot of down time at the MLiG and Leonard Herman tables (see below). Coury and I talked about photography, while Try and I talked about Backloggery‘s recent 17th anniversary celebration, my multiple raids to the Backloggery Twitch channel, and how I rightly kept dejitter off on my Analogue Nt Mini Noir. Try neglected to do that in the MLiG review of the console back in 2020. (Source: Comment to Analogue Reddit post.) Having dejitter off allowed me to connect my Monoprice VGA-to-composite/S-Video adapter, run a composite cable to my sister’s old Durabrand DWT1304 CRT TV (a Funai-manufactured TV sold by Walmart), and play NES Zapper games in my last two Twitch streams before LI Retro.

9/2 UPDATE: Coury and Try ended August with a new My Life in Gaming video: the second in their Multi-Games Compilations series. It’s worth watching for Try’s LI Retro t-shirt alone.

Leonard Herman

We round out this segment with the Father of Videogame History, Leonard Herman, joined by Patrick Wong and Mark Baer (middle child of videogame pioneer Ralph Baer).

I spelled video game as one word because that’s how Ralph Baer spelled it and how Lenny spells it.

Leaving the guest tables behind, it’s panel time!

PANELS

Saturday Panel 1, 11AM-12PM
Panel Room 2
Mark Baer and Leonard Herman
Ralph Baer: His Creative Life in Electronic, Videogames and More

This strayed close to the 2023 presentation, which was the last panel I attended. So, I changed my photographic approach. Before the photos, here are the videos shown during the panel:

Before the other panels, a diversion.

Mishaps

It was in between the Ralph Baer panel and the CU Podcast panel that I accidentally knocked my camera off a food court table, breaking my Canon EOS R7’s RF-S 18-150mm lens. The ring attachment stayed on, but the rest of the lens broke off.

It was irrecoverable. The only solution was to buy a replacement lens once I got home, and with a 5-year lens accident warranty. I’m covered if history repeats itself, God forbid.

The lens and UV filter arrived Wednesday morning and a test photo was successful.

I took the rest of Saturday’s photos on my iPhone 13 Pro. Then, Sunday, I shot in RAW for the first time on my Nikon D5500 with a Nikkor 18-300mm lens.

Unfortunately, Sunday had another problem. Patrick Wong from Leonard Herman’s table prepped to take a photo of me with Pat Contri and Ian Ferguson. Ian sprained his ankle and was only at LI Retro that day. After I took the photo of Pat and Ian together, I foolishly chose to take a photo with them to the right of Pat’s table. Ian’s cup of coffee was perched on the right end of that table. As I turned to get into position for the photo, Ian warned “watch the backpack!” The warning was in vein. My bulky backpack knocked the cup over and it spilled on the upper right end of the table. The photo op was aborted, paper towels were summoned, and adjacent merchandise was checked for damage. As all that happened, I felt tremendous guilt and shame. I thought I’d become persona non grata to both of them, and God forbid, would be sued. Thankfully, none of that was true. No merch was damaged, the spill was quickly disposed of, and Pat used hand sanitizer to further clean the affected area. Then, we retreated to a safe spot away from the table for our photo op. Pat and Ian were all smiles in the photo while I was too drained to fully smile. They both assured me everything was fine and not to worry. That’s when I headed to the main theatre for the Gail Force panel.

After that panel, LI Retro staff member Ryan Shapiro gifted me with an expo backpack that contained a pin, sticker, 2024 program, and Asteroids-themed t-shirt. I’ll save the contents photo for the third post, but I’ll show the backpack here, too.

Thank you very much, Ryan.

Now, back to Saturday’s panels.

Saturday, 12:30-1:30 PM
Main Theatre
Pat Contri with Frank Cifaldi (filling in for Ian Ferguson)
CU Podcast Live!

The topic was the sudden end to GameStop’s Game Informer magazine, and the bizarre public relations statement accompanying its demise. (Reactions were compiled in this Resetera thread.)

When the theatre was opened to Q&A, only one person had an Amico-related question. Mine focused on Pat’s Wednesday Twitch streams:

Aside from the podcasts, you’re also on Twitch every Wednesday, watching retro commercials. How did you- What made you decide to go that route instead of streaming games?

Pat responded that it spun off from his NES Charity Marathon (origin of the “Buh-lack Box!” catchphrase), and that he felt relaxed and nostalgic watching things from the past. The TV commercials or promos allow him to recall moments from his past. That led to a discussion about the significance of preserving these moments in the same way video game media is preserved. I chimed in with radio airchecks as an example, but I might not have been heard.

As of publication, the podcast is not up in audio or segmented video form. There is, however, Flea Market Madness Volume 49, recorded on Father’s Day (June 16). It features the other Frank, as seen in the thumbnail.

3:51 PM UPDATE: There is audio of the Game Informer discussion, but not the Q&A, starting at the 1:17:25 mark of the latest podcast.

10/28 UPDATE: Video of Pat and Frank’s discussion went up six days after this post was published (August 27).

Saturday, 2PM-3PM
Panel Room 2
G Gracin and Greg Sewart
Growing Up Sega: A Trip Down Sega’s Console Timeline

After browsing and buying from the vendor marketplace, I went home.

I returned a little closer to 10AM on Sunday morning. I still had to wait in line for a bag check; I didn’t mind that.

In lieu of a panel I had in mind at 11AM, I re-photographed areas that were blurry on Saturday, took photos of vendors I missed on Saturday, then toured the exhibits on all three floors. Look for those in the second post.

Sunday, 12:30-1:30 PM
Main Theatre
Gail Tilden, interviewed by Jeremy Parish (Retronauts, Limited Run Games) and Lucas Thomas (Nintendo Force magazine founder)
Gail Force: An Intimate Interview with a Nintendo Legend

The interview initially covered Gail’s involvement in the Nintendo Entertaintment System’s North American launch, beginning in the New York Metro Area in October 1985. Among the locations chosen to carry the NES were Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream. At some events, attendees could play Baseball against either New York Mets pitcher Ron Darling or center fielder Mookie Wilson.

Then, the topic switched to her tenure with Nintendo Power magazine. Lucas asked the audience to give a “whoo!” when their first issue was displayed on the projection screen above them.

Watch the video to see if I misremembered anything. Then, see the photos that I kept bending over to take.

Then, it was quickly off to Panel Room 2 for my last panel of the weekend.

Sunday, 2PM-3PM
Panel Room 2
Leonard Herman
The History of the History of Videogames

This was the place to be: a celebration of a man who blazed the trail for videogame history. 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of the original Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Videogames.

Ahra wanted a photo with Lenny beforehand:

Then came a prologue from John Hancock:

Well said, John.

The stage is yours, Leonard.

Upon closing, Lenny opened the floor to Q&A:

The funniest question and answer came via Mark Baer:

LENNY: Yes, sir.
MARK: Do you have a favorite historical figure in videogame history, by any chance?
LENNY: Yeah. Nolan Bushnell.
[audience laughs]
If anyone doesn’t know, that’s Ralph Baer’s son. That’s his son, Mark. He’s a troublemaker.
MARK: You could answer honestly.

After a few more questions, the panel ended with a round of applause.

I had to get a photo of Leonard Herman, Frank Cifaldi, and John Hancock:

Ian Ferguson dropped by after the panel to say hello:

That is the end of post one. Head to post two for a tour of the marketplace and exhibits. Post three features a conclusion, pickups photos, and a postscript with post-expo pickups.