2025 Long Island Retro Gaming Expo recap: conclusion and pickups August 21, 2025

Posted by Mike C. in Aviation, Education, Magazine, Media, Personal, Photography, TV, Video, Video Games.
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If you haven’t seen them yet, read part one here and part two here.

CONCLUSION
With Leonard Herman’s panel complete, I said my goodbyes. On my way outside to wait for my Lyft ride home, I noticed a vendor that had a copy of David Crane‘s Pitfall! for the Atari 2600. Then, as you’ll see in the pickups section, I did something I’d never done in all my years attending Long Island Retro Gaming Expo at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Uniondale.

This was the last photo I took before packing up my Canon EOS R7 (with RF-S 18-150mm lens and Speedlite 430EX II attached):

PICKUPS
As I walked around the vendor marketplace Sunday, I noticed this replica Pan Am plane in the window of the museum gift shop. Finally, after seven years, moments before going home, I stepped inside to buy that plane (seen here on Amazon).

The clerk told me his grandfather flew that model plane as a pilot for Pan Am.

My LI Retro program and badge, front and back:

Two vendor cards (only one side of the first):

Guest merchandise:

Video games:

1 for Nintendo 64 (on Saturday):

• Superman: The New Superman Adventures (a.k.a. Superman 64)

1 for Sega Genesis (on Saturday):

• Home Alone

1 for Super Famicom (on Sunday):

• Super Donkey Kong (Donkey Kong Country outside Japan)

5 for Super Nintendo (1 Saturday, 4 Sunday):

• Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball
• The Lost Vikings
• Super Off Road
• Super Off Road: The Baja
• Wing Commander

5 for Atari VCS/2600 (4 Saturday, 1 Sunday):

• Combat
• Donkey Kong (programmed by Garry Kitchen)
• Ghostbusters (programmed by Dan Kitchen)
• E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial
• Pitfall! (“Conceived and designed by David Crane for use with the Atari Video Computer System.”)

And by coincidence, I got a whopping 14 NES games for its 40th anniversary (6 Saturday, 8 Sunday):

• Bases Loaded II: The Second Season
• Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II (Yes, that’s Fabio on the cover)
• Jack Nicklaus’ Greatest 18 Holes of Major Championship Golf
• Mad Max
• MagMax
• Metal Gear
• Monster Party
• Ms. Pac-Man (Tengen) (I bought the licensed Namco release in 2023)
• Pac-Man (Tengen, Licensed) (I’ve had the unlicensed version since I was a kid)
• Pac-Man (Namco)
• P.O.W.: Prisoners of War
• Shadowgate
• Volleyball
• Whomp ‘Em

Whomp ‘Em was my most expensive game of the weekend, going for $60. Counting the fried ravioli (and Sprite) I ordered from a food truck Sunday afternoon, I only went $30 over my $370 cash budget. (I bought the Pan Am plane with my credit card.)

Volleyball is my latest NES Black Box game pickup. There were 30 Black Box games released, 17 at launch, then 10, and 3 more. Alphabetically, Volleyball was the 30th. I have 20 of the 30: 11 of the first 17, 6 of the next 10, and all of the last 3.

THE END
Thank you, as always, for taking this photographic journey through Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. I seem to say this all the time, but working on recap blog posts is truly a labor of love. So much work goes into them: editing the photos, choosing which ones to watermark for inclusion in these posts, making lower resolution equivalents for the blog and other social media, uploading the photos into each blog post draft, rearranging the photos in certain galleries, writing, link aggregation, coming up with SEO summaries (I forgot to make one for this post), publication, and social media promotion.

Like with Smooth Jazz for Scholars, I initially streamed the photo editing process on my Twitch channel (after showing all my pickups). I finished the “job” off-stream after Friday afternoon. I sacrificed many hours, and either truncated my treadmill runs (42 minutes instead of 70) or didn’t run at all. It was for the art. I hope you, the reader, are satisfied with the end results.

See you again next year.