Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • Page 253

Chicago Tribune, Thursday, August 17, 2000 Section 5 5 Tempo Old video games don't die, they turn up at the Classic Gaming Expo 2000 gone for good," Backiel says. 'That's just wrong." Interestingly not all of the games at the expo are old. Keith Robinson, who worked on the Mattel research and development team that created Intellivision, recently purchased back the rights to the system and now publishes new games for Intellivision, Atari 2600 and ColecoVision. This year he created three new cartridges. Steamroller for ColecoVision, and Seabattle and Swordfight for the 2600.

But Robinson is not the only person creating new games for these old systems. A long line formed in front of two or three booths when word circulated that they also had new games. Walking around the expo floor was highly reminiscent of the early '80s, when Atari ruled the gaming world. While there was an occasional Nintendo or Sega game on display at a few booths, Atari dominated the show. There were booths with stacks of Lynx, Atari's short-lived handheld game system.

Jaguar, Atari's final game console, also was well-represented. The only PlayStation product to be found, on the other hand, was a collection of classic Intellivision games (on a CD-ROM) released by Activision last year According to Robinson, Acthnsion has sold more than 125,000 copies of that collection. Accepting that old games still have a following, the next question is why people would want to play old games with doodle-like graphics when the newer games have nearly realistic-looking artwork. "It's a combination of the older games being simple to play and the new games giving you too much to know," says show organizer Hardie "It's also that playing the games lets you relive your childhood." Michael Mize, a space shuttle technician who flew in from Cocoa, agrees. "With the old games, you start playing and maybe the graphics aren't as good, but the play is there.

With these new games, you get great-looking art but the game play is not necessarily replicated." It fh; Dy Steven Kent Special to the Tribune I'l "HI he Atari 2600 and ColecoVision video game consoles I might have disappeared from store shelves in the mid-'80s, but the systems themselves live on. I At least they live on at Classic Gaming Expo 2000 djm (CGE), a Las Vegas trade show entirely dedicated to preserving the history of video games. This is a show; held late last month, in which hundreds of people get together to buy games, swap games and talk games. This expo is not as notable for the number of people who attend it as it is for the passion of the community it attracts. It is not a huge multimillion-dollar show like the Electronic Entertainment Expo or COMDEX.

While those shows are staged and financed by huge corporations, this one is organized by John Hardie, a down-to-earth kind of guy who works for Bell Atlantic New York, and his partner, Sean Kelly, who owns a Chicago-area convenience store. But the expo is a pure experience compared to the glitzy world of COMDEX. Bigger shows are held in the Las Vegas Convention Center or in the huge hotels along the strip. This was held in a downtown Las Vegas hotel called The Plaza, the Walter Day, author of the "Video Game and Pinball Book of World Records," and Billy Mitchell, dubbed "Video Game Player of the Century" by Namco, the company that created Pac-Man, hand out awards at an Expo banquet mj IviM if hM Hi jS SIS kind of place people go to for wedding receptions, not heavyweight title fights. Both Kelly and Hardie are collectors themselves.

"I have over 35,000 game cartridges in my collection," says Kelly, in his typically understated, non-braggadocio way. "C'mon, Sean. There aren't 35,000 different games out there," challenges Al Backiel, a programmer and avid collector More than anything else, you see a genuine sense of community among those in attendance. Backiel is not trying to embarrass Kelly by challenging him; they're clearly friends. "There are lots of repeats," Kelly confesses.

"I mainly collect Intellivision and Vectrex games, and my collections are completa" Intellivision is a video game console that was manufactured by Mattel Electronics from 1979 through the early 'dOs. Vectrex was a table-top console with a built-in black-and-white vector graphics screen. (Vector graphics screens are screens that only render straight lines rather than color-filled shapes. Tempest, Asteroids and Battlezone are examples of arcade games that were manufactured on systems with vector graphics monitors.) For his part, Backiel says he owns about 3,000 games. "Off the top of my head, I would say that I have 700 Atari 2600 games, 80 games for the Atari 5200, and 130 games for These are probably not wild guess-timates.

Many of the people at the expo have carefully maintained computer inventories of the games in their collection. "The most I ever paid for a game was $330 for the Nintendo Virtual Boy version of Space Invaders," Backiel says. For people like Backiel, the fun is in having a complete collection, not in having exclusive access to games. He becomes slightly agitated when discussing another collector who has some one-of-a-kind prototype game that he will not sell or allow to be copied. "He should make copies of those games because if something happens to those originals, if his house should get flooded or the game stops working, then that game will be II! I ft A--' iVi i J6k- i) L.iWlMi Howard Scott Warshaw, the Atari game designer who can be credited with Yar's Revenge, the best-selling Atari game of all-time, and blamed for the atrocity some analysts believe caused the video game crash of the '80s.

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