Even though CGE seems a convention for sentimentalists, there were a few announcements about new games for old systems. A lot of buzz stirred around the official CGE booth with the debut of the heretofore never-released Vectrex title, Pitcher's Duel, a baseball game that showcases the still-impressive capability of the vector-based machine. In a similar attempt to rescue bits without homes, former Atari programmer, Keithen Hayenga, announced Sunday that some unfinished Atari games have surfaced on back-up tapes and that he hoped to make an official announcement about these very soon. One of these includes a 5200 version of Tempest. (Let's hope these tapes were stored in a temperature-controlled room with no magnets around). Later, Keith Robinson revealed that a fellow INTV alumnus, David Akers, has been living in Japan updating old Intellivision titles. Robinson then led curious onlookers to an overhead view-screen to see a 3D version of Bi-Planes, an update that makes one wonder what could have been had there been an Intellivision IV to compete with Japanese consoles in the late 1980s.

The thriving homebrew scene at CGE has always been a dangling carrot that sends many running across the country to snatch up exclusives. Each year, attendees have come to expect packaged homebrews for the 2600, Vectrex, and Intellivision, but this year a NES cartridge captivated a lot of attention: Sudoku, programmed by Al Bailey. While NES homebrews are becoming increasingly common, most of them live solely as ROMS, disembodied from tangible carts. Not only is Sudoku housed in the familiar looking grey chassis, but it comes packaged in a beautiful tin box that will draw one's eye to it in any collector's room - a great deal at only $20. An exclusive gold copy was offered at an auction and sold for $460. This game is also noteworthy because it does not borrow any sprites or maps from previous games; its programming content is entirely original. The enthusiasm for Sudoku bodes well for a larger presence for Nintendo at CGE, where second generation consoles have heretofore dominated.

Other homebrews lined the tables of Oldergame.com's booth which showcased new 3DO titles like Frog Feast and Decathlon as well as a Saturn collection, Lost & Found 2 - an anthology of unfinished and unreleased titles. Atari2600.com also managed to churn out some new products, and this year unveiled The Last Ninja, N.E.R.D.S., and Rent Wars, a two-player war between competing property owners to furnish their respective apartments.

With the vendors, musicians, games, hobbyists, and overall good cheer in place, this would seem a satisfactory convention (especially for the $35 two-day fee), but there was more, and being that it was my first CGE, I did not expect what awaited in the room across the hall.

Away from the synthpop and chatter, was a large room that was eerily quiet, but then I discovered that this was the silence of reverence. This was the museum where hundreds of consoles and their peripherals were arranged according to era or theme. The wonders to behold in this room are too innumerable to be listed here; one could enter and re-enter this room a dozen times and see something missed the first time around. It was hard to miss, however, Ralph Baer's "Brown Box" sitting on the first table. With its chromosome-font labels and faux-wood finish, Baer's machine has always looked like an inauspicious beginning for home gaming, but when surrounded by hundred of other consoles, it sits like the wizened patriarch smoking a pipe on the front porch at a family reunion. Another prototype, the Atari Game Brain, followed leading to a line of other curiosities like the wooden Puppy Pong box, the Adventurevision, a Famicombox from a hotel, and the elusive Atari 2800. If you walked in at the right moment, you could spot Al Alcorn hovering around his Cosmos prototype (a holographic handheld), Glyn Anderson inspecting a machine gun modded to work with the SNES in Army simulations, or see John Sohl verifying the historical accuracy of the placard next to the Intellivoice add-on. It's a rare moment when you can peruse a museum with the originators of the artifacts in the same room. This alone was worth the price of admittance.

As much as collectors and enthusiasts ogle over the hardware, most of them recognize that the biggest rarities at the expo each year are the programmers who put these machines to work. Down the hall from both the main room and museum, several panels met to discuss the intricacies of programming for Atari, Activision, and Intellivision. These informative sessions could have lasted hours, but the moderators did a good job keeping a clock so that questioning did not get too out of hand. After the conferences, all of the panelists were so approachable that conversations tended to leak into the halls and become peripatetic jaunts. With many homebrew programmers in the audience, the discussions tended to be aimed at the tech side of things, but even without a basic understanding BASIC, one can appreciate the complex work needed to create seemingly simple games. In some ways, Atari 2600 games were more tightly scripted than the latest multi-million dollar produced titles. With so little memory space, programmers needed to be inventive to squeeze as much content as possible into their carts. Nowadays, it is strange to hear one talk about the preciousness of memory space. David Crane mentioned how one shortcut in BASIC could free up a scintilla of valuable space on a 4K cartridge. Garry Kitchen talked about how he borrowed the "beep" sound from the Atari's reset button to add one more sound to a maxed-out ROM. In the words of panelist Steve Wright, these guys were "doing a lot with very little." Most second-generation games never credited their programmers with their work, so it's always nice to see them publicly recognized years after their anonymous efforts.

Many of the stories shared at CGE are already well known, but it was a pleasure to hear them directly from their sources. When asked about the fiasco known as the 2600 Pac-Man, the panel jointly gave an almost apologetic justification for its poor quality. They explained that the game was commissioned for the 1982 holiday season giving Todd Frye the unenviable position of finishing it in only six weeks. Crane capped the discussion by quoting Frye: "Why can't ghosts flicker?" It's amazing how 25 years later, people still feel burned by their disappointment.