My family's Retro Roadshow is doing a presentation + exhibition at the Computer History Museum's TechFest event on July 27th!

[wowbobwow]

Hi VCF'ers!

My family and I have created The Retro Roadshow, the San Francisco Bay Area's premiere hands-on pop-up museum of vintage technology, and we're now collaborating with the Computer History Museum! The CHM is hosting a fun and engaging video-game-themed "TechFest" event on July 27th - details here. They're going to have live music, performances, interactive projects (like a pixel art station!), and more. Special thanks to the VCF forum member who originally put us in contact with the folks at CHM - we appreciate you very much!

For our part, The Retro Roadshow is offering a special exhibition we call "Mario Through The Ages." I'll be walking visitors through a broad-strokes overview of the history of home video games, using Nintendo's iconic Mario character as a familiar guide. Following the presentation, attendees will be invited to get hands-on with our fully restored collection of vintage gaming consoles, each of which will be paired with a beautiful CRT display, and all running classic games starring Mario. Assuming no last-minute technical challenges (vintage hardware can be tricky!), we plan to exhibit the following systems for hands-on play:

• Atari 2600 (both an original Sunnyvale-built "Heavy Sixer" connected via RF cable, and a video-modded 2600 connected via Composite cables)
• Intellivision
• Atari 7800
• ColecoVision
• Multiple NES's
• Multiple SNES's
• Virtual Boy (bring your Advil for the inevitable headache!)
• Nintendo 64
• Nintendo GameCube

We hope to see you there!

Huxley

PS I've resubmitted this after realizing that there was a silly typo in the title of my original version - sorry for any confusion that caused!

 

[Samir]

Super cool! I hate that I will be out of town and will miss this. Hopefully will be able to check you out at some point.

 

[wowbobwow]

Update: this event was a BLAST! All our exhibits worked (only the ColecoVision required a little TLC at times to keep running), the presentations I led were well attended and got really positive feedback, and the CHM team estimated that around 1,000+ people enjoyed our Retro Roadshow exhibition - that's a lot of folks enjoying and learning about classic video games! Here's a little look at the event:

We have more events coming up soon, including a return to the Mountain View Public Library, an engagement with the San Francisco Public Library, and more. We're retiring the "Mario Through The Ages" exhibition we've done a few times this year, and going forward we'll be rolling out a whole new exhibition featuring a mix of classic gaming consoles and vintage computers, including early Apple and Macintosh systems. Hope to see you guys at a future Retro Roadshow!

Huxley