(Before we get into the big article, I’m gonna do a prelude interjection to plug my Ko-Fi, which you can find here. I know I said I wouldn’t plug this until after the LRG Part 3 article was done, and yes, that is still in the works even through depression and economic uncertainty making me put out a mini ramble earlier this weeks, but considering the cost of this abrupt, stealthy trip, and how stuff in general is getting a lot tougher for me, I figured I’d plug it here so readers can support me and SFG as a whole if they so choose. Sincere apologies, but either way, I do hope you appreciate what I managed to get out of a fun weekend!)
Well that was a fun weekend! While last year I announced plans to go to Midwest Gaming Classic publicly and tried to network with people beforehand to set up some meetings and chatter, I decided to do a different approach this year. Mainly because in all honesty, I was seriously debating whether to even be going this year. After all, having extreme depression that comes in waves and goes away as quickly as it comes in makes it tough for me to focus on well, anything. And being at a con even for a single day in a horrible mood just makes it not at all a great time.
Nevertheless, with some encouragement from friends and family, I decided to go, but in quiet. I’d network with some friends beforehand on discord, but being how I am on a social media hiatus and the incredibly tense/heated takes you’ll see on social media for anything, I figured it’d be best for my mental health to keep abstaining from it and not throw out a post I wouldn’t even be able to read comments to.
So, for MGC 2025, I went with a close friend yet again, and we picked Saturday for our trip. I could have maybe done Sunday too, but I opted out of that day for the sake of my wallet and for focusing on a family fun day to get my mind off things. And compared to last year, which I liked quite a bit? Boy, was I really glad I decided to go this year. MGC 2025 was magical and gave me the most joy I had in months. Let’s talk about it! This took quite a bit to put together, but I think you’ll find this was a fun trip that was worth the wait.
Friday
Friday I arrived in Wisconsin yet again, and unlike last year, where I hardly did anything except hang out with some animals, this year I did even less; just getting ready to go straight to bed and playing more games on my Switch. Some are the review queue games, and some of that time was on the rest of that Yu-Gi-Oh collection I reviewed. I’m seriously addicted to that set still.
We did make a quick stop for pizza, but outside of it tasting great I have nothing to note on it besides the cool fact there was a Double Dragon Arcade machine there. The coin slot was sadly broken, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be getting the chance to play it later…
Saturday: Show Day!
The big day arrives! I head out early in the morning, meet up with my friend shortly after getting my registration and a convention game pickup , and we head out immediately for that third floor. Last year, I noted my acrophobia and a broken elevator made it pretty nigh impossible for me to get to the second floor, but thank god, both elevators worked properly this time around. Still, I wanted to hold off on the 2nd floor until later, so I decided to go back to the third floor and start poking around the vendors.
Funds were tighter for me this year, but I still had some main goals in mind. First, my hardcore addiction to Turbografx games, so any I found at market price or below was a quick nab for sure. Then, indie or indie adjacent stuff was a priority, especially considering this con was happening mere days after announced tariffs on countries all over the world from America. A ton of indie retro games rely on parts from countries across the world, including China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and more, so I was very aware of how manufacturing would likely become a lot tougher in the months ahead, and how some of these small businesses would struggle.
I actually threw in a physical NES game to my ticket order as an extra nod to that, since Mega Cat are cool folk and I really dig Roniu’s Tale, so I bought the physical of it on NES for $20. I’ll be reviewing it in Evercade form later, but if you know anything about that game, the price is an absolute steal for what you get! But it was pretty cursed to see the dreadful Legend of Wukong being displayed in 16:9 as I waited to pick up my Roniu copy.
So yes, the bigger goal, and arguably one that overshadowed my TG16 search (Some of the big import vendors I saw last year were absent this year, which helped my wallet a lot, too), was focused on finding indie/smaller scale partners, seeing what cool stuff was for sale, and nabbing what I could. As I waited for my friend to catch up, I began to do some basic shopping, and found the TG16 games of the show I wanted. Andre Kickboxing, Sonic Spike (priced complete with the cardboard box, but stupid me didn’t open it and realize it didn’t have the manual, so oops), and TV Sports Hockey were my nabs, and I was very tempted to get a US CIB Monster Lair, but held off on it. I also really wanted Psycho Fox for the Master System, but I was gobsmacked by how much it rose in price in recent years. Definitely a bummer the fox can’t get a cute fox game.
Further browsing ensued, and after seeing some very insanely rare and “almost nobody will actually buy this in the current economy” video games for display, I finally reunited with my friend. We went next door to the game room, and I was seeking two companies in particular at first, only to realize one of them was in the game room next door and not the vendor hall. Before we go into that though, have some peeks at assorted vendor items that caught my eye.
The game room next door had the usual cool stuff I mentioned last year. Old games with LAN play, 16 Player Faceball 2000 DX, tons of arcade/pinball titles, tons of cool consoles to demo, and a few partners selling things. The big partner I wanted to see was Atari since well, I was very curious at what their presence would be. I heard they would sell the 7800+ and since I wanted a for a while, I figured it might make a good impulse buy if I came around and picked one up. Unfortunately by the time I got there early in the day, all of them were sold out. They still had that CE set of 4 games however, along with some 2600+ units.
I get the feeling the tariffs sparked a bit of FOMO panic buying, and I cannot blame people for jumping in on a system that might double in price in mere weeks from now. Still, they had some cool stuff, including demos of Breakout Beyond (in the process of reviewing on SFG, which should be done this week), and I Robot. (which I sadly didn’t get around to demoing) I saw banners for Nightdive and Digital Eclipse there, but nothing from those studios appeared to be at the event, nor were any reps around. A shame, since I’d love to praise Digital Eclipse!
That being said, I was able to preview/demo a game that caught my eye, and it was rather promising considering the hardware this was being made for. The only 7800+ unit left was one demoing the upcoming port of Toaplan’s Tiger Heli, a brand new, ground up port done many years later. Having played Arcade Tiger Heli for review purposes and knowing just how rough the NES port turned out, I was definitely curious to see if an Atari port could capture the magic of that Arcade original. Did they manage to pull it off? Sorta.
Considering the sparse amount of home ports Tiger Heli got back in the day, it would be incredibly easy to make the ultimate console port in the modern age; any of the 16-bit platforms could do it with no problem, and even a new NES or a SMS port could do the game justice, and would fit in tune with the original timeframe in which Tiger Heli hit the Arcades.
Not that Micronics made the worst NES shooter of all time or anything with their port, but considering their really bad track record and how the NES port felt like it would disintegrate on me at any moment, beating their NES port wasn’t the main concern I had with Tiger Heli’s 7800 PORT. Rather, it was whether or not the game would even feel like a Toaplan shooter at all. Some ports like the decent Sky Shark NES port still nailed a fun gameplay loop and good sense of scoring, but didn’t fully mimic the Toaplan style 1:1, and had some oddities such as wonky hitboxes.
So how did Atari’s new 7800 port fare? Honestly, for the hardware I found it pretty impressive. Keep in mind the 7800 isn’t all that strong, and is still limited compared to the NES. It also doesn’t have too many shooters outside of ports of more basic ones, so Tiger Heli by itself is a significant improvement over playing say, Xevious. The 7800+’s wireless controller also had this little joystick thingy on it, and I was a bit concerned it would lead to a miserable playing experience over a d-pad and a wired controller, but much to my surprise it felt comfortable to use in my hand and I was able to make maneuvers in Tiger-Heli with ease.
You have your bomb and shot buttons, and the enemy formations felt Toaplan-like enough (while not Arcade accurate) to make it a pretty fun port, easily crushing the NES one. There’s even still the secret on the 10K point can, but I couldn’t seem to trigger the hyper obscure secrets with the little car. I don’t know if that’s because the devs forgot to put it in, or changed the conditions to make it show up, but regardless, a lot of what made Tiger Heli great is still here. The hitboxes didn’t feel that off to me, and I was able to fully clear stage 1 as I can in the Arcade version. I did pretty decently with getting a score, and ultimately I really enjoyed this version of Tiger Heli. Definitely would be in the higher tier of 7800 games I’ve played, and I’m really curious to see how the final product shapes up (as long as the cartridge manufacturing isn’t crippled by the US Tariff situation)
Next up, I met with one of my other online friends, who happened to be strolling by the Atari booth around the time I was wrapping Tiger-Heli. My first friend was giving the game a spin for himself, and did pretty decently at it as well, and while we were all hanging out we even noticed Jon from GenxGrownup wandering around. Still, upon my friend wrapping his time with Tiger-Heli, my other online pal pointed out to me where the other vendor I was looking for was, and it happened to have been in that vendor hall all along! I just looked in the wrong aisle.
So back to the vendor hall the three of us went, and that’s when I meet up with good old Carl from Songbird Productions. He’s the guy I buy a bunch of my Evercade stuff from and I’ve really grown fond of having a retro game seller near me, so I’ve done my best to support his business however I can since getting on board with Evercade a few years ago. Being how I wanted to help small businesses out in the wake of the Tariffs, I tried to think of something I could pick up and buy from him in person on a whim, and I ended up choosing a Technos Super Pocket and the Indie Heroes 4 Collection cart. Expect reviews of these two months down the road. I’d have bought more stuff, but as I don’t have an Analogue Pocket (for Lynx) or a Jaguar (for the homebrew), I couldn’t really buy any of his other games, sadly. Still, it was nice to see him and help out a local Midwest gaming business.
Next up, we split from my second online friend so he could go and attend a very critical Hands Off Movement peaceful protest. I’d have been there as well, except MGC was a means of escaping that sort of stuff for me, so I passed up on it. I’ll definitely go to the next one whenever that happens though. So me and my pal continued touring the vendor hall, looking for more stuff, as I impulsively bought things. A Wario Woods SNES here, a Championship Pro AM there, before we ended up going to get dinner at the food vendors. Thankfully, unlike last year we didn’t have to walk all the way to Dairyland to get something to eat, and we just had to go to the back of the vendor hall to find a meal. Lots of different vendors of various kinds this year, and all of them being very overpriced and expensive as convention vendors tend to be. $6 for a soda? Yeah, I’ll buy a bottle from the vending machine instead.
After picking a vendor and getting our food done, we then head out of the vendor hall, with my plan being to go to the first floor, get a Diet Dew from the vending machine, and then try to get to the second floor this year via the repaired elevator. I couldn’t go down the escalator/stairs to get to the 2nd floor this year due to my acrophobia kicking in near the balcony yet again, and I didn’t want to risk that other elevator stranding me for a bit close to a balcony again. Since I was familiar with the building layout this time around, I was hoping to beat my fears enough to enjoy the fun of the second floor, and if I could pull that off, I knew I’d be in for a pretty great time. But first, distractions!
Off to the corner of the third floor, were some pretty cool arcade machines. Me and my pal gave em a spin, and we found a few fun ones we played. First up we tried this Bomberman World Arcade game, seeming to be based off the PC Engine ones, and I was able to adjust to it quickly. Of course after some multiplayer fun, I wasn’t gonna stand around to play it all day to see what the Solo mode was like, so I quickly moved onto something else.
There was Arcade Bucky O Hare there, which I really wanted to try, but knew I wouldn’t have the tie to beat. But turning around from that cab and oh hey, it’s Sega’s super cool Tetris spin-off Bloxeed. I knew this would never get added to Tetris Forever, so I gladly took my friend on in it. This is quite a fun little game, though playing it on a cab with an 8 way stick made it a lot tougher than it would have been with the traditional 4-way.
Afterward, we finally went toward to the first floor, though we saw some other cool things on the way. Consoles plugged in for demoing, a cool charity program connected to a SNES, tons of special guests for signings/discussion, and lots of other neat Gaming-themed memorabilia. I stopped by Jeff Lee’s (The creator of Q-Bert) table due to this adorable 3D Printed QBert catching my eye, although being so close to the third floor balcony made it pretty difficult to approach him for a conversation, let alone buy one. Still, I was thankful to say hi to him and was really tempted to spend the $30 to get a QBert of my own. Alas, I just have the photo to remember the cute guy by.
Next up, we finally hit the first floor once again. Took a bit of a break as I went through my bag of goods so far, getting to sample the Technos Super Pocket and get straight to playing Double Dragon on it. A pretty fitting pickup after seeing the real cab the night before, only this time I was able to actually play the game. And then the GB version. And then the NES version. Yeah, there’s a lot of Double Dragon on the Super Pocket. Still, it was a nice little breather for the two of us to just relax and play our games for a bit, before we’d make the trip to the second floor. After all, I was pretty determined to avoid buying more from the vendor hall at this rate, and we knew we didn’t want to stay all night, so the second floor was to be our big, last thing before going back to the Game Center one last time to check out the old consoles.
First, I tried going up to 2F the normal way people do. Just walking up the stairs and going for it. Much to my dismay, the acrophobia kicked in hard yet again, with my head getting all weird and pressurized feeling the higher I went on the steps. I made it higher on these stairs than I normally do, but for those who think I’m sounding incredibly stupid right now, how my Acrophobia works is if I’m walking up something like stairs or an escalator near a balcony, my head feels like it’s being pushed down on, and I get incredibly disoriented.
Much to my dismay, I haven’t been able to fully fix this flaw in my life, and going down is much easier than going up, (but still a big challenge!) but I still like to try and push my limits on stairs to you know, try to be a normal person in this regard. Alas, I didn’t want to risk fainting or something happening to my mind/anxiety during the convention, so we went for the elevator. The balcony was a lot less daunting on floor 2 compared to floor 3 and with this elevator being fixed after being broken last year, I knew I’d be able to get to the rooms if I just looked away from the balcony upon the doors opening.
So sure enough, my friend and I went into the elevator, it opened up, and… We did it! Just looking to the right as soon as we got to 2F meant I was able to avoid the balcony, and successfully trick my acrophobia into not kicking in. Rushing into the first open room we saw, and hey, it was a fun little Arcade, courtesy of the Garcade. This was just awesome, and a selection of games I found to be a lot better than when I visited the real place a few years back during a Wisconsin Vacation. They had the usual classics there, but also a bunch of more obscure stuff and even some cool oddities like VS Dr. Mario and a particular favorite for me, Namco’s Assault.
Getting to play this with the real controls was just purely awesome, and really helped recontextulize the game for me after only playing it via Namco Museum beforehand. Jumping into it on an emulator and feeling the weird dual stick controls is pretty jarring, but when you have the actual dual sticks with the fire buttons on them to play around with, Assault is a lot more fun. I even got a high score on the local leaderboard! Not bad, considering how many people I saw trying this game and getting stuck on the practice level.
As me and my friend split to play various Arcade games, I next took a look at the Neo Geo cab they had. It had four games, which were Ghost Pilots, Blazing Star, Samurai Showdown II, and KOF 94. It was currently in SSII when I saw it, and I happened to see a father and son playing against each other, and was pretty fascinated seeing the game in person again. Being that the fun of the Neo Geo is the multiplayer nature of it, I gladly offered to challenge them after they were done with their game, and playing VS mode this way was a blast! I guided Wan-Fu for the win with ease, and then afterward I let the game expire so I could swap to another game for scorechasing purposes. I knew for a fact the Blazing Star scores on this machine were absolutely insane, and I had no shot of breaking those on the cab, so I went for the other shooter, SNK’S Ghost Pilots.
And uh, wow, Ghost Pilots sure is a blatant Toaplan ripoff. They didn’t even bother to hide what they were trying to imitate with the game, and it was incredibly dull and forgettable as a result. I got the high score with ease, but I have a feeling there’s a good reason nobody really talks about this shooter anymore. It’s what the current generation would call “Peak Mid”.
After that disappointment, I went back to Assault and kept at it for the scores. I kept enjoying the experience and having so much fun, but I didn’t want to hog the machine all day, so I let someone else have it after a while. I really was hoping to try Baby Pac-Man, but the ball got stuck and was unplayable as a result. So thus, I just bounced around between various games as my friend did as well. Once we were satisfied, we moved to the next room to see what they had! It was another Game Center of sorts, but with a lot less games on display.
Still, there was some cool stuff to be had here, from the Turbografx on display, some LAN multiplayer titles hooked up, and most appealing to us, The Pac-Man VS setup. Not the easy to play Switch version, but the Gamecube original! It was pretty neat to play this in the original format, and my friend and I had a good bit of fun playing against two kids who were treating the experience of playing as the Pac-Man ghosts like it was the greatest moment in their entire lives. Always nice to see people appreciating the simplicity of retro games VS the boring online only slop that plagues the market for kids games now.
At a table nearby, I happened to catch my eye on a vendor with a few rare PS1 games, including the holy grail that is Tail Concerto for me. I was tempted to just bust out my credit card and spend $400 on that CIB copy, but I knew better and decided to hold back; no game is worth that price and I was saving for the Switch 2 anyhow. Still, I did end up nabbing a CIB copy of Sonic 3, since it was in pretty outstanding shape and only $60. With that, i was only missing Sonic 3D Blast as the one Sonic Genesis game I didn’t own, and that was the game I could easily live without.
With that fun game room done, it was time to finally experience the highlight of Floor 2, the reason I wanted to go last year and was bummed my acrophobia blocked me out of that floor back then. The World of Nintendo exhibit, replicating a store from the 90s with the original displays and all the goodies. And honestly? It might have been the coolest part of the show hands down, despite the inability to buy any of the games in the room. You had a M82 demo unit, a TV playing vintage Nintendo ads, and a giant SNES kiosk with the Star Fox Competition cart! Lots and lots of coolness to be had here, and we both spent a lot of time here for sure.
So many of these vintage ads were ones I even knew first hand to be damn near impossible to find at all, let alone in good enough shape like they were here. But everywhere I looked, there was just good stuff one after another.
Another thing that particularly caught my eye was the display advertising the old Zelda games with the aforementioned advertisements playing on the TV. Mostly because yeah, the original advertising posters were cool and all to see hanging here, but to my utter astonishment there was the real sword prop actually used in one of the commercials, just hanging up on the wall. This wasn’t some modern replica, it was the real deal to my knowledge!!!
Lastly, as the two demo stations there were the big time sinks you could spend your time with, my friend decided to try the Star Fox one out. He did good, slowly increasing his score with each attempt at the score attack challenge, and eventually hit around 120K points, a pretty good feat all things considered! He got a button for his troubles, (as did anyone who broke 60K) and while he went away to play that, I got a message from my other friend who noted how he was back from the protest and was waiting in the Retronauts panel room.
I decided to join the panel to try and find my friend, but to my surprise it was pretty packed. After awkwardly standing around in the doorway for a while, I decided to just give up and sit down in an empty seat and listen away. It was about Chrono Trigger, a game I liked, but it definitely felt like the panel had to be condensed for time; that game is so big you can’t even cover the entirety of it in 45 minutes, but I felt they did an OK enough job from what I heard. Afterwards I met up with my online pal yet again, then I reunited with my first pal who got done with Star Fox and hit that impressive 120K record I noted earlier, and so we split up yet again; me and my friend going back to World of Nintendo, while my online friend went around to shop and browse some more.
And boy, was World of Nintendo still a fun thing to experience. Even on a return trip, the the kiosk amazed me. My friend tried some more to break his Star Fox competition record, and at one point I was like “eh maybe i’ll try it” despite only playing the game for a grand total of 5 minutes. So I gave it a spin, completely botched my attempts, and ended up with the grand score of…
Yeah, this ain’t no Gradius III or Axelay. Still, while my friend kept at the attempts again, I did decide it might be fun to try the M82 demo unit. It has some games in there I was decent at such as Shadow of the Ninja, but it was Super C I gave a spin. No cheat codes, just muscle memory from my 3DS VC days, and I wanted to see how far I could go with it. How did I do?
Pretty decent progress, making it up into stage 4 before I started to lose a lot of lives, and it wasn’t all my fault, honestly. The graphical layers started acting weird with some of the bosses missing pieces or turning invisible, I assume due to the cartridge aging or being not fully cleaned, but my muscle memory still led me to feeling like a pretty proud badass making it through half the game without a sweat. I always have preferred this to the original NES Contra, and that still remains the case to this day, and so I felt pretty proud of myself for still having the juice to do well enough here.
With all the second floor fun out of the way, we went up to the third floor for one last rodeo; going around, touring the games and finding something to play until it was time to go home. Once again there were tons of various game consoles and cool rarities to play, and I bounced around between a lot of them. Here’s just a couple of neat ones I saw!
After touring around for a bit and my friend being determined to break all the crazy scores shown in the picture for Pac-attack, I went off in search of another thing I wanted to try and do; note down some Indie developers and cool games I saw, photograph/jot them down, and maybe even buy a few! After all, SFG was made to help indie devs, and while the market is a lot more flooded than it was when I made SFG in 2014, I still liked poking around and seeing what caught my eye. So, here’s some fun Indie highlights from Midwest Gaming Classic!
With all that indie touring done, I saw a good amount of interesting looking stuff, along with a bunch of other games I didn’t have time to even approach to examine. I honestly wish I had come earlier in the day, mainly for more availability of physical copies/products and to be able to appreciate these indies a lot more than I could with the limited hour or so remaining I had left before we had to head home. Still, one thing I also wanted to make sure to do before I went back to my friend and his Pac-Attack session was to see if an indie I missed out on last year was still available… And it was! You might remember I lamented wanting Skate Cat for NES but being unable to get it, but lo and behold there was one copy left this year, I talked to the very nice dev’s father, and bought the last copy. Hooray!
Heading back to my friend’s table, I poked around at other stuff on the way. The Atari recharged machines were still pretty busy, as was Valve’s Portal Pinball machine, and looking around the corner I found Premium Edition Games’ booth. A limprint company in the wild isn’t something I encounter much, but last year I remember there being a good amount of staff there for people to talk to as you could pick out games, but this time around there was nothing I could find. Lots of games not sold, but no staff to buy the games from.
I was hoping to ask them about the tariffs since I genuinely wanted to hear a limprint company’s take on that first hand before I wrote my ramble on them, but nobody ever showed up while I was in the room, so I just passed on that. A lot of the stuff that was there last year was there this year, so I don’t think many games were purchased from them.
While I waited for my friend to finish Pac-Attack, I tried out the Funtech Super A’Can. This weird chicken themed Puyo clone was on it, and it was incredibly bizarre, difficult and not at all fun. Still a fascinating look at what gaming was like in another part of the world, though! But once my friend finished an attempt at Pac-Attack and ended up on the local leaderboard, (and being that he lasted 15+ minutes in a single game, it was a pretty darn impressive showing!) we felt it was time to start heading home. That way, we could hang out and play on our switches for a bit, and also show family the haul! One nice drive later and with some fun local multiplayer on Switch out of the way, (and a good family dinner!) I came home with this haul from my time at MGC.
Overall, much lighter than last year! But with a bigger focus on indies and smaller businesses VS just buying every PCE/TG16 game I saw like a vacuum. Still wishing I bought that copy of Monster Lair VS Sonic Spike, though. Nevertheless, I had a wonderful time at MGC with my friend, and will happily go back next year provided things are safe enough to do so.
So with my friend and I saying goodbye, it was just me and my family in WI. A great convention, a great day, but what next? We still had a bit of spare time…
Short Sunday Aftermath
Sunday was not a convention day for me. Sure, I could have gone to the family day, but I opted not to. I wanted to save money, and just relax and do fun family stuff. We popped by a retro game store while going through Waukesha, which was just opening up, and had some pretty cool things like an Atari Jaguar in the box, and a few obscure games for 3DO like Starblade. Sadly no TG/PCE stuff, but I at least got a couple of Game Boy games I didn’t have yet like Natsume’s underrated Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue and Kemco’s Mickey Mouse Magic Wands.
After browsing a bit and buying those games, we then just went and did casual things. Minigolfing, ice cream shopping, and then going home for a nice home cooked dinner. Nothing too crazy, but a nice calm day for me and the family on vacation. And then the next day, we headed home, ending my vacation in Wisconsin.
Conclusion
Overall, Midwest Gaming Classic was fun, and was honestly the best time I had in months. Having dealt with depression going back and forth for months now, it was nice to have a full weekend where that didn’t really intrude at all or get in my way. Just some nice time with friends, seeing some cool indie games, and having an overall excellent weekend that was the perfect pick me up I needed the some stressors I’ve dealt with.
Of course, my continual social media breaks have helped tremendously with that factor too, and being unable to impulsively click on apps to doomscroll during the convention was a big help as well, thanks to my appblocker keeping me in check. Maybe I’ll do a writeup about how I use the app blocking tools to focus and enjoy life a lot more rather than drowning in constant social media fearmongering, since I’m also sure if I was in my pre-appblocking habits I would have been too distracted to have had the fun I had at this event.
That doesn’t mean I was ignorant to the state of the world during the con, of course. Talking with some people about tariffs and the concern they might jack up prices of physical homebrew cartridges to the point of unfeasibility wasn’t exactly fun. And with Carl having to pull the June Evercade releases from his store due to the insane 145% tariff on China we currently have to deal with, it definitely made me worry even more for small businesses like him going forward.
Who knows what the future holds, and whether or not things will be A-OK for small businesses or one of the roughest patches in history, but I was a lot more motivated to shop local and small-scale this time around than just buy any NES/SNES game I could easily get elsewhere. Here’s hoping I’ll be able to still see and buy something from a lot of these vendors at the next MGC, and hopefully this also serves as a reminder for all my readers… To buy local!
Until next time, take care and be safe!