Jagfest 2002
July 12th and 13th 2002
Mayfair Wyndham Historic Hotel.
806 St. Charles Street St. Louis, Missouri 63101
Well, The Sixth annual Atari Jaguar Festival (Jagfest 2k2 :Atari and beyond) is now in the history books here is my short report based on what happened:
July 11th,2002 (pre-fest day): I was hoping to receive Dan Loosen's package
before this date but it came on this date (I will be bringing it to with
me so Al of Atari Age could sell it off) most of my stuff was all done before
hand and
I was just waiting for time to pass by. this was all before a quarter to 8am,
I was also chatting with Tim Wilson on icq right before he took off with James
Garvin on his 14 hour trip to the fest. around 7:30am I went to catch the
Metra rail at the station by me that will take me to Union Station Chicago
where I would take the Amtrak to St.Louis, MO. Fast forward to a little after
3pm in Amtrak station St. Louis, MO: I got off the train called JT August to
pick me up (luckily he was there at station when I got there so I didn't have
long wait) he gave me a quick tour from the train station to the Mayfair hotel
telling me about the various places and history. I asked about the video game
hall of fame I heard about it a while back, he told me the whole story how
they went belly up. when we finally came to the hotel, I looked in to the main
room where the fest was taking place and met up with Greg George and his wife
Marianne. I checked in first before I started to get to work at setting up the
fest area and museum. We thought we wouldn't have enough TV's but JT took care
of that problem, when we finally decided to take a breather from all the
setting up we went to our respective rooms (I was on the 4th floor, Greg was
on 11th) around 8pm Greg gave me call asking about dinner and we decided to
leave a note for JT (or James and Tim who didn't show yet) saying that we left
to eat at the old spaghetti factory (we had to walk a couple blocks to grab
the metro link train). Jt came right around after we ordered (I had the
Spaghetti dinner the others had something different) after dinner we went back
to do some more setting up because JT had brought more stuff with him. Around
11pm James Garvin and Tim Wilson finally showed up and we did more setting up
with the museum and fest area ( we did have some debate about the gaming area
but we figured that we would leave as it is and have a second game room up
stairs in the conference room where the seminars was taking place.)
Around early morning the next day ( I think it was around 3 or 2am) we decided
to call it a night (uh day).
July 12th,2002 (Fest day part one): I got up around 7am cleaned up
watched some TV and headed down around 8am
I saw that Greg was setting up more stuff Jt was said to be late getting more
stuff. Around 9am Slackers and Trade N Games
showed up to starting setting up some stuff. About 10am the guys from Japan
who showed up at years came in and we open up the museum which I ended up for
most of the day until Jt and his brother in-law came in around 11am.(which was
a bummer for me since I know I would be losing possible sales since I had no
one to watch my stuff) I saw that channel 11wb
had set up an interview with Greg and do a quick report on the fest. We also
had a chance to show a home brew game of Fellow ship of the Rings that Adam
Thornton had done( I also saw the game Mr. Roboto hack of Berzerk was being showed
at Trade n Games booth) and I saw a floor based controller for the PS called
Dance Dance it was pretty cool.
I missed the first seminar by James since I had to watch the museum around
that time. We did pretty good turn out for the first day I would say.
July 13th,2002(Fest day part duex): it pretty much started up as the first day. This time we decided to wait until 11am to open up the museum since we figured JT was going be late again. I have decided to get my jag set up so people can play Battlesphere and enter the tourney (which sadly didn't go well) I had a chance to show a 2600 super charger in action again (the first day we used to load up FOTR game) I loaded up Phasor Patrol and the original frogger by Sega (which JT had fun playing ) later on some other tourneys got started like brutal sports football, Soul Calibur and the SNK melody that took most of the day. later on I met up with none other Greg Goodwin (aka Dr.Chu), who also won the pong system in the pong tourney. We also got a bit of Bs net working after a few tries and getting a RS2332 cable from Radio Shack. We wanted to try doom but when I moved my jag so it won't be wobbly (it was leaning on two tables which I didn't care for) it some how knocked the cat box out of whack so we decided to drop that idea. I did get a chance to sit in on the tail end of the second seminar by James which was good. I did plan on doing a seminar for AVC/JCU but like I said the SNK thing took up most of the time so I decided not to do it. Turn out for day two was pretty good also (I ended up giving the color issue of the fest issue to Greg Goodwin, btw I did sell one copy of the fest issue and sold a membership to Tracey Herbert).
July 13th,2002(Fest day part duex after
hours): Around 6pm we decided to close up shop, we started talking about the
next years plans if we were going to do it again, later on most of decided to
hang out a bit longer, originally we were going to go out to eat, then we
decided to order pizza from Papa Johns and have an Atari all-nighter. I played
Space Wars 2k for the first time
and got blasted by Dr.Chu, I also played Super Burn-Out and lost. Around 1am I
decided to head to room and get my stuff ready to go back home.
July 14th,2002(The Day After): I woke up
at 7am decided to watch some TV for while then I took a walk out side to
stretch
my legs. I then returned to my room watched some more TV after I went to the
snack machine and got something to eat
around 11am Greg called me up asking if I had his World of Atari Tape, I
checked and I didn't have it. ( he did find it after all) at 11:30am I decided
to check out so I could catch the Metro link that will take me to the Amtrak
station. I got there about
2 hours before the train got there. I arrived back home to Chicago Union
Station around 8:25pm(just missed the Metra rail to station back to my home by
5 minutes so I waited for the last train back which was due to leave at
10:30pm and I got home around 11:45pm. Over all I had fun at this show.
Highlights: seeing James Garvin's Dark
Guardian and Native works in progress, watching most of tourneys taking place
,playing Asteroids and Slam Racer on Jugs, finally seeing a TI-99/4A home
computer in a museum (gray model that is, I have the sliver model at home),
getting to play the Pac-man fever CD on the Jaguar CD, watching videos from
past events (WOA, E^3,fest'99 plus the Jaguar demo tape), seeing Phase Zero
being played (Greg sold both copies of the demo carts to the Japan guys), and
being able to show Fellow ship of the Rings for the first time as well being
able to show the supercharger for the 2600 at work.
Click here to view the Photos taken at Jagfest 2k2