Midwest Gaming Classic 2024

LANCommander attended Midwest Gaming Classic this year! I've been going to MGC since 2007 and this was the first year I actually brought something to show off.

MGC is a convention held every year here in Milwaukee that covers pinball, arcade games, retro consoles, (some, and in my opinion not enough) PC gaming, tabletop games, and LARPing (shout out to my friends at Deeplight!). It started off as Jagfest where a small group of people would meet up at a hotel to celebrate the Atari Jaguar. Throughout the years it's grown from small hotel conference centers to taking over the Baird convention center for a weekend.

Over the past few years I've been hanging out with the guys over at Bitbuilt who are known for their crazy and ground breaking consoles-turned-portables. I felt a bit out of place being the only software guy in the room, but regardless it was great to see those friends again.

The day before the con I was having issues coming up with a way to attract some attention and needed some sort of print material. I was in the middle of designing a simple 8.5x11 poster when I glanced over at my PC big box game collection. With the help of my amazing partner, we were able to whip up a couple of LANCommander big boxes in the span of a few hours. Who knew living with a packaging designer would pay off someday?

Overall, interest in the project was pretty good. To a select few, of course. It's unsurprisingly really hard to explain what problems I'm actually trying to solve in an era of Steam and GOG, but there were a few veteran PC LAN party enthusiasts that I got to meet and talk shop with.

I would love to do more cons in the future (and possibly host a LAN party at one). In fact, I'll be at Open Sauce 2024 in San Francisco! I won't be exhibiting anything, but if you're attending hit me up! I might even have some swag on me.

No big dev updates in this post. There was a bit of a mad dash to fix some bugs and prepare for MGC, but other than that focus has shifted towards exploring some sort of dedicated LANCommander client. There have been some discussions in the Discord if you want some more information, but I have no real news as of yet.

That's all for now! Until next time!