The Portland Retro Gaming Expo is a delightful celebration of older games

16.10.2023 - 18:25 / theverge.com / Jay Peters

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

“Sega had their own console?”

That was a devastating comment I heard as I sat playing Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on a Sega Genesis Mini at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo (PRGE) this weekend. The Sonic games on Genesis were my favorites as a kid; one time, I played so much Sonic that I peed my pants. How could this person not know about Sega consoles?

Thankfully, the person’s friend was more charitable than I would have been. He used it as a teaching opportunity and showed him the game he was playing. (And I realized later that the person may have been asking about mini consoles.)

The whole event was filled with that wonderful spirit about sharing the joy of classic games and generally nerdy stuff. I saw four friends huddled around a classic X-Men arcade machine. Tons of younger kids were playing older games with the same wonder I had for them as a kid. Rows of vendors sold things like retro games and elaborate art (my favorite: Blue Bomber Pixel Art, which remade my favorite famous sprite characters out of pixel-like Perler beads). In a room next to one of the auditoriums, I sat and listened to somebody sing their heart out to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” backed by Rock Band musicians. 

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One hilarious expo attraction was a giant NES-style controller advertised as the “world’s largest video game controller.” It’s genuinely huge, at 18.5 feet long, 8.5 feet wide, and three feet tall, and it nearly weighs a ton. At the show, it was hooked up to a TV so people could team up to play Super Mario Bros. Multiple people had to coordinate across the controller to attempt to beat the suddenly challenging level 1-1. The first goomba proved to be a fearsome monster. The first tall pipe was a nearly insurmountable obstacle. But somehow, clambering over the controller like a playground structure, kids and grown-ups could advance through the game.

There was a GoFundMe advertised at the show to help “save” the controller; its humongous size makes it difficult to transport.

One area was littered with older game consoles hooked up to TVs. I beelined for a Donkey Konga station, where I drummed along (poorly) to Blink-182’s “All the Small Things.” As I was getting near the end of the song, a young kid who was definitely not alive when that song was written watched in awe, and I happily handed the controller to him so he could drum and clap to the song, too. (His mom really tried hard to coach him through it.) Then, I made my way to my Sega Genesis Mini station with Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which has a lot more bullshit than I remembered. (Tails is a