Well, folks, it looks like Classic Gaming Expo 2008 was canceled. This doesn’t effect me personally…I’ve never gone, and haven’t felt much desire to, but the recent posting from the staff struck a chord with me (emphasis mine):

“Despite the fact that we fulfilled our requirements with them, our calls went unanswered and when we were finally able to pin them down, they gave us a bit of a run around and finally stopped returning our calls again. We never really got a straight answer from them, but the disinterest was most likely due to the amount of space that we require versus the number of rooms we can fill. CGE has also traditionally not increased casino revenues all that much in years past, so it’s possible that had something to do with it as well.”

As many of you know, I ran the SWRAP Fall Commodore Expo for a couple of years. If the CGE folks are having problems like this, imagine what I had to go through. Classic gaming/computing is a pretty small hobby, and only a small fraction of enthusiasts have the means and the interest to go to these “expos”.

I once wrote a scathing editorial to submit to the remaining Commodore newsletters, but I didn’t want to sound bitter. In it, I talked about all the crappy things I had to go through trying to get an Expo together. Imagine what it’s like to describe your needs to the hotel. “We need a 2000 sq. ft. room from 8am-6pm, plus an all-night party room, we want to bring in food, we need Internet access…oh, and we need 10 guest rooms”. At least they were usually polite when they told me to go to hell.

Classic gaming & computer hobbyists are a cheap bunch. That’s one of the attractions to this hobby, I guess. I remember passing up Atari games for $5 because I could get them for $1 at a different thrift store. And, I split the cost of a hotel room with five other guys before, so I’m not completely innocent here. But, the fact is that hotels don’t make a lot of money off of us, and I can understand them not being interested.

On the bright side, maybe this means some of the big shows will consolidate, and that might mean a bigger turnout. Then, the hotels might be interested again.