The Midwest Gaming Classic is scheduled for April 5-7 at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. The show will feature pinball tables, gaming consoles and hundreds of vendors. But before the annual event saw crowds of over 20,000, it started in the basement of the Boy Scouts Service Center over 20 years ago.
In 2001, cofounder Dan Loosen helped organize an in-person meet up with an online group of Atari Jaguar fans. Loosen says the Jaguar is a gaming console that failed commercially, but it created a worldwide cult following. The show has grown from 100 attendees to over 24,000 at last year’s event. The attractions at the show have grown too. The Midwest Gaming Classic features a vendor hall, live entertainment and thousands of free-play games. Over 100 guests offer interactive experiences with fans.
“This year we have someone as young as 10 years old that’s going to be demoing a game they created,” says Loosen. “We’re going to have them beside huge companies like Stern Pinball that will be bringing more than 70 pinball machines to put on the show floor for people to come up to and play and check out what they’ve done. We present those kind of equally where you come in and you just show off your passion.”
Loosen considers many of the people involved in the show’s creation cofounders, including Gabriella Heil.
“My partner Gabby and I kind of joke sometimes that it’s more of a social trade show than a gaming trade show. It was about the Atari Jaguar, but it wasn’t — it was really about the communities around these games that made us start it.”
Lossen recalls his childhood memories of how gaming and community meet when he would play the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game. He would insert a quarter and choose Donatello “because he’s the best” and begin the quest to defeat Shredder.
“Someone else would walk up and put a coin in the slot beside me. It wouldn’t matter who they were. It didn’t matter if they were older than me or younger than me or a different color or a different race or a different ethnicity or a different anything — we were on the same team. We had a shared experience where we were teammates throughout the entire thing.”
Loosen says even if he would never see that person again, he’d considered them a friend.
