PORTLAND, Oregon—Everything old was new again at October's annual Portland Retro Gaming Expo, which overtook the city's major convention center for two full days of arcade play, retro tournaments, and presentations from some of gaming's biggest legends.

As opposed to more modern gaming expos such as PAX, it's a little harder to leave a retro expos with something to describe at length. That's not for lack of content. Retro gaming shows feel both enormous and small because they distill down to a seemingly endless number of micro-niches. Love the Atari Jaguar console? You and maybe 50 other people will find a few booths full of merch and rarities to make your heart swell. How about old light gun games? You'll find a range of gun-mounted arcade games that you can play without a single quarter, from later-gen gems like Area 51 to early delights like Cheyenne.

Maybe you want to purchase every issue of Nintendo Power magazine that you fell behind on as an early '90s fanboy, or compete against children of the '70s in Atari Combat, or see original Atari and Activision console game developers talk about squeezing every last pixel out of the 2600's hardware, or pick up a ton of colorful artwork based on classic characters. Events like the Portland Retro Gaming Expo will happily indulge you.

The above video report also includes footage of the final combatants in one of the weekend's two Tetris competitions. One of them revolved around the NES version of the game, but we at Ars didn't qualify for that one. Instead, we played in a Tetris Ultimate tournament, revolving around that game's 2014 PlayStation 4 version (and we placed eight out of 16 to boot.)

Sam Machkovech



























Sam Machkovech









In addition to all those elements in play at the PGRX, we found flasks shaped like Nintendo cartridges, custom ROMs slapped into old, working cartridges so you can play "new" games on old systems, brand-new indie games, and much more. With an vast array of nostalgia that was seemingly impossible to completely capture, we gathered as many video clips and photos as possible (both above and below).

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech





































Listing image by Sam Machkovech