Also my first MGC, as well as my first convention, and let me tell you, it was an absolute joy! There was so many cool stuff to check out there, and it was amazing to meet everyone in person!
We'll start with the car ride over, which went pretty quickly once
@cy already spent the 5 hours it takes to get from his place to Illinois. Still really appreciate their gesture of coming out of their way to grab me for this awesome event!

During the car ride, I got a chance to try out some of cy's Wii portables, and I gotta say they're suuuuper well built! Really makes me want to finish my G-Wii up...
Eventually we make it to out respective hotels and parted ways until the convention, where I met up with
@HackerBilly in the hotel lobby while I was checking in. Apparently he ordered a pizza and it arrived just as I got there. What a coincidence! Once we got up to the room I decided to do a quick check of my luggage just to make sure that nothing got destroyed on the drive over, and thankfully everything was in one piece.
I left most of everything at the hotel until Saturday, since it was gonna be a pain to walk over a 50lb duffel bag back and forth. Grabbed my backpack and we headed off to the convention hall. The walk over wasn't *too* bad, took us roughly 20min to get to the hall by foot from the hotel, so not something we wanted to keep doing continuously. After this we made it an effort to Uber/Lyft over, as it wasn't all that expensive to do.
We finally make it to the convention hall and... man what a line. Thankfully it went by quite quickly, and we did run into
@YveltalGriffin while Billy and I had our Steam Decks out waiting, so we were able to pass the time getting our wristbands & badges pretty quickly! By the time we finished, the line was at least twice the size it was when we started, so it's probably a good thing that we got there when we did.
Towards the beginning of the line, we spotted a kid working on boxing up the NES games for VIG ticket holders. Man I wouldn't want to be him, seems like he had a lot of work cut out for him! Hopefully he enjoyed helping out the event though
Finally, with out wristbands & badges in hand, we made out way up to the BitBuilt room!
We made it up, met everyone, and started getting the room all set up. Managed to snag a photo of Crash and Cheese setting up the BitBuilt sign, which really tied the whole room together!
Once we were somewhat set up, we all decided to head out to the gaming hall and check out some of the stuff on display! There was a lot of cool stuff to see and try out, but I did manage to find a light gun arcade cabinet that was in non-working order that someone was selling for $100. If i had the capacity to drag that back to my place, I totally would have! I'm hoping it managed to find a decent home regardless...
I didn't take too many pictures of the gaming hall on Friday, but we all joked about doing donuts in the hall on the Tesla that was on display. I also found this homebrew Undertale pinball machine that I thought was pretty neato!
After further shenanigans, we all went back to the room and continued to set-up and hang around. After lots of headaches getting my Dreamcast working on one of the PVMs Shank brought, we finally got Yveltal's MaplePad demo set up and ready to go, plus some light-gun game action if anyone was interested!
That was Friday in a nutshell, after getting abruptly kicked out right at midnight, we all headed back to our hotels to rest up for what would turn out to be an *extremely* busy day.
Next day, me, HackerBilly, and
@CrazyGadget roll up to the convention pretty early, so early that Crazy and Billy had to go get someone to open the room for us. Once that was all taken care of, Billy and Crazy went off to galavant at their early access in the vendor hall, while I stayed behind to watch the room and get some more stuff set up. Most importantly, I got the microconsole demo section all set up, including a Noldendo Wii Micro & a GC Micro all hooked up any ready to play! The GC Micro was a HUGE hit with convention goers, and we had a ton of people asking about it and definitely more than a few Melee sessions on it!
After we were FINALLY all set up, the convention was now open and the people flooded in. The room was PACKED for a good majority of the time! I'm so glad so many people came by and got a chance to see all of our amazing builds! There were plenty of questions to be answered as droves of people rotated through, getting a chance to try out many of the offerings, and asking lots of questions along the way!
I finally did manage to sneak out and get a look at the World of Nintendo exhibit that was right next door, and this was a kiosk nerd's dream! I got lots of good pictures of all the things they had to show, and did get a chance to talk with some of the people running the exhibit. It was probably the highlight of the entire convention for me! I even managed to snag a picture of the Game Boy kiosk with my modded DMG cheese gave me for the Secret Santa! This kiosk is like the holy grail for me, so it might be an understatement to say that I was nerding out a little bit hehe...
Also got a chance to stop by the Gamebox vendor hall booth and talk to Postman for a bit. They brought a lot of great stuff to see! I'll definitely need to build a GBHD at some point...
Lunch came around and one of the people from Free Geek made us all sandwiches! I was super grateful that they did this for us, and it was absolutely delicious! I also loved the Sonic toaster they were using! Makho also let me try out his GBC Pocket that he made a while back, which really makes me want to build my own! I absolutely love this Game Boy Pocket as some of you may already know, so this just hits hard for me!
I don't have too much more to share, and this post has already gotten absurdly long, so I'll finish this post off with some more stuff I found at the gaming hall. I'm quite the rhythm game enthusiast, so when I saw a Taiko no Tatsujin cabinet running with Green Ver., I absolutely lost my mind. They also had Project Diva, Sound Voltex, Chunithm, and Jubeat *networked*, which was an absolute trip to see at a large convention. I was hoping to find out who was running the servers, but I had no luck there. There was also an incredible collection of cars there, including a DeLorean as a BttF time machine!
We then ended the night off with some great live music by Goose & co., and some great multiplayer game sessions, including 1500CC Mario Kart, some Mario 64 splitscreen, and Tetris. Lots of alcohol flowing that night, was absolutely crazy.
I had an absolute blast. It was so great getting to see and do all these things and meet so many great people! I'm definitely going to make sure to come back next year, and I'll hopefully a little bit more flush on cash so I can peruse the vendor hall more than I actually did. Thanks for making my first time at MGC a memorable one everyone!