Hello everyone, the 12th Annual MAGFest event is coming up at the beginning of next year. It is held at the Gaylord at National Harbor hotel and conference center off of i495 (DC Beltway.) It starts on Thursday and runs until Sunday afternoon. It's a 24 hour event, most things never close.

At MAGFest 11 the arcade room was a 30,000 square foot space containing 200 plus arcade games. This includes pinball machines, music games, classic arcades, racers, and fighters. There was an original pong machine, several music games that are very rare (only a few in the USA) and a decent lineup of pins.

In addition there is another similar sized space just for consoles (Atari 2600 to modern), marketplace area, Indy game development area, lan party area, and more. Upstairs is home to panels and full on video game music concerts.

This year we have a badge for a cab/pin program. Anyone who brings a working arcade machine Thursday and takes it Sunday for the public to play gets free attendance. So if anyone is interested in sharing their collection with 10,000+ visitors, it's appreciated.

The bulk of the 200 machines come from serious collectors and a few commercial vendors (arcades) -- it's how the arcade happens. Believe it or not the majority is home collectors (80 vids from one person, 20+ music games from another, 40+ from another and so on.)

Also -- if there are community groups (Pinside, KLOV, pinball leagues, facebook arcade groups, etc) that want a table in the arcade for flyers / to set up display we can accommodate! Regulars include ACAM at Funspot and Retro Gaming Roundup podcast. The only rule is no sales from the community group tables. People who are selling things need to go through applying for a marketplace table, which is in a neighboring expo hall.

If you want to put a for sale note on a machine -- that should be okay, but the sale is between buyer and owner and that all happens between those parties, and it's problematic to remove machines before the end of MAGFest (loading dock availability.) Please PM me on here first if you are looking to do this.

Some pictures of MAGFest 12 arcade:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethanotoole/8409451770/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethanotoole/8409450960/

Those pictures are only half the room, roughly

www.magfest.org is the official event site. There you can find information about the music artists and panelists and others.

To submit information about bringing a game (or multiple games) just visit magfest.org and click the drop down tab for How to Contribute. Select Bring an Arcade and fill out the information there.
If there are any questions, feel free to PM me on here.

Power distribution is beautiful, we have 28+ 10 outlet / 20 amp power strips will full current monitoring. The venue has proper power hand-off (hundreds of amps.) Good loading docks, vehicles can be driven in during set up / tear down.

Fest 11 attendance was over 9000 people. Growth is generally 50% year over year or better.

Hope to see you there!

Ah - I forgot to mention. 100% of the arcade games are set to free play.

boo32 - thanks! The pinballs at MAGFest early this year as I remember them:
STTNG, Doctor Who, Hook (mine)
Indiana Jones (Williams) - Mike L.
Cleopatra - Forgot his name From PA league
Whirlwind, Black Hole, Super Mario Bros - Luna City Arcade
Nitro Ground Shaker - Buffett
PoTC, Sopranos, Family Guy, Ripleys BION - Flippers in Grandy NC

Can't remember who owns Centaur I think it's Luna City Arcade which is a private home gameroom collection. He also brings classics like environmental discs of Tron and a number of vector games and such.

There was a tourney on pins, a 10 game classic video tournament, a NBA Jams tournament by Screw Attack and a Neo Geo Windjammers tournament among others.

The story of InvisoFrogger is that there was a PCB that had an issue where Frogger wasn't rendering. They had the idea of running a tournament with this malfunctioning board and announced it. The tournament was running and it was going well when all of a sudden the (already malfunctioning) board totally quit. So that locked in the results a little per-maturely but there was still a good amount of competition.

Over the course of the next year a friend and myself took the Frogger roms and removed the sprite data for the frog, re-burned them to EPROMs and converted a working board to an inviso-frogger board that was stable. And thus the competition has continued!!

A friend reversed a bunch of other data in frogger like the text and what not, but just because it runs in MAME doesn't mean it will run on a real boardset.