Okay, just had someone point this thread out to me, WAY late to the party...

I'm one of the dudes that runs MGC, but I also don't like to oversell anything, so here goes with some quick facts and figures.

This is getting off into the weeds a bit here, but if we didn't have the Stern games there wouldn't have been a "hole". One of the things that Gary and I are very particular about is creating plans to fill the space as best as possible no matter what is there.

If you've been to the show for multiple years, we've never really had "holes". We won't again this year, whether Marco tries to equal or beat it or not, or whether someone else decides they want to make an even bigger splash. If they do, I'll find space. If not, I'll fill the space with other stuff.

Oh, and I'll also say this - for years we had people complain that they wanted more space to walk and enjoy the show in the vendor area, so last year we did that on purpose, and had a bunch of people then complain that it was too much space and they liked the smaller aisleways.

Life finds a way to fix that (see below photo for one example of ways we're already addressing it... and yeah, it isn't more games to play, but it's something unique that we can provide for the show...)

Having said that, if you are just looking for pinball, pinball is only one part of our show. I would instead look into some of the other shows first. If you want other things too, I think we provide more "things that aren't pinball" than any other pinball show, but again... I wouldn't consider ourselves a pinball show.

At Texas as a for instance, *everything* they do is a pinball show. The guests they have are exclusively people who made the machines or starred in the series depicted on the machines. They will have more pinball specific vendors than us I figure. And all that is fine.

For us, some of our attention is devoted to things like this year, bringing in Eric Bischoff that has absolutely nothing to do with pinball, and we gear our main stuff around doing all of that stuff too. If you're just looking for pinball, that makes no sense.

PRGE is the show I MOST want to get to in the future. PRGE went to a convention center before we did, and I talked with them about that move before we made ours. Having said that, the two shows are a bit different in the following ways (and I think they would say this too):

PRGE focuses much more on their "Retro" side, whereas while we have the word "Classic" in our title, we focus on all eras of stuff including new and upcoming stuff. They have a more comprehensive retro gaming section.

We, in part due to our location near the center of the traditional arcade industry, have a bigger arcade industry presence at our show. We do have a larger pinball showing than they do by a considerable margin.

PRGE has many more super rare 'artifacts' and fun stuff like that which they put on display at the show. I drool every time I see a photo of their 2600 displays. We focus on people playing stuff, so for the most part we have less crazy rare stuff, but I think we have a bit more "playable" stuff.

We are some odd square feet bigger than their most recent show, but I believe their most recent show was bigger in square feet than ours, so next year they may be larger than us again too. Square feet is a silly metric through.

I think that's the main stuff I'll come back in to try to tamp down MGC expectations if I can again in the future

DSCF7027 (resized).jpg