I am an active contributor to a local retro gaming community located on Long Island in NY. The organization has been putting on a yearly show, The Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, for five years now. I started actively contributing in 2016, and am now leading a team of individuals that maintain and operate all free play offerings for the organization. Free play consists of all sorts of retro gaming home consoles from companies such as Atari, Coleco, Nintendo, Sega, and NEC. It is a large list! In 2018 we started offering PC gaming as a free play option. This currently includes Mac and DOS gaming. In late 2019 we started planning for the 6th annual LI Retro Gaming Expo. Unfortunately the COVID-19 pandemic hit and we, as an organization, had a tough choice. Should we cancel the 2020 expo? We ultimately cancelled the annual Expo in March of 2020, but decided to forge ahead and offer a virtual convention. This turned out to be UPLINK, which took place on the second weekend in August of 2020.
Since UPLINK is an entirely online experience, there was a need to engage the audience in a virtual free play experience. Free play is one of the core offerings of the Expo. You get to sit down and play Space Invaders on genuine Atari hardware, play through the first levels of DOOM on a physical PC, and wander the Oregon Trail on a Macintosh.
Fast forward to today, UPLINK was a success, and it opened additional options for this local retro gaming community to spread the word on how gaming is a community experience.
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