Hey all you fantastic Creatures!
We just got back from this years Portland Retro Gaming Expo and ooooooooh man was it epic!
Met some wonderful people, made some connections, bought some games, sold some merch, and most importantly tons of people enjoyed playing Circus Interstellar!! 🎪🤡🎪
Let’s start from the top!
Setting The Stage
Obviously the first thing we did was get our booth all assembled and ready. Being that we’d never done that before, it took a lot of trial and error. First we started off with 3 tables, but the tables were actually larger than we originally anticipated, so we ended up ditching 1 of the tables in favor of more open space.
Next we hung the banner, setup the arcade cab, setup tv’s, got laptops ready, laid out the tablecloth, set the rug, folded t-shirts and backpacks, laid out games, comics, and pins. Then we hung balloons all around us.
After all that, this was the final result:
The booth looked better than anything we could have imagined, especially for our first ever booth, and people seemed to really enjoy it!
Win win!! 😀
The Circus Gets Underway
Upon completion of the Ettinsoft booth we still had until the next day before expo goers were allowed into the vendors hall, but that didn’t stop other awesome exhibitors from popping by to see what was going on at the clown infested booth!
On the first day we met some wonderful people who became fast friends and had a great time chatting before they surprised us with an early purchase of a physical copy of Circus Interstellar!
They even asked us to sign it!
Thanks Daniel and Joey, you guys rock! 😉
The next two days was GAME ON! We started the second day off painting our faces (thanks to our badass friend Savannah) and jumped right into it.
As people wondered by the booth, they were quickly sucked in by the bumping jams coming from the CI cabinet as well as the enthusiastic clowns (the three of us lol) manning the booth and giving them the rundown on the game.
The comics and physical copies were definitely a hot buy, with many expo goers straight up asking us to sign their copies! Which was quite a surprise! 😮
So many people had such a blast playing on the cab, which felt great! Some even jumped with excitement whenever a clown would spook them, it was really fun to watch.
We even gave away most of the free party hats and coloring pages to parents and their kids, which produced many a warm smile. 😊
We received a wonderful surprise on our second day too, both our parents and little brother showed up to cheer us on and help us at the booth! That was wicked cool! Love them so much. ❤
We also ran into a few people we had seen online through the Atari community such as John Hancock, even ended up buying a copy of his game Block em’ Sock em’ for the SNES, can’t wait to play that!
Paul E. Niemeyer, the creator of the original Mortal Kombat dragon logo, was also at the convention! We talked with him for a good while, got autographs, and ended up giving him a free copy of our comic as thanks for him being such an awesome dude! 😊
We learned so much running this booth (such as how difficult it is to eat food while doing so lol) and now have a much better idea of what to do next year.
Thank you again to all of the awesome people who supported us before and during the Expo, especially thanks to our friend Savanah, whose help was invaluable. She’s definitely invited to the next Expo!
You guys are all amazing, and you can bet we will totally be there next year! 😉
The Spoils
A retro game convention wouldn’t be complete without breaking the bank!
We ended up buying tons of games and merch from the many other booths surrounding us.
Many a gem was found.
My favorite find was a back-lit Gameboy Advance SP and a legit copy of Pokémon Emerald! I’ll be playing that for days on end.
Stephan was stoked about his new Atari 2600 and the mountain of games he got for it! (thanks Bill and John, you two are great guys 😀)
Savanah ended up snagging a ton of crafted goods and a bunch of gifts for her family, which I’m guessing they must have enjoyed immensely! 🐉
Also a big shout out to Layla Bushey who helped us hand out our Circus Interstellar cards and had a booth full of awesome stickers we loaded up on, you were so cool and we really appreciated it! 😁
Here’s a link to her One Stop Sticker Shop Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/TheOneStopStickerShop?mibextid=ZbWKwL
She’s got tons of awesome stickers of all sorts of different styles and themes! (including Helluva Boss stickers that I bought too many of lol)
We also found this ironic picture for our home that just suits us so well lol
Depths of the Arcade
After all the craziness of the vendors hall we found ourselves with several hours left to do whatever we wanted, so we moseyed on over to the arcade section to hit up some of the classics!
First we started off with some Berzerk! (naturally) The cab had definitely seen some years, but worked like a charm and was pretty fun.
Then we split the party, Stephan went with Joey to play a fighter and I went with Daniel to play some Root Beer Tapper. I was actually surprised that Root Beer Tapper actually had different mechanics than the original Tapper, that was a pleasant surprise!
Then Daniel showed me her favorite game called Mappy, which was a total blast! It was basically a platforming Packman, so I instantly loved it lol. Definitely gonna check the multi-cade at home and see if I’ve got Mappy on there!
While I was playing Mappy a couple awesome Mortal Kombat cosplayers approached us and challenged Stephan to a match on OG MK1! In the first bout between Stephan and Subzero, Stephan was just able to come out on top, but his victory was swiftly put to shame when the lu-Kang stepped up to the challenge, destroying Stephan with 2 flawless victories.
No contest lol.
Afterwards we all went over to try our hands at this awesome Joust remake named Killer Queen. The game is a 5 v 5 where 2 linked back to back cabs verse each other. It was such a blast and if you haven’t heard of it, definitely Google it! Long story short, we lost, but it was tons of fun! I guess it’s available on the Nintendo Switch, so I will totally be picking up a copy for myself.
Here’s a trailer of Killer Queen in case your curious:
As the night closed, we finished it off with some good old fashioned Mario Kart 64! Obviously that was fun, who doesn’t love Mario Kart? xD
Unfortunately I missed out on the pinball machines, but I’ll just catch those next year. 😄
All in all, PGRE was an amazing experience, and I can’t wait to do it again! 😆
The Clowns Go Super
Now begs the question, what’s next from us at Ettinsoft?
Some of you already know the answer to this, as we’ve no doubt mentioned it a ton on our social media’s, but for those of you who aren’t aware we already have an idea of what we’re going to be working on next!
Originally we planned for Circus Interstellar’s gameplay to be completely redesigned, but due to the sudden iiRcade shutdown, that plan changed drastically and we released Circus Interstellar with its original Berzerk styled gameplay.
However, my brother and I still want to go through with completely revamping the game.
So we plan on working on a definitive edition we’re calling Super Circus Interstellar!
Many of the core mechanics will be changed to make the game resemble more of a rogue-like meets Berzerk style. We’ll cover more on Super Circus Interstellar once we begin full development, so keep an eye out! 👀
Also, just to get ahead of you guys, we don’t plan on sticking with the clowns forever lol.
We actually have several different game ideas ready, we really just want to make Circus Interstellar as awesome we can.
So have no fear, we’re no one trick pony! 🐴
This year has been quite the trip for us, so thank you all for supporting us every step of the way! 😊
We’ll keep on keeping on and can’t wait to show you what we have in store. 😀
-Matthew and Stephan Hanewinckel; Co-owners of Ettinsoft LLC
We hope to see more of you creatures in the discord. 🙂
