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If my blogs had gone as planned (and I had a lot more time to write them...), I would have spoken about some of the changes we were looking into to help people understand what was taking place every hour at the MGC. One of those ideas was to make an hourly guide, just like a TV Guide, that plainly lists what's going on and when.

Unfortunately, not everything can be listed on an hourly basis, because, well, sometimes we just do things based on the crowd and on a whim, and other times we really don't know what we're going to do about a particular thing until the very last minute. For everything else, there is this guide, which I'm happy to say will eventually include just about everything.

The first part of the guide I have for you guys is the museum guide. Now, right away I need to qualify that by saying this isn't the entire Wisconsin room at the Olympia Resort, mind you, its far from it. The "Museum-Proper", as I call it, is the part of the museum that Marty and I are personally largely responsible for. The other half of the Wisconsin room is made up of the Events area, which is where you will find VGEvo, The BenHeck.com Experience, the Family Game Room, and the Underdog Chamber. Technically, this also includes the Atari Fest, the Development Kit & Debug Zone, and even the Turbo Fest, but those are in the museum-proper.

Confused? Well, I'm just getting warmed up!

All of these "Events within an Event" as we like to call them are run by folks that through the years have approached us about doing something in the museum area of the Midwest Gaming Classic. For example, after I believe coming to the Midwest Gaming Classic 2003, David Flemming approached us about doing an "Underdog Chamber" filled with the systems and computers that were steamrolled by generally larger companies with bigger bankrolls. Over the years his area has become one of the focal points of the "Classic Gaming and Computing Museum" because it gave people a chance to see and play a lot of the great games and systems they may have missed. It became so popular that it is now advertised on the MGC website and has become its own autonomous area within the Classic Gaming and Computing Museum.

When we first started to do the Midwest Gaming Classic, the entire museum was made up of just one person, Marty Goldberg. The second year, The Midwest Gaming Classic 2002, the museum was made up of both Marty and myself after I had taken in the show the previous year and decided to get involved. Now nearly eight years after doing the first Midwest Gaming Classic, the entire Classic Gaming and Computing Museum area is made up of over 30 people involved in over ten different zones, many of which have been spun off into their own autonomous areas like the Underdog Chamber and the Family Game Room.

Eventually we will publish the hourly guide for the Events area, the Tournaments, and the Speakers. Working on something like the Museum, however, was something I thought would be a good first step considering the scope of it, not to mention the issues with doing a guide where half of the systems will have its games filled on an hourly basis, and the other half will likely be a spur of the moment decision.

Is nobody playing Venture on the Colecovision? Put in Donkey Kong and see how that works.

It'll actually be interesting to look back after the show and see what people prefer, or more specifically if people show any signs of actually camping a system because they know in a few minutes a certain game they wanted to play will be going in.

Hmm... This has kinda gotten long enough for me to simply hit that "Blog" button and post it now, hasn't it? Now you gotta ask yourself, was it always in my intentions to trick everyone into reading this blog as any normal post, or did I honestly go off on the world's largest tangent simply based on one guide? Hmmm....

In any case, here's the guide:

Midwest Gaming Classic 2009 Museum Guide

Note the usual disclaimers... These items are subject to change, and some things may be added or deleted from the list.

Hope you like it! That's well over 200 playable games in just under a quarter of the Classic Gaming and Computing Museum!

Later.