I had been attending MAGFest since 2019, but this will be the first time I make a proper blog post about it!
In case you don't know, MAGFest (Music and Gaming Festival) is a convention held in the Gaylord National Convention Center, and it celebrates video games and video game music! Although it is primarily a video game convention, you'll still find some cool anime merch and cosplayers, too. In fact, there was a lot of stuff relating to Chainsaw Man.
It usually takes place on the first weekend of January, so it gets very cold around that time. However this time, it was surprisingly warm the first day and only gradually got a little colder.
In the exhibit hall are four halls: the marketplace, the arcade hall, the console hall, and the indie game showcase hall.
Perhaps my favorite part of MAGFest is the exhibit hall, which is open 24 hours throughout the whole event. Before I moved to the East coast, my spouses made it a tradition to always go to the exhibit hall at around 3am, so more games are available to play. Although we spent most of the time at the marketplace, I am glad to say that we continued the tradition of going to the arcade and console halls this year!
The marketplace is, as indicated by its name, is where vendors can sell all kinds of merchandise, from artists selling their artwork to vendors selling old games and tech. Here's my haul!
The arcade hall contains all sorts of arcade and pinball machines that people generously donated to the convention staff. I'm not much of an arcade person, but I do love me some rhythm games and found myself gravitating towards the Taiko no Tatsujin machine. :3
The console hall contains a lot of home consoles attached to numerous televisions. Any console you can think of, it was there! The convention staff also hosts some Super Smash Bros tournaments, although I met some cool dudes that are trying to put together a Splatoon tournament. I'm a retired competitive player, but I have fingers crossed for next year!
The indie game showcase is a hall where game developers can show off their own homebrew games. There were some...interesting ones, ones I cannot describe. Hopefully, I'll remember to film it next year, but some games I enjoyed playing was a typing party game!
Since we planned for our trip to MAGFest to be a relaxing one, I didn't cosplay nor did I take a lot of photos of cosplays. However, that doesn't mean that there weren't good cosplays, though! Below are photos of my favorites!
Besides the exhibit hall, there are also two museums located in the upper level of the convention center: one that contains arcade machines from the 80s-90s (that still work!) and one that has computers and related hardware such as the Commodore and other IBM computers! There was even a typewriter from the 80s where we got to type in memes and such. I wrote the first few sentences of the Bee Movie. :3 In the arcade museum, I played a pretty addicting game called Klax and I hope it'll become available as part of a collection of arcade games for the Switch or something!
Overall, I had a really good time at MAGFest with my spouses. My only criticism was that there wasn't as much in the museum as it was in previous years, but I have no doubt that it was the result of COVID. Still, I had a wonderful time, and I definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to have a good and relaxing time at a convention!
Although...I hope that whoever invented the Colossus Roar steps on LEGO pieces barefoot for the rest of their lives. In the meantime, here are two more photos that I took!
