GAME ON FROM A BASEMENT TO BAIRD CENTER, HOW MIDWEST GAMING CLASSIC GOT HUGE
The Midwest Gaming Classic, an annual convention dedicated to all sorts of games, will take place the first weekend in April at the Baird Center in downtown Milwaukee. ⬤ The annual convention, which was first held in a basement in the early 2000s, had a rocky start. But gaming fans’ passion for their interests and dedication to their community have grown the convention from a few hundred people to more than 20,000 attendees exploring three full floors of exhibits, panels and merch in downtown’s convention center.
Jagfest? What’s that?
Dan Loosen, the organizer of the classic, said the convention started because he and some of his friends “fell in love with” an obscure video game console in the 1990s — the Atari Jaguar.
“There was this small group of people, myself included who, for whatever reason, loved this system,” said Loosen. “If I had walked into school and said ‘let’s play Jaguar,’ people would have looked at me like I had a third eye. But the internet allowed me to find my community.”
After years of talking online, Loosen’s Jaguar community decided the next logical step was to hang out in real life; that happened when he was 18 in 1999 and attended the first Jagfest in Rochester, Minnesota. Loosen loved the experience, saying it felt like a club where people got to share their passions.
The community started holding the festival annually, each time rotating to a new location. In 2001, Loosen and his friends offered to host the festival in Milwaukee, although they changed the name to Atari Jaguar Festival because, Loosen said, “Jagfest sounds weird.”
Loosen said the Milwaukee festival turned out to be “what many people consider the most popular Jagfest” with 100 people in attendance, 75 of whom traveled to the festival from outside the Milwaukee area. “Three people even came in from Japan,” Loosen said.
These Jagfests were Loosen’s first taste of the community that can form when people with a shared passion for even something as obscure as a random video game console get together to obsess about their interests.
It was a feeling he wanted to continue, so he and his Milwaukee-area Jaguar enthusiasts offered to host the following year’s festival as well. However, the group agreed that part of the charm of the festival was its rotating location, so Loosen and his friends started brainstorming something new to capture that same feeling of shared passion.
That’s how the Midwest Gaming Classic was born. The idea was to expand beyond the Jaguar and invite people who had interests in all types of games to “come in with cool displays to show them off to people.”
Midwest Gaming Classic tries to find niche
The first two years, the Classic was held in the basement of the Boy Scouts service center, then they moved to a high school cafeteria.
Loosen said the year of the high school cafeteria is “seared into my memory.”
The group went all-in on promotion that year, taking out thousands of dollars’ worth of classified ads; they expected at least 1,000 people to attend.
“We had 206 people,” said Loosen. “The budget for just the ads was $2,500 and we only charged $5 per ticket. That was not a great year.”
After that experience, the group decided they needed to “go big or go home.”
They decided to hold the event at the Brookfield Sheraton, they did even more advertising and attendance that year grew to 1,600 people. However, the added expense of the venue meant they again lost money.
Although he was discouraged, Loosen thought the silver lining of that year’s event was that the fans loved it. He only became more discouraged when he read online comments about the event.
Those comments made it clear that the Classic had an existential problem; they didn’t know who their audience was.
“When I went home and pulled up the message boards, the people who gave us bad reviews were hardcore gamers,” said Loosen. “The people who had all Nintendo games except two and had expected to find those games are our convention.”
Gamers build their community
“We threw up our hands and said this was stupid, and we’re not going to do it again,” said Loosen. “People don’t like it and we keep losing money.”
The problem was that there were indeed fans who loved the Midwest Gaming Classic. Not wanting to let those fans down but feeling as if they didn’t have the ability to host a profitable convention, Loosen and his fellow organizers came up with what they thought was “an impossible wish list.”
They sent out an email to their fans, explaining that they couldn’t hold another convention unless they could get twice the space for half the cost, someone to staff the ticketing booth all weekend and people to visit local gaming stores to promote the Classic.
“We figured we were showing our fans how impossible it was to hold the Classic and that no one would want to take on these tasks,” said Loosen. “We figured then we would be able to wash our hands of it.”
But that’s not what happened. Instead, seven or eight of the Gaming Classic’s fans started a group email, divided the tasks among themselves and got to work.
Loosen said he hadn’t heard from anyone for about two weeks and assumed his message had gotten through.
“But then I got an email telling me they had found a location that was 4 times the space for half the cost, that they had a couple who would run the ticket booth for the entire weekend and that a group of three people agreed to go to 15 game stores every week to advertise the Classic,” said Loosen. “My business partner and I were like, ‘Shoot, I guess we’re going to have to do this thing.’”
They agreed to hold the convention, but to quit if they ever lost money again. For the next six years, they never made more than $200 on the Classic, but they also never lost money. And the fans who came together to save the convention still help out every year.
A family-friendly ‘buffet’
Ever since the Midwest Gaming Classic fans stepped up and helped out, Loosen has had a clear idea of the convention’s mission and purpose. The Classic is not a specialized event for “hardcore” gamers; rather, Loosen describes the event as a family-friendly gaming buffet.
“We’re not going to be the biggest or best event for just Nintendo or whatever,” said Loosen. “But we are the most diverse; we have something for everybody.”
That includes pinball machines, arcade games, air hockey tournaments, board games, Dungeons & Dragons tutorials, video game consoles, trading card games, pop culture booths and costume contests. There are also panel presentations focusing on everything from the history of food mascot games to video game music to Saturday morning cartoons.
“I’m always willing to say yes to anyone who has an idea of something they’re excited to show off,” said Loosen. “It’s like a maker fair for gamer stuff where we have small groups of people dedicated to specific games and representatives of top companies in the industry, and we present them right next to each other.”
Don and Liz Caldwell are two of the fans who helped Loosen get the Classic off the ground years ago. The couple — who first bonded over their love of pinball decades ago — have 18 pinball machines in their basement and another 15 or so in storage. They run a booth at the Classic every year.
Although pinball is their thing, they enjoy the annual opportunity to see what kinds of games other people are passionate about. In addition to the diversity of games, the Caldwells also appreciate the diversity of the people who attend.
“This is the most integrated event I go to, and I notice these things because I’m in a hobby that is very white-male-dominated,” said Liz Caldwell.
Don Caldwell also pointed out that there are more families and children who attend the Classic than he sees at other gaming conventions.
“There’s so much family orientated stuff for kids to do at the Classic, and Sunday is always a less expensive family day,” said Caldwell. “The people who come to our booth, they always have their little sprouts with them. Everybody wants to encourage young people to enjoy gaming and be part of this community.”
A gaming convention that breaks stereotypes
Loosen appreciates that the Classic stands out from other conventions that are more male-dominated. He estimates that the Classic attendees are closer to a 50/ 50 gender breakdown.
A few years ago, Loosen and his son were at a Boy Scout campout where he met another dad who was surprised to find out Loosen runs the Gaming Classic.
“He said he and his daughter love going to the show every year, but her number one concern was boys in her class finding out that she likes gaming,” said Loosen. “She thought games aren’t supposed to be for girls, and even though her dad tried to tell her it’s not true, he said it had been really hard to convince her.”
After that conversation, Loosen added a panel to the Classic.
“We called it ‘gamers who happen to be women,’ and we featured a CEO of a company, a professional Esports gamer, some of the top air hockey and pinball players,” said Loosen. “When people see other people who are doing the things they love, then it doesn’t seem so weird that they could do it too.”
All those years ago, after the Classic that took place in the Brookfield Sheraton, Loosen was disappointed to see complaints about the show, especially because he thought people had loved it. Now he hears stories all the time about people who love the Classic.
One anecdote that stands out in his memory is when a person who runs a group at the Classic told Loosen why he decided to get involved.
“He said he went to the show to see what it was like and he saw a grandpa walking around with a little girl that was 3 or 4 years old. He was carrying a stool with him so she could stand on it when she wanted to see something,” said Loosen. “He told me he’d been to 100 shows across the country and he had never seen that kind of interaction. That’s why this is his favorite.”