When Brian Wissner discovered some of the old video game consoles stored away in his childhood home, he saw an opportunity to connect with his then-four-year-old daughter.
"Playing video games was kind of my escape, it was my pastime," says Wissner, who returned to Pittsburgh with his wife and three kids after living in Baltimore, Md. for four years. "Video games in general have trended in a more violent direction and I wanted to be able to do whatever I was doing in front of my kid."
He says he found a "modded, old school Xbox console" full of Nintendo NES and Super Nintendo games and decided to introduce his daughter to the world of Super Mario Bros.
"She was immediately enamored with it," he says. "And so we started playing video games, and I asked her, 'Hey, would you like to collect video games with Dad, this could be, like, a hobby for us?' And, you know, this is a four-year-old kid, they're probably always gonna say yes to whatever. So that was like a father-daughter hobby for us."
Little did he know that this father-daughter hobby would spin into the Pittsburgh Gaming Expo, an annual convention dedicated to all things related to gaming culture. The event returns Sat., Sept., 30-Sun., Oct. 1 at the Monroeville Convention Center, where attendees will find, among many other offerings, hundreds of arcade, pinball, and board games, all of which are free to play.
The event stems from Pittsburgh Retro Gaming, a Facebook community Wissner and the Expo's co-founders, Colt Dalmaso and Alex Kinnamon, started in 2014 as a way to connect collectors of game cartridges for Nintendo NES, Sega Genesis, and other old-school consoles. As Wissner tells it, he and his co-organizers then tried organizing a free meetup, and "nobody showed up."
In 2015, he says they tried again at Game Masters, a store that was then on Babcock Boulevard in the North Hills (it has since relocated to West View).
"And I applied the knowledge that a mentor had given me years before and told me that anything worth doing, even if you're not going to charge a lot, you should charge something," he says, adding that they charged $5 and 100 people attended.
Due to the crowd size, they quickly realized that a larger venue was in order should they decide to continue. They hosted a 2016 convention at an Elks Lodge on Cedar Avenue, which attracted around 500 people. In 2017 and 2018, what was then branded as the Pittsburgh Retro Gaming Convention took place at the former Ace Hotel in East Liberty.
However, Wissner and his team soon found that many venues, including the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, which has previously hosted similar events like the now-defunct Replay FX, were beyond their price range should they want to expand.
Then, Wissner says, someone put them in touch with Mike Vento, who serves as general manager at the Monroeville Convention Center. When the subject of rental payment came up, at the time, Wissner says they only had about $1,200 to spend, and believed they were wasting Vento's time.
"He's like, 'Don't worry, you'll do the show, and it will do well enough that you'll be able to pay for it,'" recalls Wissner.
Unfortunately, the pandemic would put the convention on hold for a few years. The event finally took place at the Center in 2021, this time as the Pittsburgh Gaming Expo.
"And it was a huge success," Wissner says.
The 2023 edition features all the elements that Wissner and his fellow organizers always hoped they could provide to attendees. Besides the free play, there are cosplay contests, panels with industry experts, live music, and gaming tournaments, including for Iron City Pinball players.
"When we moved into the Convention Center, we finally had space to bring in tabletop gaming, because that's something I'm very passionate about," says Wissner, referring to the designated tabletop role-playing games area where players can indulge in what a press release describes as over 100 hours of "epic adventures" over the course of the weekend.
Tattoo booths and vendors are also on hand to send guests home with something to remember their experience.
Wissner emphasizes that, since the Expo began, the goal was always to create a family-friendly event where kids and their parents or caregivers could share quality time together through gaming. This includes making it fairly inexpensive, with Wissner pointing out that a family of six can get in for $75, which he believes is cheaper than going to the movies.
"It's very family-oriented, and probably one of the most rewarding elements of the show is getting to see parents share these nostalgic machines and games with their kids," he says, "and to watch their faces light up and watch the parents wax nostalgic as they beat the kid at, like, Street Fighter."
Pittsburgh Gaming Expo. Sat., Sept., 30-Sun., Oct. 1. Monroeville Convention Center. 209 Mall Blvd., Monroeville. Ticket and badge prices vary. All ages. pghretrogaming.com
How a father-daughter hobby turned into the Pittsburgh Gaming Expo
