26-28th January 2010 - ExCeL Centre, Docklands, London
The European Amusement and Gaming Expo, held at the ExCeL Exhibition Centre was the inaugural staging of the industry’s newest mega-event. With the promise of over 130 exhibitors and nearly 5,000 visitors over the 3 days, myself and fellow CGEU member Arcadian were quite excited to see what the EAG Expo had to offer. ..
Our first task though was to navigate our way from Earl’s Court to Docklands, a task that turned out to be more difficult and long winded than we expected. A tube, a walk, a train and another walk later and we arrived at the show eager to get started and walking into the venue we immediately felt at home. Unlike the ATEI show that I had attended in the morning, the ExCeL Centre was a buzz with the sounds of arcade gaming machines and seaside style grabbers. There was still a bias towards gambling machines in most areas of the hall, but we were pleasantly surprised by the quantity and quality of true amusement machines on display.
Girls playing games. OMG!
Many of the top names in arcade entertainment were present, such as Sega, Konami, Electrocoin and Namco and some of the new equipment they were showing off was mind blowing!
Whilst the traditional driving, shooting and flying games were all in abundance and added little in the way of originality, interesting licenses and concepts made them feel fresh.
Novelty games were very much a part of the show including a great Guitar Hero machine being ignorantly hogged by the Konami helper, a coin-op version of the ancient Playstation game Bishi Bashi Special and a number of games that attempted to put an image of the player into the game, such as a linked 4 player tank game that photographed your face and superimposed it onto your avatar (with varying degrees of success) and a wonderfully simple Scalextric type racing game that projected the combatants onto a large back-board screen.
Get your victory face on screen!
But some of the most interesting machines were also the biggest and this was evidenced no better than Korean company Rassen who were showing off the stunning Vulcan-M. This game featured a 100″ screen, a vibrating floor and a huge fully rotating barrell replica Gatling gun.
SEGA had a huge area where they promoted both their own branded items and many more where they act as distributor. Some of the biggests and most interesting were the moving theatre machines. The XD theatre (coming in 8, 16 or 24 seat variants) was a superb full 3D movie experience, whereas the smaller 2 seater Typhoon machines were actually quite disappointing as they blasted air into your face to give the illusion of speed. This worked quite well, however a lack of real movement meant it was a little wasted.
SEGA (and Sonic in particular) had significant floorspace.
Other machines of particular interest included titles such as MP Group Leisure’s Marathon Runner. This was basically a hamster wheel that you run in to win redemption tickets. Unfortunately this seemed handicapped in favour of short people (i.e. kids), so when we had a go we were particularly awful at it.
Other highlights were a new conversion kit for large games where the huge screens are being removed and replaced by bigger, brighter and more importantly cheaper flat screen TVs.
42" Plasma TV Conversion giving new life to an old system.
All in all it was an entertaining and fun day. We managed to speak to a number of developer/manufacturer/distributors, making good contacts and enjoyed our trip to the smoke immensly.
Our photos from the day are available in the Gallery.
More detailed write ups of the event, along with excellent photo galleries are avaiable here…
Well you have to big yourself up at these events!