Retroroomish Booth at The Game & Geek Expo
Princess Peach, The Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase and 3,000 Nerds Walk Into a Convention Center. It sounds like a made up bit but it actually happened this weekend at the Raleigh Convention Center. I Went to Raleigh’s Game & Geek Expo for the Nostalgia and Got Suplexed by It Instead.
The cosplayers did the most, and I mean that as the highest compliment I have. You could not walk twenty feet without getting stuck behind someone in full armor. Foam swords catching on lanyards. A Peach who was fully aware the actual voice of Peach was somewhere in that building and carried herself accordingly.
Nobody was phoning it in. Somebody hand-sewed a costume. Somebody spent three months on a helmet they can barely see out of and then wore it for eight hours in September. These aren’t hobbies, they’re a lifestyle with a hot glue budget.
The runway is where it stopped being cute and started being impressive, because when you put that many people who built their own outfits in one room the bar quietly goes up. The kids were losing their minds. The parents were losing their minds. I was losing my mind and I didn’t know who half the characters were, which is the best way to watch a cosplay contest. You point at the coolest one and yell.
One hill I will die on: the best cosplayers at a con this size aren’t the ones with the most expensive builds. They’re the ones who commit to the bit. The guy who stayed in character while ordering a pretzel. The Power Ranger who hit the pose every single time a kid asked, which by my count was roughly four hundred times. That’s why a con built by Raleigh natives feels different from one built by a corporation. Everybody here actually wanted to be here.
Before we get into the rest of it, let’s dive into what the expo was for.
The Game and Geek Expo – What is it?
The Game and Geek Expo is North Carolina’s newest nostalgic convention. This was their second year running and it was phenomenal. The expo was hosted at the Raleigh Convention Center throughout the weekend and my only complaint is that it wasn’t longer.
The pitch is basically “everything you loved from the 80s, 90s and 2000s, under one roof, plus the people who made it.” And they meant everything. A mega marketplace packed with vendors selling retro cartridges, trading cards, comics, plushies, and things I did not need but now own. Freeplay gaming with retro and modern consoles, arcades, VR, rhythm games, PC rigs, you name it, they had it.
Tournaments for the competitive people. Tabletop for the people who want to argue about rules. Panels with industry guests. Beyblades tournaments. An entire Dungeons and Dragons experience. A cosplay runway. Live wrestling, because this is North Carolina and of course there was live wrestling. A time machine lounge that drops you straight into the 80s and 90s. And an after dark party, for the adults who paid for a babysitter and intended to get their money’s worth.
Then there’s the guest list, which is where it went from “nice local con” to “wait, who is here?” The voice of Princess Peach. The voice of Bowser. WWE Hall of Famers, including the Million Dollar Man himself and the D-Von Dudley. Silent Hill and Castlevania voice actors. A Gears of War developer. A Mighty Morphin Power Ranger. That’s not a second-year lineup. That’s a lineup for a con that’s been around a decade and has a sponsor wall to prove it.
I loved this expo so much because it felt like it’s trying to be the place where every kid who grew up with an NES controller in their hands, every card player, every cosplayer, and every wrestling fan in the state can walk in and immediately find their people. Which, based on the lines for the photo ops alone, they did.
The Best Vendor Booth – RetroroomISH
There were so many incredible booths and vendors but if there were awards for best booth setup, it would no doubt go to the guys at RetroroomISH.
It felt like I was stepping into someone’s living room in 1992, which made sense because after talking to the owner’s, I was told this setup is from one of their actual living rooms. A human being chose this vibrant pieces of what I consider art older than their grandmother over sad beige furniture, it made me immediately want to set my couch on fire. I’ve been browsing marketplace for hours already looking for something similar.
The bright green couch with matching chairs, the chevron 70’s pattern throw over the couch, the wood bookcases stocked with every VHS you could imagine and three guys happier than anyone has a right to be at 11 a.m. on a Sunday lounging like they’d just found out rent was canceled and Blockbuster was reopening.
When I started chatting with one of the owners, Matt, I said “Tell me how this got started because there’s no way you just woke up one day and decided to set up shop'” Which to my surprise he said “Thats actually exactly what happened.”
He and one of the other owners met over a Facebook marketplace connection and had an instant connection. It down pretty much like this.
They both had insane VHS collections, a deep love for all things nostalgia and said “what the hell, why don’t we go into business together’ and RetroroomISH was born.
When I asked Jade, one of the owners, why does he think physical media is back he nailed the answer.
“As millennials we’re the best with tech and we’ve had to learn new tech every time we blink, and there’s always something new and we are burnt out. When I get home I just want to sit down and put in a VHS and watch a movie with my daughter.”
Preach Jade because isn’t that the truth. I truly believe transporting back to 1997 and walking into a Blockbuster could heal me right now.
You can follow them on Instagram and Whatnot to purchase your favorite VHS’s, vibe with them, or just enjoy their content. They did hook me up with a very niche horror movie, Dr Giggles, which is a must-watch if you love all things horror.
Cosplayers – The Heart and Soul of Any Convention
I always look forward to the cosplayers at fandom conventions. These fans are the reason these events are so fun to begin with. They sleep, eat and breath these fantasy worlds and spend years perfecting their costumes just to wear them maybe 3-4x a year.
We’re talking handmade armor, elaborate makeup, wigs that probably required a small engineering degree, props that look like they were pulled directly out of a movie and enough attention to detail to make the original costume designer nervous. Some people show up in a T-shirt with a character’s face on it, and then you turn a corner and encounter someone who has apparently spent the last eight months constructing a fully functional suit of armor in their garage.
What makes it even better is that most cosplayers aren’t doing it because they’re expecting anything in return. They’re doing it because they genuinely fucking love these characters and the worlds they come from. They become part of the experience for everyone else, too. Kids light up when they see their favorite character walking around. Adults suddenly become 12 years old again. Complete strangers stop each other to ask for photos, compliment a costume or excitedly point out some tiny detail only another fan would recognize.
That’s the magic of conventions. The celebrities and panels might get people through the doors, but the fans are what make the place feel alive. Without the cosplayers wandering around looking like they accidentally escaped from whatever fictional universe they’re representing, you would just have a building full of people buying collectibles and standing in line for four hours. The cosplayers turn it into a fucking fandom.
Gouge Wrestling – NC Is Still a Wrestling Goldmine
Of course WWE is still the largest wrestling organization across the globe. But what I love about being a North Carolinian is our deeply rooted love for wrestling in general. You can travel to almost any corner of NC and find local events which I could not recommend more.
At the Game and Geek Expo, Gouge Wrestling held live wrestling matches every hour on the hour.
The first match I caught was with ‘Suited and Booted’ Roosevelt Conyers. Conyers comes out fully dressed to impress wearing a full suit and as the match goes on, the suit slowly comes off. His opponent got his dome rocked and had his flabbers gasted, and the fans were loving every minute of it.
Conyers retained his title and all was right in the world.
You could be across the convention deep in a video game and still hear the boom of the ring anytime someone got body-slammed into the mat, which honestly felt like the perfect soundtrack for the entire weekend. That is what I love about North Carolina wrestling. It does not need a massive arena, a television deal or 20,000 screaming fans to put on a damn good show. Give these wrestlers a ring, a microphone and a crowd willing to lose its mind, and they will absolutely deliver.
Gouge Wrestling brought that energy straight into the middle of the Game & Geek Expo, and watching people stop what they were doing to crowd around the ring was a pretty solid reminder that wrestling in North Carolina is not some forgotten little corner of the sport. The talent is here, the fans are here, and apparently we are perfectly happy to watch a man in a suit get the absolute shit kicked out of him between rounds of Mario Kart.
I Played Trimson – New Horror Video Game Launching in 2027
I interview people all the time but the second someone approaches me I clam up. But thankfully I didn’t when the creator of Trimson saw me eyeballing their monitors and asked me if I wanted to play their demo.
I’m a huge fan of horror video games, Silent Hill has always been one of my favorites so I walked by this booth probably 5 times before I actually sat down because I could see the demo just screaming my name.
I first attempted to play via computer but it became a little hard to switch between weapons when zombies were hurling themselves at me so the creator saw this and came up and handed me a controller instead and I locked in. Those zombies stood no chance.
Follow @nactogamingstudios on Instagram for more info on this and keep up with when it releases.
Princess Peach Bowser & WWE Icons
No convention would be set without celebrity panels and Game & Geek Expo did not disappoint.
Headliners on Day 1 were the voice actors Samantha Kelly and Kenny James, two voices that have been permanently burned into the brains of anyone who spent a questionable amount of their childhood playing Super Mario.
Samantha Kelly is the voice behind Princess Peach, Toad and Toadette, which means she has managed to provide the soundtrack to both royalty and the tiny mushroom people who have been getting kidnapped, thrown into lava and generally having a terrible time for decades. Hearing Peach’s voice come to life onstage was one of those moments where you realize just how much these characters have been woven into pop culture. She talked about her career, the characters she’s voiced and what it’s like to become the literal voice of someone’s childhood.
Then there was Kenny James, the man behind one of the most recognizable villain voices in gaming: Bowser. James has voiced the King of the Koopas for years, giving the giant turtle dragon his signature growl while somehow making him sound threatening, ridiculous and occasionally like he desperately needs a nap. His panel offered fans a behind-the-scenes look at the work that goes into creating a character who mostly spends his free time kidnapping princesses and getting repeatedly launched into walls by a tiny Italian plumber.
Day two headliners were WWE Royalty – The Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase and D’Von ‘GET THE TABLES’ Dudley, which is basically the convention equivalent of someone dropping two nuclear nostalgia bombs directly onto the schedule.
DiBiase brought the swagger, and that unmistakable Million Dollar Man energy, while D’Von brought the kind of crowd reaction that makes you wonder if someone has hidden a table somewhere backstage just waiting for the inevitable. For longtime wrestling fans, this was a pretty damn special pairing, because these are two guys who helped define completely different eras of WWE, and hearing them talk about their careers, the business and the absolute insanity of wrestling back in the day was exactly the kind of panel that makes you remember why you fell in love with wrestling in the first place.
I caught up with Ted just as he was wrapping up and was able to ask him where he got the million dollar laugh from. He said he was in the locker room one night and because he has a deeper voice, he kind of bellows when he laughs and he was laughing and Vince McMahon walked by and said “Thats it, that’s a million dollar laugh.” And history was made. Ted was so kind and I could listen to his stories all damn day.
You can follow The Yapper Gazette on Instagram and on Youtube for more Game and Geek Expo content because I have so much footage I’ve yet to edit and post, and make sure you follow and subscribe to Game and Geek Expo to get announcements for next years event!
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