MATC’s students showed off their own games at the Midwest Gaming Classic at the Baird Center. The Gaming Classic, on the first weekend in April, is one of the largest gaming conventions in the Midwest, and it hosted over 18,000+ attendees in 2023. The quantity of 2024 attendees is comparable to Anime Milwaukee, filled to the brim with nerds of all flavors and interests.
Many large companies such as Nintendo, Tesla and world-renowned paleontologists attended the event besides local companies and Internet Influencers. TikToker “Roll For Sandwich” was there, who is known to use RPG dice to make randomized sandwiches for TikTok. There was a lot of support for people cosplaying (the activity or practice of dressing up as a character from a work of fiction), artists (such as artists from video games, comic books, and adjacent industries), and incoming game developers (such as students from MATC and surrounding colleges, freelance indie developers, and professional developers).
There was a very refreshing openness to the entire thing; going through each of the sections (vendors hall, gaming hall, tabletop hall, etc.), students felt very welcomed in the space which is often overlooked in a lot of similar events. Anytime there was an issue, someone working the event was very, very thorough in handling it and was very attentive to complaints and compliments. Students were able to experiment with different hobbies such as DND (Dungeons and Dragons), rock climbing, larping (live-action role-playing games), soccer with puppets and playing video/arcade games from every era.
The gaming and game development communities at MATC and the greater Milwaukee area have been gaining in popularity each year. With the ever-growing interest in gaming, this year’s event hosted an even wider variety of possible connections and opportunities.
MATC’s students had their projects shown off through Mothership, which had a booth secured for the event right next to the booth reserved for Dino Might, a game showcased by the founders of this year’s Mothership club, Kevin King and Katrina Senebouttarath. Mothership is MATC’s game development club that focuses on giving its current and prospective members a way to network and build their professional portfolio. Mainly by hosting and planning events, Mothership offers opportunities that are difficult to pass up for ambitious game developers. Mothership members who presented their games were able to receive valuable feedback from players and other more experienced game developers. MGC allowed them to network with local game studios like Lost Boys Interactive and Flippfly.
Midwest Gaming Classic is a very unique experience and there are not many events quite like it, especially local to the greater Milwaukee area. As fun as the event was, it was also very educational. Mothership members grew as upcoming developers thanks to the feedback and support from everyone including the people who tried out our games, the student government, Stephen Chepp and MATC Times. From the bottom of our hearts, we are grateful for the opportunity to showcase our games, this helped us learn about the flaws within our games/booth presentation and also what we did right. This has prepared us with this knowledge of what we could improve for next year’s MGC.
(Kaitlyn Montoya Gonzalez and CeeCee Huff also contributed to this story.)
To get a taste of the event, please check out the photo gallery. (A special thanks to Rebekah Bledsoe, CeeCee Huff and Kaitlyn Montoya Gonzalez for taking pictures as well as writing about their experience for the MATC Times.)
