Today is the 23rd anniversary of the first MAGFest, the community-run “Music and Gaming” festival! With help from the extended MAGFest community, we’ve assembled a new collection of archival materials that tell the story of the first MAGFest event from 2002.
The original “Mid Atlantic Video Game Festival” was held at a Holiday Inn in Roanoke, VA on September 27–29, 2002. The event actually began as an anime convention called Omakecon, but when their original plans fell through, local game store owner Joseph Yamine retooled it as a video game festival. Over the next year, Yamine and his small team hit up conventions like the Electronic Entertainment Expo to find guests and sponsors.
This new mini-collection starts all the way back in February 2000, when Yamine and a few other Roanoke locals started an anime club. Over the next two years, their original idea to throw a series of video game tournaments gradually grew into a full-fledged fan-run game event. These materials show how much they were influenced by the local anime scene, and the role that game stores and early-2000s import gaming culture played in the development of the original MAGFest.
We love collecting materials like these because they add context to the history of video games. This collection started out when MAGFest allowed us to scan their copy of the program for MAGFest 1, which is historically interesting and worth preserving in its own right. But as we kept gathering up more items, we realized that these materials actually tell a story about the gaming community. By documenting the threads of MAGFest’s history all the way back to the beginning, you can follow the messy, warts-and-all path that it took for a group of local fans to throw their own convention.
Thanks to MAGFest, Inc., Joseph Yamine, and collector Chris Kohler for sharing these materials with us—and allowing us to share them with you too!