BOY MEETS CLEVELAND GAMING CLASSIC

9/21/2025 7:56 PM

Listening to: "Under My Skin" by Briston Maroney

On a whim, I took my kids to the Cleveland Gaming Classic at the IX Center in Cleveland, OH. This may have been a questionable decision for those of you that I know that I was up until almost 4:00 AM last night, but I didn't want to pass up the experience!

Before rambling about the convention itself, I want to talk about what I found at the first booth that we stopped at! There was a small flyer for the game Necro Kitty that releases on October 1st. This was placed there by a very close friend of, well, a person that is very close to me. (This is a lot of very closeness, I suppose! Confused? Good, me too!) Coincidences aside, or the universe's will aside, I am very excited to share the flyer with you, and even more excited to purchase the game on day one! This is a precision platformer/auto runner which is honestly right up my alley. So, if you're reading this, and you want to support a local indie developer, please check out Necro Kitty on October 1, 2025! I'm planning to record some gameplay footage upon its release and will share that out with the masses. (At least the very limited masses that I am connected to)

NECRO KITTY out on Steam on 10/1/2025!

Okay, so back to the convention! There was so much cool stuff here! I was really excited about the local limited edition beer that was available from the Brew Kettle. It was called the "Level Up Lager" and had a label designed in the style of a SNES game. It wasn't half bad either, for a lager.

We started off by doing a couple laps just to generally check out the vendors and see where everything was. There were so many interesting vendors and I could have easily spent hours exploring their offerings and perhaps even having conversations with them. We came back to this at the end of the day to get a couple things for the kiddos, so I was happy to be able to support a couple of them!

The game selection was also really cool. I'll say that I've recently had a heightened interest in pinball since the aforementioned very close person and I have enjoyed it together, so it was really fun to see all of the pinball machines they had available! (All set to free play, of course) They also had some fun nostalgic areas set up which ended up being really cool photo opportunities. My favorite was easily the 80s style room with the NES set up, but they also had a cool area with a 90s theme that had a Super NES, and a booth set up like Pizza Hut from the 90s, complete with a Mortal Kombat arcade machine!

It was honestly just so cool to see the love and care that was put into this event. It felt really cool being in the environment with people that love all the same things! I'm of course so happy to have shared this with my kids this year, but I could also see spending the whole weekend there, playing all the games, talking to all the people, etc. I should definitely keep this on my radar for the next one!