MagWest - for Magfest
MAGFEST, the music and gaming festival, is a 501c3 non-profit dedicated to promoting and preserving videogame music, art, history, and culture. MAGWEST was their first time coming out to the West Coast which took place August 25th - 27th, 2017 and will hopefully continue for years to come.
Although the focus is video games and music, the producers behind the event have expanded the event to include pinball and engaged the Pacific Pinball Museum to representthat end of amusement machines.
And represent we did; led by long time board member Jem Gruber, we brought 9 Electro-Mechanical Pinball machines for the arcade room. They were extremely popular getting solid play for most of the event. With tech help from board member David Volansky and PPM staff technician Kyle Spiteri the machines were kept running smoothly throughout the show. They were a major hit taking the event in a different direction and exposing many to a new experience in gaming. In keeping with the music theme, board member Ron Chan and PPM staff Designer Lynn Gustafson put together a seminar presentation about the earliest involvement of music in gaming. This covered '30s~ '70s pins themed from popular scores of the day and the introduction of music and sounds into early electronic pinball games of the late '70s to present.
The second half of the presentation was an excellent video about music production and composition by veteran sound designer David Thiel. Thiel covered his current project, Alien providing details on audio tracking and composition in the digital world. Truly fascinating on many levels!
For more info on MAGWEST go to: http://magwest.org/