The Nintendo World Championships are Returning!

Nintendo of America announced their plans for this year's E3, and it's a lot of the usual. They're letting us play their newly announced games (this year it's Mario Maker) at Best Buy the week of the convention, they'll be holding a digital event to announce lots of good things, the Treehouse will be live on the floor the whole time...oh, and they're bringing back the Nintendo World Championships.

Wait, what?

An Anime Expo Retrospective: The Long Beach Years

Anime Expo, a Thirteen-Year Retrospective

Part One: the Long Beach Years

When I came back from Anime Expo 2014, I realized it was my 13^th consecutive Anime Expo. 

Sigh.

Yes, a sigh, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  It’s a sigh of exhaustion from all the different things I did.  It’s a sigh of both joy and sadness as I saw, but had to say goodbye to, some longtime friends.  It’s also partially a sigh of some deep thought, since Anime Expo used to be the most exciting thing of the summer, at some point even more than San Diego Comic Con.  Now, it’s not, and not simply because of SDCC. 

The Long Beach Years (2001 -2003)

I first went to Anime Expo in 2001, the summer after my junior year in high school.  These were the years (2001-2003) that it was at the Long Beach Convention Center, right after AX was asked to not come back to the Anaheim Convention Center, for one reason or another.  I think it involved cosplayers going to Disneyland and being mistaken for character workers, and this was the mid 1990s, where cosplay was anything but mainstream.