Video Game Summit (VGS) started back in 2003 when Jim Goebel, (Inky on Atari age) had an idea for gaming get together in IL.
Daniel Iacovelli, have been running VGS since then, the show much like Midwest Gaming Classic was a spin off of the Atari Jaguar Festival(Jagfest) which was stand alone show running from 1997 to 2002.
In 2003 it was decided that Jagfest would start piggy backing other show like Midwest Gaming Classic,Classic Gaming Expo and of course VGS.
VGS started as small show held from 2003 till 2014 at Heoron Point Building in Lombard,IL (we took 2007 off after show took loss in 2006). The show returned to Heron Point Building in 2008, the following year Daniel Iacovelli, appointed fellow gamer and friend, Todd Friedman as Co-Promoter of the show,helping with promoting show and gathering well known guests. After the 2014 show, we was informed of a Management Split between Heron Point building and Quality inn hotel.
In 2015 we moved the show to Midwest Conference Center in Northlake,IL, the show significantly down sized in small room, it was what I called the show that
almost didn’t happen because we was short on time to find a new space and came close to end it all together. Despite all that the show wasn’t our best and we decided find new venue.
In 2016 we found what we thought would be our new home at The Odeum Expo Center in Villa Park,IL. We were in much bigger space than Heron Point and
Midwest Conference Center (approx. 9k sqft), from 2016 t0 2019 we remained at the same room and even went out to lobby, and had plan to move to the North Hall in 2020.
In 2020 Covid-19 hit and shut down everything and VGS went Virtual like all other events.
The show returned to Odeum after Covid restrictions was lifted in 2021 and we did move to the South Hall which was big success. Then we have planned to return to Odeum in 2022, then we heard at start of 2022 The Odeum was sold to a trucking company and later demolished, so instead of rushing to a venue like we did in 2015 and risk having another bad show, we took 2022 off to do hard search for a venue in 2023.
After a long hard search VGS found a new venue for 2023: The McCook Athletic and Exposition Center(the MAX) in McCook,IL
Attendance of the show went from 50 or 60 from the early days to 300+ what it is now.
Daniel Iacovelli has been an Atari Fan since the 1970’s, around 1988, He started a local club for Atari players. That club was known as Atari Traders Association,for we just traded games with each other. 2 years later the club went national and renamed the club Atari Video Club(AVC) 2 years later after the club went national.
The first official fanzine of AVC , known as The Atari Zone came out in October 1998 and ended on February 2007. AVC’s Online presence started on Prodigy and moved to GEnie later on. Than AVC moved to word wide web staring with Angelfire website and GeoCities for a framed site, then AVC moved to Atari-Users.net until July 2017 when the server closed.
AVC was offline for 3 months until December 2017 when the website moved to Godaddy and the new address became Atari-Video.Club.
Todd Friedman is currently a writer for Old School Gamer Magazine and the Walter Day Trading Card Collection.He is the author of 2 books and has co-promoted the Video Game Summit for the last 14 years.
About AVC Online:
AVC Online (Also Known As Atari Video Club Online) is am online club that has been supporting Atari Video games and computers for more then 13 years.
We have also been involved with Atari Jaguar Festival since 1997. For more information on AVC Online visit: http://Atari-Video.Club)