I'm going to announce the first batch of industry legends we've confirmed attendance for at this year's Classic Gaming Expo at the Classic Gaming Expo site, but in this forum I'm going to detail them. Take note of games and items that you might want to bring along for signatures!

Tom Sloper

When many of his fellow producers were wrapping their hands around a joystick for the first time, executive producer Tom Sloper was creating the ground-breaking products that shaped the Golden Age of video games.

A dedicated video game enthusiast, Sloper joined Activision in 1988 as a video game producer. He has since left his mark on numerous titles, including Alien vs. Predator for the SNES and Game Boy, Mechwarrior for the SNES, Blast Chamber for the PlayStation, Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye for Windows, SNES and Sega Genesis, Sargon V, Shanghai: Great Moments, Shanghai: Dynasty, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos II for personal computers, Radical Rex for the SNES and Sega Genesis, and the NES Ghostbusters series.

An engineering designer and modelmaker/draftsman by training, Sloper began his entertainment career as a theater set and lighting designer before becoming a game designer and modelmaker in Southern California in the late 1970s. Sloper designed games for the legendary Vectrex game system (Spike, Bedlam) and other platforms at Western Technologies and Sega Enterprises before joining Atari Corp. as Director of Product Development, where he spearheaded the revitalization of the 2600 and 7800 game systems.

Sloper earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Speech and Drama from the State University of New York. He completed graduate work in Theater Arts at the University of Cincinnati.

Asked to tell about himself and how he got here, Sloper has this to say: "I've been with Activision for eleven years now, and I've been making electronic games for almost twenty. My first electronic game design was a little game watch from GCE called "Game Time" in about 1981. You wore it on your wrist and had two buttons. My favorite game in the watch was "Firing Squad," where you tried to see how long you could dodge volleys of bullets shot at you. When I was a kid in upstate New York, we used to play lots of card games and board games, so I guess I was always a gamer. When I went to college, I didn't know what I wanted to do when I grew up (I still don't). If you had told me that I would eventually make electronic games, I would have looked at you like you were crazy -- there was no such thing back then! In college, I studied theater, art, radio, and astronomy. There were no courses in computers (not that I was aware of anyway), much less games."