Retro Roadshow Takes Four Decades of 3D Gaming to Bay Area Maker Faire

The Retro Roadshow presents Into The Third Dimension at Bay Area Maker Faire, showcasing hands-on playable hardware across 40 years of 3D video game evolution.

The Retro Roadshow is spending this weekend at the 2026 Bay Area Maker Faire on Mare Island with an exhibition called Into The Third Dimension, tracing the evolution of 3D graphics and gameplay across roughly four decades of consoles and vintage computers. The exhibition runs across the Faire's September 25-27 programme, with today's Saturday session scheduled from 11:00 to 17:00 local time.

Rather than presenting game history as a sequence of screenshots and increasingly enormous polygon counts, Retro Roadshow specialises in hands-on exhibits built around original and historically relevant hardware. That approach is particularly appropriate for early 3D gaming, where the experience depended as much on unusual controllers, low frame rates, CRT displays and developers inventing the rules in real time as it did on the software itself. The jump from wireframe and sprite-scaling experiments into textured polygonal worlds happened across arcades, home computers and consoles rather than through one tidy technological handover. An exhibition spanning multiple decades can therefore put those experiments side by side and let visitors feel just how quickly conventions changed.

Maker Faire is also a sensible venue because retro hardware preservation increasingly overlaps with electronics, repair, FPGA development, fabrication and homebrew engineering. Classic gaming is no longer simply about collecting finished products; an increasingly large part of the community is learning how the machines worked so they can keep them working. Sometimes the most educational way to understand primitive 3D remains picking up the controller and wondering why the camera has decided the ceiling is suddenly fascinating.