A Penny Arcade Expo 2007 attendee dons full BioShock cosplay gear at the videogame conference, which draws the hardest of hard-core gamers to Seattle each year.
The hard-core gamer is alive and well and heading for Seattle.
While the videogame industry is currently caught up in a passionate fling with "casual gamers," the ever-growing and highly lucrative pool of people who will never touch Halo but snap up Wii Sports, hard-core gamers need some love, too.
They'll get it this weekend when 50,000 of them arrive at Penny Arcade
Expo for a three-day celebration of gaming culture held in downtown Seattle. This year's expo, the fifth, will be larger than ever, say organizers, and it's aimed squarely at the hard-core crowd.
"PAX is dedicated to the community and the culture," says Robert Khoo, Penny Arcade's president of operations. "It's about having one event to look forward to that's more about the community than about business."
PAX's rise from indie event to major player comes after the radical downsizing of E3 in 2006. Gamers lost their mecca that year, when the Entertainment Software
Association canceled the grand and glorious E3 trade show, that bacchanalia of light shows and booth babes that once served as the game industry's yearly must-visit event. With E3 reborn as a tiny, invite-only media show, gamers had nowhere to party, and PAX and a handful of other gaming events stepped up to help fill the void.
So far, so good. While Khoo dismisses the notion that PAX is "the new E3," the expo hosted a record 37,000 attendees in 2007. This year, organizers have preregistered 42,000. The expo has doubled the size of its show floor and added 40 percent more square footage than last year.
The upstart gaming festival, created by two guys who make webcomics, has gotten too big for Seattle. Next year, Penny Arcade plans to put on two shows: one at home, one on the East Coast.
PAX, which runs Friday through Sunday, has plenty to offer the hard-core contingent. This year Nintendo will show The Conduit, an upcoming first-person shooter for Wii, at its booth. Electronic
Arts, which participated only minimally in previous years, is going "whole hog" in 2008 with a large booth and panel discussions about games like Spore and Dragon Age, according to Khoo.
The chance to meet fellow gamers adds to the expo's draw.
"I'm going to PAX because I think it will be fun to meet cool people who share similar interests, and the chance to possibly get to talk to some industry folks," said Corey Greenhawk, 20, of Oxford, Maryland.
Some folks still lament E3's transformation. "The industry needs the old E3 back," says Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who adds that "the sizzle is what sells, and revealing new information with lasers and booth babes attracts more attention than showing off a game that is going to be released in two weeks."
But in fact, there's almost too much to do at PAX each year. Gamers can spend the entire time playing -- whether fragging in a massive LAN party, strategizing over card games or plopping in a giant beanbag chair to play competitive Zelda on their Nintendo DS. On the show floor this year, 70 exhibitors will let gamers get their hands on unreleased titles. Attendees can watch dozens of panel discussions during which industry figures will talk about their craft.
After-hours on Friday and Saturday night, PAX features the geekiest concerts ever, with videogame music cover bands and a show by Jonathan Coulton, the singer/songwriter who penned the theme song to last year's Portal.
"The type of content (at PAX) isn't much different than the content we had (at the first show) in 2004," says Khoo. "It just happens to scale really well."
This weekend, Seattle. Tomorrow, the world.
*Photo: Puja Parakh/*Wired.com
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