PAX 2012 Trip Report

PAX 2012 aka PAX Prime

This Labor Day Weekend, I was on vacation with my family in Seattle for a family event. When I realized what was going on, I suggested that we stop in the downtown area to check out the convention center. Someone sold me a Three Day Pass, and for the duration of the weekend I spent my mornings and afternoons at the 2012 Penny Arcade Expo in downtown Seattle. This is but a sample of my experience there.

I have never been to a convention as big as this one. I needed to navigate the crowd of attendees to even reach the main hall. If you came before 10:00 a.m., you needed to wait in the adjacent large hall for an initial shot at the exhibits. One day I saw a man galloping around pretending to be Korean pop star Psy. I reacted by showing one of the guys in line the Heavy Gangnam Style video parodying Psy’s latest hit song.

Even when I got there early in the morning, I was still inundated by the amount of content available. For example, if you went to the Epic Mickey booth, you could request a sketch from a Disney animator. However, as soon as I got there, the line was already looping around the booth for a wait time of two hours or more. I didn’t stick around, but I got an Oswald the Lucky Rabbit hat at least. Across from them was the Konami booth, so I posed on the green screen to get a picture with Naked Snake. Not too far from them, people were demoing the latest Xbox 360 and WiiU titles.

PAX is also friendly to the smaller developers. I got to try out downloadable titles like Skulls of the Shogun and Harold, which I didn’t even know about before I came to PAX. The smaller dev section had plenty of things to pick up. I got a few pins, but the best souvenir was the signed copy of Bit.Trip Saga for Wii.

I had a lot of fun browsing booths and picking up photo ops. The guys at Mega64 were happy to oblige as I posed with my signed copy of the Mega64 Version 3 DVD. I got to talk with Dan Paladin at the Behemoth booth, who’s come a long way since the Newgrounds days. The Behemoth was close by Twisted Pixel, TellTale Games, and DoubleFine, all game companies I enjoy following especially since TellTale and DoubleFine are local to the Bay Area. When Tim Schafer signed a Psychonauts poster before I left, he noticed the many pins I was wearing and gave me one for his company’s new iOS game.

I had a lot of fun at PAX Prime 2012. I don’t know if I can come back next year because of how quickly tickets sell out. In any case, I look forward to the next time I can go to a big convention around gaming, digital and otherwise.