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| By Benn Robbins |
This weekend the Hoth-like city of Boston Massachusetts was invaded, much like Hoth itself when the Empire landed it’s AT-AT’s on the surface of that ice covered planet, when PAX East came in to town.
Lines were long, temperatures were cold, food trucks were a plenty and the gaming community exploded all over the Seaport district and surrounding areas.
“PAX EAST IS HERE!” claimed twitter feeds!
“PAX EAST 2015 IS UPON US!”, exclaimed Facebook feeds.
And the masses came.
What is PAX East?!
First off, PAX is an acronym for Penny Arcade Expo. If you don’t know what Penny Arcade is then why are you on this site?
HA HA.
Just kidding.
I had to look it up as well.
Not really but here is what you need to know.
A cursory browse through the inter webs will let you know that Penny Arcade is one of the longest running web based gaming comic strips of all time and that their creators, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik are about as lucky as they are talented as they have turned this little venture into a multi million dollar company with books merchandise and now four different conventions; PAXPrime (In Seattle, their home base), PAX East (their East Coast counterpart), PAX Australia (the PAX from Down Under) and now PAXSouth (filling the void at the bottom of the country).
PAX East is the giant middle brother of older Prime.
And giant it is.
Some say they build the Boston Convention and Expo Center just to house it. In it’s first two years PAX East brought in an estimated over 100,000 people to the city of Boston. It has been speculated that they have since stopped publishing totals as to prevent competition with the sibling conventions.
So, what was a casual gamer and sometimes cosplay photographer doing at one of the biggest gaming conventions in the country, if not the world?
Learning that he knows about as little about gaming and the gaming culture as you probably do about being a free form Jazz Basoonist.
There are a lot of games out there.
There are a a lot of types of games out there.
There are a lot of gaming companies out there.
And they all want you to try their game.
You and the tens of thousands of fellow attendees all clamoring to get your first glimpse of the new Final Fantasy game from Square Enix , The new and awesome multi-player FPS Overwatch by Blizzard Entertainment, even the new and awesome zombie survival game, Z. by Downward Viral successfully funded by Kickstarter this year .
Or, if board game and table top games are your thing there is a giant areas of companies both promoting and allowing free play of their games as well.
Console Games, card games, LAN (Local area network) gaming is available and not only that but the panel rooms and the classic arcade games and lounges to play your hand held games with others.
The size and pace was dizzying. And I love it. I may have literally, no idea what 89% of what I saw in my one-day whirlwind tour of PAX East but I can tell you that the people were having fun and the vendors were loving the attention.
There was so much going on that I couldn’t possibly do it all in one day, hell I doubt if I could in the three days they allotted me to try.
Would I do it again?
I don’t know but I will tell you this. I can see why this show sold out in a matter of minutes when the tickets go on sale and I can tell you why my social media feeds went crazy.
Nerd and gaming culture is here to stay and if we could all get get out of our on ways and embrace this golden age of the nerd instead of tearing each other down or becoming so entitled or elitist as to become that which you once hated then maybe we can all just embrace this cool ass time.
