Penny Arcade Expo 2007

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Penny Arcade Expo. (Discuss)

The fourth annual Penny Arcade Expo took place August 24 to August 27, 2007, and experienced its first year within the confines of the 130,000 square feet of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, more than doubling the space used to house PAX 2006.^[1] While 2006 brought forth the announcement that the massive Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) would be heavily downsized, this allowed the ever-growing Penny Arcade Expo to become the biggest gamer festival in North America. Although PAX is not “the next E3,” Penny Arcade co-creator Mike Krahulik listed PAX as the place for “exhibitors like Nintendo, Ubisoft, Microsoft and ATI… to pick up where E3 left off.” Headliners for 2007’s PAX included Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, as well as others such as “Ubisoft, NCSoft, THQ, Wizards of the Coast, Namco-Bandai, Vivendi, Konami and 45 other game publishers and developers.” 1

1 History
2 Pre-PAX 2007
3 The Layout
4 Notes
5 External links
6 See also

[edit] History

The Penny Arcade Expo began in 2004 as PAX 2004, held in the last week of August, originally in Bellevue, Washington, and later in downtown Seattle. Hoping to turn it into an annual event, PAX 2004 allowed exhibitors such as Microsoft and Ubisoft to showcase videos and playable demos, featured panels with the creators of Penny Arcade, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, and other guests, and musical performances. Occurring again in 2005 and 2006, the Penny Arcade Expo continued to grow, featuring more exhibitors, more panels, more music, and more gamers until finally settling into the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in 2007.

[edit] Pre-PAX 2007

While PAX'04, PAX'05, and PAX'06 have grown consistently throughout the years, the anticipation for PAX'07 brought about several exciting endeavors, including the Cross-Country Super Trip, the Pre-PAX'07 Dinner and The Party at Sealab Party, created using the Penny Arcade Forums as a means of uniting the thousands of gamers traveling to Washington to attend the convention. The Cross-Country Super Trip, an experience in Massive Multiplayer Driving, began in Hoboken, New Jersey and concluded in Seattle, Washington. The trip featured stops in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho, where cars of gamers joined the trip before reaching the destination of PAX'07.

[edit] The Layout

While the convention was housed on three of the floors of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, the exhibition hall was certainly a busy place, featuring educational, video game and tabletop exhibitors, as well as retailers. The layout of the exhibition hall allowed visitors to peruse through a variety of displays, offering places where they could win their weight in Ramen noodles or enter the World's Smallest Dungeon, as hosted by Technomancer Press.