PAX! much that is good is here. many of my kin, as with the star trek cons, roam these halls - yet there is a different frequency which they ride, if only by degrees. gone is the sci-fi memorabilia, the wandering klingon, the kirk/spock slashfiction. instead, i find my brethren indulging in cosplay and the church of nintendo and musing upon the ‘old days’ of the 1980s, back when it ‘all began’. our heroes are not actors, but rather game designers and programmers. rather than watching ‘wrath of khan’ for the hundreth time, we cheer on ‘the wizard‘, the fred savage vehicle about the ‘nintendo videogame championship’, and the very screening i’m sitting in. the crowd roars to any reference or appearence of the oldschool games; truly, there is nowhere else that this film would be shown to such an enthusiastic crowd. for that matter, i don’t know if there are any other fictional videogame-specific films *about* videogames - there are certainly plenty films *of* said games (street fighter, resident evil, mario brothers, etc).
the penny arcade guys hosted a panel earlier, to a crowd of about 500 young men (and women!). lots of fun; nostalgia, support group, confessional - a little something for everyone. mike and jerry really had their hands full with this sort of face time, but i don’t think anyone left unhappy (including them, hopefully).
i met some of the speakeasy guys, who were hosting a gamecloud booth. they were really cool - the coincidence was a pleasant one.
red vs. blue. now wrap your head around this one: it’s a series of short films using the Halo engine about these soldiers, who have long conversations about silly or banal things, and then get shot or blown up in various ways. the characters all have defined personalities and take part in a consistent storyline. the voice talent is comprised of various folk whom the creators know and/or have recruited. it’s as if they made a first person shooter into an RPG, and then made *that* into a soap opera. it’s a lot of goofy stuff and crude humor, but they take it quite seriously (as does their huge fan base). they distribute their films on their website, apparently with microsoft’s blessing (helps advertise their game). they’re on their 4th season; lotek first introduced me to it a couple of years ago, back when it was part of the background of obscure fan films and net foolishness. now these guys are rock stars, if the fans are any indication.
the penny arcade guys are their own phenomenon, though - they have served as the ‘central node’, if you will, for much this sort of thing. in other words, there’s no real degree of separation between the fans of PA or homestar runner or red vs. blue or console/PC gamers or 16bit musicians - seemingly, all of them live on the same planet. PAX is simply the next stage of evolution, much the way trek cons were for the scifi / fantasy / LARPer / filking tribes. it will be interesting 5 or 10 years from now, to see what this phile is up to, how they’ve grown, what they’re into - with the grateful dead and trek gone, could they be the next big fancult?
concert: line wrapped around two sides of the conference center, no mean feat. but everybody got in - easily about a thousand. first act - tuxedo-clad concert pianist playing old computer game themes. notables: mega man theme, final fantasy theme, pac man theme blindfolded. how and where else could you see a hundred+ late teen/early 20 kids rocking out to piano music? he had them doing ‘the nod’ for pete’s sake!
second act - optimus rhyme, a sort of shy, thinking geek’s ’soul coughing’, who sang of computers and cars, space travel and calling in sick. there was one more act, the NESkimos, but regrettably i had to take off prior to their set, because it was almost 2am by this point and my right arm was killing me for some unknown reason.
pictures from friday PAX are here.
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