PAX East was this past weekend and it was a resounding success. This marked the first time a large event has come to the east coast for gaming and we now know that it will not be the last. It has been announced that PAX East has already signed up to return for 2011 and 2012.
This year being the inaugural year an estimated 30,000 people were expected to join in on the festivities. The event ended up selling out over a month in advance and 60,000 people were in attendance over the three day period of the convention. For anyone interested in the game community or game development it is a great and we are being told that next year will be even larger to accommodate more more developers, publishers, and attendees. The west coast may have E3 and others but the east coast is starting to make a name for themselves.
It has been known for sometime that California is the largest area for game development and hereby also gets most of the gaming conventions (not to mention the nice weather), but what most people are not aware of is that Massachusetts has quickly become the second largest community for game development in the United States. The two most popular companies consisting of Irrational Games (Bioshock) and Harmonix (Rockband).
The show featured a great mixture of indie games, major developers and future technology. Twisted Pixel showed off Comic Jumper, we saw the finalists for a Boston Indie competition as well as many other great games that showed a lot of potential. As far as major developers we found 2k and Rockstar making a huge splash with Mafia 2, Bioshock 2, and especially Red Dead Redemption which had the longest lines of any booth at PAX. Nvidia and Alienware also showed off some great technology while holding competitions for a variety of prizes. Nvidia was big on 3d technology, I personally thought of it as more of a gimmick before but after playing around with what they brought to the table I could see how it could become huge in the future.
You can find fun for everyone at PAX, like music? go to the Rockband Lounge and watch or become a part of constant concerts as performed by the people of the audience taking turns playing Rockband. Into table top games? well those were all over the place on the first floor and entire area was dedicated to them. You could also go into the main area and play some games that are not even out yet! You also have Keynotes every few hours where you can hear from your favorite developers about several topics or just go up a level and go to a free play area where you can relax, rent out a game and play around for awhile!
I have not even gotten to the free swag either. By going to all of these booths and playing games you can get anything from free t-shirts, hats, keychains, stickers, etc. A friend of mine even won an i7 processor from intel!
Overall I could not be happier with my decision to go to PAX East. My only hope at the time was that it could become larger so even more developers would join in on the fun. Thankfully PAX has already responded saying it is expected to be much larger next year. As seen on his Twitter Cliff Bleszinski (Designer behind Gears of War) has already made noted that he will probably be attending next year (crosses fingers). Now if we could only get Peter Molyneux (Designer behind Fable) to come I would be even more ecstatic than I already am. (Can you tell I am an aspiring Game Designer yet?)
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