Seattle Times Pre-PAX Profile

Undeterred by their loss in a magazine's comic-strip contest, they'd set up their Web site for their strip, which survived on PayPal donations from readers. Then they made a big jump to advertising on the site, but their paying clients barely covered food.

Today, their sarcastically fun gaming webcomic, "Penny Arcade," is hardly struggling. The comic's Web site collects more than 70 million hits a month. And "Penny Arcade" has grown far beyond a comic strip, morphing into a video-game convention back in 2004. Friday, Krahulik and Holkins will kick off the fifth PAX, or Penny Arcade Expo, a three-day festival about all kinds of gaming. More than 50,000 gamers, from as far as Australia and Japan, are expected to come.

Nicknamed the "Woodstock for gamers," PAX attracted 3,000 participants its first year. It's now grown into the largest conference focusing on video-gaming, rivaling others like E3, an industry-driven convention about electronic entertainment.

Wow, the Wikipedia entry on the Penny-Arcade Expo is almost bigger than all the other entries under "pax". And people criticize the value of Wikipedia as a legitimate resource.

But it's totally missing stuff. Like last year, Chuck Norris was there. He wasn't killing anyone or anything, but he left before the cosplay parade. This year, they're going to have a surprise theme, and I believe that it's a Soul Reaver alternate dimension. You get there, of course, by squatting with your hands out, then *poof*, everything's all swirly and there are snacks. I'm not a hundred percent, but I believe they're going to have some kind of essense-based sundaes. Topped with pralines and fangs.

image creative commonsed from gamescoreblog

[Read Full Story at Seattle Times]

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