h1n1 posts

It's not exactly a surprise to learn that at a three-day event where tens of thousands of people show up in relatively close quarters some people might come down with something. The official Twitter site for PAX 2009 has confirmed that a case of the H1N1 flu was discovered in one of the attendees at the show this past weekend.

In a brief phone chat with Big Download today, PAX organizer Robert Khoo stated that they wanted attendees to be informed of the confirmed H1N1 flu case which is why they sent out the info via their Twitter account. It's important to point out that while there is no current vaccine for the H1N1 flu it also doesn't appear to be any more dangerous than the common everyday flu. If you attended PAX you can find more info about H1N1, including common sense info on keeping healthy, at the Center for Disease Control web site.

The Japanese are getting jittery over traveling, well, anywhere because of the new H1N1 virus. Even though the outbreak of the mutated "swine flu" has proven to be about as deadly as the regular flu it's causing at least one major game to be pulled from being shown at E3 2009, according to Kotaku.

That game, ironically enough, is Dead Rising 2, the Capcom action game (coming to the PC and other platforms) about fighting a horde of people infected with the fictional zombie virus. While the game is being developed by a Western company (Blue Castle Games) its producer at Capcom, Keiji Inafune, is Japanese. According to the story, no one from Capcom based in Japan is attending E3 this year because of the H1N1 outbreak. According to Capcom's US PR head Chris Kramer, " . . . the team is not comfortable having anyone else demo the code" for Dead Rising 2. All of the other planned Capcom E3 2009 games will be shown at the show.

In addition, the Develop web site has posted word that Japanese personnel from Square Enix and Koei won't attend E3 2009. However, it appears that both companies will still be exhibiting at E3.

While plans for E3 2009 continue to be made, at least one major publisher could keep at least its Japanese executives from attending the show in two weeks. The reason: the swine flu (also known as H1N1) infection that is affecting the world.

While H1N1 doesn't seems to be quite as serious to human life as originally feared, Capcom is apparently taking no chances. Gamesindustry.biz is reporting that Capcom's Keiji Inafune, the producer of their Dead Rising games, will not attend this week's Nordic Game 2009 conference in Sweden " . . . due to corporate policy restricting foreign travel during the current influenza outbreak." While Capcom will likely not pull out of E3 entirely (they are in fact running a contest to have Capcom fans attend their E3 booth) this might mean that Japanese producers and executives will not be coming to Los Angeles in two weeks to attend E3.