pax-east posts

PAX East 2011 is now in the history books and the second annual east coast event in the Penny Arcade Expo consumer video-PC game show line up is now even bigger than the PAX Prime event in Seattle. Penny Arcade's head biz guy Robert Khoo has revealed to Big Download that this week's PAX East 2011 show in Boston brought in a whopping 69,500 attendees. By comparison, the first PAX East event in 2010 (held in a smaller convention center than this year's event) brought in 52,290 attendees.

Khoo told us via email, "The venue we have this year is massive - it's legitimately 2-3x larger than last year's venue, so the amount of breathing room was fantastic. I didn't hear a single complaint about overcrowding. I never thought I would see the day." 2010's PAX Prime show in Seattle, the highest attended yet, brought in 67,600 attendees. The 2011 edition of PAX Prime will be held on August 26-28 and Khoo told us that 2012's PAX East event will be held on April 6-8.

And what about the rumors of a PAX event overseas, perhaps in London? Khoo told us, "Haha, no sorry - there really isn't anything to say! we look at all sorts of places to see if it's right for PAX. I think the UK rumors got picked up because it's just so... Out there."

It's official. The second annual PAX East gaming event in Boston is officially sold out. The official Penny Arcade Expo web site has confirmed that all of the tickets for the March 11-13 event at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center are spoken for. In case that wasn't clear, the web site states, "We will not sell any (tickets) at the show. There are no more available. Please do not email us asking if this is a real thing. It is real. I'm serious."

For those of you lucky enough to have tickets to PAX East 2011 the web site has some helpful info for attendees including the fact that it will be first come, first serve for attending the Friday and Saturday night concerts. There will also be a giant food court created especially for the show in the convention center since there are not many places to eat nearby.

PAX East 2011 is less than a week away but opportunity to attend at least one day of the March 11-13 gaming event in Boston are slipping away. According to a post today on the official PAX Twitter page, " ... we only have about 250 Sunday badges left!". Those tickets are expected to sell out before the start of PAX East on Friday.

Meanwhile game publishers and developers are starting to annouce their PAX East exhibit plans:

• Irrational Games will be holding an invite only party on March 12.
• ArenaNet will show off a playable version of Guild Wars 2 at PAX East.
• FireFall will be shown off for the first time in playable form at PAX East.
• Nvidia is rumored to launch its new dual GPU graphics card the GeForce GTX 590 at PAX East.

Orcs Must Die! No, that's not a chant for your World of Warcraft raiding party. That's the name of a newly revealed single player action-strategy game from developer Robot Entertainment, the same folks that are currently working on Age of Empires Online. In the game the player must defend his fortress against an army of orcs who just want to make a mess of things.

Players will have a wide variety of weapons to chose from to take out the orcs along with being able to set up traps to ruin the orcs army's day. The game will be released later in 2011 via download for the PC and other platforms. The game will make its public debut at PAX East in Boston on March 11-13.

With just under 18 days to go, PAX East 2011 preparations are starting to accelerate. The event's official web site has now confirmed that all three day tickets for the March 11-13 event in Boston are sold out, as are all Saturday tickets. There are still some left for Friday and Sunday but they are expected to go quickly.

The show's expo map has also been uploaded to the PAX East web site and it reveals lots of exhibitors that until now have not been announced. Bethesda Softworks will be at the show, as well as Electronic Arts, Kalypso Media, Microsoft, Valve and many more. The show is expected to have attendance that will be much higher than last year's inaugural PAX East event.

Devolver Digital is mostly known as the publisher who handled the release of the graphical remakes of the first two Serious Sam games for developer Croteam. However the Austin, Texas-based company is apparently going to be expanding their horizons to other game titles very soon.

A post on the company's Twitter page states, "We'll be at PAX East showing off some secret indie titles that will melt faces. Come and find us!." PAX East 2011 is, of course, the big public game event that's being held in Boston on March 11-13. Big Download emailed Devolver's head man Mike Wilson who told us, "I can confirm we'll be there, but the secret indies are indeed... Secret. :) For now, anyway."

With less than a month to go before PAX East 2011 starts in Boston, the gamer convention has posted up the schedule of panels that will be held during the event on March 11-13. There's a wide variety of subjects on the schedule but a couple stand out. One is that id Software team members will be giving a live demo of its upcoming first person shooter Rage on March 11 and again on March 12.

The other panel of note is the world's first public gameplay demo of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the upcoming single player fantasy RPG from developers Big Huge Games and 38 Studios. By the way, the official PAX Twitter page has posted up word this weekend that "we only have a few hundred 3-days (tickets) left."

The two versions of the Penny Arcade Expo gaming event have been very successful with the PAX Prime event in Seattle bringing in over 60,000 attendees and the first PAX East in Boston launching in 2010 with over 50,000 attendees. Now it looks like the Penny Arcade team along with its convention partner Reed Exhibitions are starting to think about taking the PAX show over the Atlantic to Great Britain.

The online survey, intended for UK users, asks people if they would attend a version of PAX were to come to that country, along with choices of specific locations and what kind of events would be important in any UK version of PAX. This survey comes less than a month before the second annual PAX East event occures on March 11-13.

[Via VG247.com]

With about five weeks to go before the second annual PAX East event starts up in Boston, the event's web site has updated its exhibitor list with a number of new companies pledging to attend the second biggest game event in the US (the biggest being, of course, PAX Prime in Seattle). Among the new exhibitors are THQ, Alienware, Logitech and others.

Meanwhile if you were planning to attend the March 11-13 event, you might want to hurry up and buy your tickets soon. According to an official PAX "tweet", "Based on current trends, we should sell out of our 3-day badge allocation in about 16 days. Heads up has been given! ." Indeed it has, PAX 'tweet"; indeed it has.

In less than two months the second annual PAX East game event will be held in Boston. A few days ago the event's current web site revealed the preliminary list of exhibitors that are scheduled to attend PAX East on March 11-13. At the moment there's only a couple of major publishers attending the show (2K Games and Ubisoft) along with PC hardware companies like Intel and Nvidia.

There are also a number of smaller game publishers attending this year along with indie game developers behind games like Skulls of the Shogun. PAX East had over 50,000 people attend its inaugural event in 2010 and that number is expected to increase for 2011 thanks in part to the show moving to a larger venue, the Boston Convention Center.