PAX Packs Friday Journal

As promised, here comes the information dump from three glorious days of geek culture immersion.

Pardon my repetition, but there's only way to describe Friday: Epic.  Things got off to a great start when I spotted some of my tech-culture idols while waiting in line.  Unfortunately my t-shirt was representing the boys back home from the Texas Aggie Game Developers or I would have tracked down the Totally Rad Show hosts for a prize from the Rad Swag Bag.

Needless to say, lines on Friday were ridiculous.  My cohorts and I arrived around 3pm and spent a good solid hour waiting to pick up tickets from Will Call.  Apparently buying tickets would have been faster...so much for planning ahead.

Lines, yay for lines!

Totally RAD Show hosts Jeff, Alex, and Dan

And as if waiting in line for tickets wasn't bad enough, we were promptly redirected to another line to wait for the highly anticipated Ken Levine Keynote.

Lines, lines, and more lines

Levine's speech covered everything from his sexual awakening with the Scarlet Witch to his failed attempt at writing Romantic comedies in Hollywood.  And while he may not have had the same crowd response as last year's Wil Wheaton keynote (though he certainly attempted to drop as many F-bombs) his endearing "Portrait of the Geek as a Young Man" seemed to reverberate in the hearts of standing room only crowd.  Well, except for that guy playing his DS.

Hmm, I wonder if he was the guy writing swear words on picto-chat?

The Penny Arcade Q&A followed directly after Levine's keynote, but things started getting werid after a round of unison knuckle cracking and a costumed fan making growling noises into the microphone.  There's geek, and there's bizzare.  This is about when we decided to checkout the exhibition hall.

I spent the first day just scoping things out, which took a surprisingly long amount of time.  All the major players seemed to be there, EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc., and if you had the stomach to brave an hour long line, you could get your hands on just about any of the upcoming new titles for this fall and early next year.  Unfortunately, the hall was about to close by the time we got there and we were all eager to reserve our places for the Friday evening concert.  I did manage some gloriously blurry iPhone photos before heading back to wait in line, including one of me next to the Fallout 3 booth.

Thanks to Brandon Bloom for the photo Thought this guy was a statue till he moved

So after that, it was out for a quick bite to eat and then back in line for the evening's concert venue featuring The One Ups (a jazz/improv group performing retro gaming music), Freezepop (A techno group of Guitar Hero & Rockband fame), and Jonathan Coulton (JoCo, need I say more?).

First up was the One Ups, who performed jazz-ish reduxes of retro gaming themes.  The muscianship was great, but I felt that overall their "smooth jazz" vibe was a bit laid back for a geek convention in a city know for its punk and grunge.  Additionally, the themes they played were mostly esoteric themes from esoteric games (I know it's cool, but does anyone really remember the theme from the NES Ducktales game?).  The band was received well, but I felt mostly with the courtesy awarded the opening number of any show.

 

After the One Ups came Freezepop, renowned for their inclusion in the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games, as well as for Harmonix producer Kasson Crooker, a lead keytarist and vocalist for the band.  Freezepop's synth style and use of vocoding definitely had a more "video game" feel to it, and their performance effectively livened up the crowd.  They were also very candid in their request for us to continue applauding after the set so they could play two "completely unexpected" encore songs, which was either humor or slight worry about the tepidness of the tiring crowd.  Below is a pic of Crooker rocking out the red keytar to an encore performance of The Final Countdown.

By this time the smell of body odor was wafting pungently through the crowd (it's called de-odor-ant people, seriously) and my feet were aching in protest.  However the best was indeed saved for last, with by far the favorite artist of the evening, Jonathan Coulton. 

JoCo's performance was met with wild applause and cheering after each song, which was saying something for starting his set well past midnight.  Coulton's performance also feature several surprises, including Felicia Day (of Buffy fame) joining him to sing Still Alive, and royally Rickrolling then entire audience (a strangely recurrent theme at PAX).

Never gonna give you up...

Even at the end of his set, the audience unanimously brought him back on for two encores, featuring his NSFW song First of May and a surprise cover of Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline (who knew that geeks actually knew the words to that song?). 

We trudged like zombies out of the theater and to our vehicles at around 1:30AM, bringing an end to my day one geek-culture-overload.  Like I said, Epic.  Check back for the Day Two and Day Three journal still to come!