Sorry about the late blog on this one. We’ve decided to expand the blog to be more than just me. We’re slowly starting to add Lance, Steve, and Camille (with some guest bloggers planned as well) and we’re trying to start cranking them out weekly again. Well, somewhere we got our wires crossed and we not only didn’t start getting them out weekly as soon as we would have liked, but we accidentally skipped last month altogether! Oh no!
Anyway, this post today is all about our big trip to PAX East last month!
So yeah, PAX is by far the biggest event we’ve ever done, and since it happens to be the biggest event here in the states, there’s a good reason for that. Nowhere to go from here but back down, folks! Anyway, normally PAX East is 3 days, but this year they decided to make it 4! Since we’re exhibitors, that means we had to have everything set up a day early… and since we like 14 hours away (with good traffic), we had to leave here on Tuesday at 10pm! Adam, Natalie, myself, and newcomer Lucas drove up, while Thorne had the better idea and flew up (the clever jerk). In all seriousness, though, we had a LOT of gear so it was the only way to make it work for him.
Not going to lie; traffic was a nightmare. This was where we got to experience the Bostonian phrase “you can’t get there from here”, which really only makes sense if you’ve had to drive there! We were supposed to load in on Wednesday before 5:30, I believe, and we really only managed to slip in 15 minutes before that time. If we hadn’t been on time, apparently we could have had our booth revoked! Luckily, some people showed up after us and they were fine, so it was probably just something in the contract to get people as punctual as possible.
Now, I’m not going to talk much about our hotel, which was in the nearby town of Danvers, but I will say that it was the worst hotel we’ve ever stayed in! Luckily we were able to get a refund afterward.
So, the actual PAX stuff… to be honest, most of it was a blur. I personally didn’t get to play any games, but was lucky enough to be able to hang out with our friends Steven from Flyover Games, David from Ukuza Games, James & Andrew from Mega Cat Studios, and a huge chunk from our siblings to the slightly north”, Multivarious!
But yeah, other than that it was basically a non-stop barrage of people hitting up our booth. We had a standard 10×10 booth with 10 tablets… and we were basically full the whole time. It was so bad that a few times, con staff had to break up the crowds around the booth! It was both overwhelming AND incredibly flattering! We really could have used a bigger booth, but live and learn, right?
There was a point (a full day) where, because of food poisoning at a restaurant we stopped at on our way up, I had to stay at the hotel with a barf bag and some meds. Luckily the rest of the team stayed (mostly…. Lucas) healthy for it all!
We also got a BUNCH of amazing press coverage. I’m guessing the big reason for that was that we could finally announce that we’ve been picked up by our new publisher, Ratalaika Games and that we could OFFICIALLY announce that yes, Collapsus is indeed CONFIRMED for Nintendo Switch release! We had synced that announcement with us being at PAX and they put out an awesome press release all about it… so that REALLY helped!
So yeah, that was basically it. A really fun, wild, LONG, week for us that was super productive! It was great seeing old and new ans alike! If you want, we have an episode of our “2 Devs and a Dude” podcast talking a bit more about our experiences here: https://youtu.be/I76RKCod7sQ. We also have a new vLog from while we were there coming out soon, so stay tuned for that!
What’s next? Well, Indy PopCon, of course! See you then!
Comments