PAX (event)
recurring gaming festival in the U.S. and Australia
PAX (originally known as Penny Arcade Expo) is a series of gaming culture festivals involving tabletop, arcade, and video gaming. PAX is held annually in Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, and Melbourne. Previously, it was also held in San Antonio.
PAX was created in 2004 by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the authors of the Penny Arcade webcomic, because they wanted to attend a show exclusively for gaming. The shows include speeches from industry insiders, game-culture inspired concerts, panels on game topics, exhibitor booths from both independent and major game developers and publishers, LAN party multiplayer setups, tabletop gaming tournaments, and video game freeplay areas.
History
The first Penny Arcade Expo was held on August 28–29, 2004 (2004-08-28 – 2004-08-29), at the Meydenbauer Center, and was attended by about 3,300 people. Renamed PAX, it became an annual event. Attendance grew rapidly, topping 9,000 in 2005 and 19,000 in 2006.
Outgrowing the Meydenbauer Center, the event moved to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, where it drew some 39,000 in 2007; 58,500 in 2008; 60,750 in 2009; and 70,000 in 2011. The show stopped reporting attendance numbers in 2011, citing difficulties in tracking attendance in a multi-day event.
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This entry incorporates text from “PAX (event)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.