2011 - 4 - 1 / 6:53 pm / snapshot

PAX East: Day 3

And now for the final installment of the PAX East experience. It seems that I have completely exhausted my supply of shitty cell phone photos of the event, so this post will have significantly less photos.

We got back to our place of sleeping at about 11pm or so, so things were looking up this time as far as raw amount of sleep, but there was one problem: Daylight Savings Time. Yes, that's right, at exactly 2am time itself would bend around the will of man and advance by one hour in the blink of an eye. One less hour of sleep for the final day. It seems it was our destiny to only get 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night.

I think this time we actually slept in until maybe 8am instead of 6:30am. The demo was set to go for the day and we didn't have any bug fixes to get through before the doors opened to the public at 10am. Even though we had been lacking sleep for the past couple days, I didn't really feel that tired on the final day. The adrenaline of being so close to the end must've been keeping me awake.

The final day was by far our most organized. When we set up we had two working demos playing in the booth space, and a TV facing outward that was hooked up to a laptop playing all the trailers. Everywhere you looked you saw something related to Snapshot.

Early in the afternoon is when the illustrious Tycho from Penny Arcade showed up to the Boston Indie Showcase to sample the games, but he was super busy and ultimately didn't have a chance to get a hands on session with Snapshot, but in the end he linked to us on the Penny Arcade blog which is fine by me. I guess the other Penny Arcade dude didn't end up going to the expo hall at all, so I didn't see him at all for the entire duration of the show.

At one point a legendary figure stopped by to play the game and told the masses how much he loved it so that someday people will look at Snapshot and think "Hey didn't that Tim Schafer guy tweet about this once? Oh yeah, he did, I'm totally going to buy this."


I believe it was about 4pm when we had exhausted our entire supply of 500 postcards and 500 buttons that we had prepared for PAX. We were holding on to about 10 of each by the end of the show just in case some ultra cool famous person came up to play, but I don't think that ended up happening. The cool thing is that we only gave buttons out to people that played the game, well at least for the most part. Some people saw the stack of buttons and literally snuck up to them and took a couple as if we weren't going to notice if they were moving slow enough. So if we went through about 500 buttons, and most of those were given to people that played, then we must've had about that many people play the demo for the 3 days that PAX East existed.



For some reason on the last day of PAX we had a crapload of press people come up to us for video interviews and such. There was a small crew from G4TV that showed up and filmed a little segment, but I don't know if its going to end up airing or not. A lot of podcasts stopped by for interviews, and other various gaming media websites, but it seemed for a good part of the day it was nonstop with the video cameras all over the Boston Indie Showcase.

We also had a lot more t-shirts on the final day. On day 2 a lot of people noticed the fact that we were making t-shirts right in our booth, so on day 3 a lot of those people returned with blank t-shirts for us to print on. I think we made probably around 25 to 30 shirts during the entire event, so that's pretty awesome. A lot of people went to other booths and got a free t-shirt, then came back to us and turned it inside out to make it blank enough for us to print on. The best shirt making moment was this guy that walked by us while making a shirt and proclaimed "You guys just won PAX."

Finally after another 9 hour day of talking about Snapshot and resetting the demo after it crashed it was time to pack everything up. Packing up was pretty interesting, mainly because the Boston Convention Center has all these unions and rules about running the expo hall. We got yelled at for bringing our stuff into the expo hall by parking our car next to one of the doors and just unloading there, so we were trying to figure out the best way to avoid that this time but not have to walk 100 miles to the far parking lot where the visitors had to park.

So we figured out that we could park in the loading area and go out that way. A bunch of people yelled at us for getting our cars back there because we weren't specially approved or whatever but we ended up getting back there anyway. Then we got yelled at again because not everyone that was helping us pack up had Exhibitor passes. We had a few of our friends that had "Vendor" or "Speaker" passes helping us and whenever a security guy saw one of them he would yell at them, and then we would explain that they were with us, and that would be the end of that -- until another person saw us and then that person would yell at the people without the exhibitor passes. Each time we went through the big loading doors with our stuff some cops and security guys would yell at us and tell us we can't go back through there again, but then we would anyway. Basically what I learned from the Boston Convention Center is that they will yell at you a lot but then not actually do anything, so you can do whatever you want as long as you just say something like "they're with us." or "this other security guy told us we could do this."

After the cars were loaded up with computers, TVs, and a giant chair, we were on our way. We drove off into the sunset, and into a BBQ style restaurant for dinner. I don't even remember what exactly happened after that, I think the next thing I remember is waking up the next day back in New Hampshire at the Retro Affect East HQ after sleeping for like 14 hours. PAX East was a blast and definitely the best expo experience of my life, and hopefully that will take me to PAX Prime in Seattle at the end of the summer.

And now back to working on Snapshot, YEAH!