PAX EAST PACKED
100,000 expected in Seaport convention
While lines started to form outside the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center before the sun rose Thursday morning, Amber Heirdel, of Dorchester, was not among them.
Heirdel, with hiking shoes on and a backpack empty and waiting for free swag or last-minute purchases, arrived at around 3 p.m., not in costume, she pointed out.
“It’s going to be a long weekend,” the 26-year-old said. “I’m a late riser and I’m pacing myself. No heels today.”
PAX East returned to the Bay State this week, when upwards of 100,000 game enthusiasts — some fanatical enough to dress in costume all day and wait in the late March cold for the early entry swag giveaways — annually join hundreds of game developers and exhibitors for one of the city’s largest conventions.
First started in Washington state in 2004 by the authors of the popular web comic of the same name, the Penny Arcade Expo was built as a convention focused entirely on the gaming industry for gamers.
The event has grown to include a series of satellite conventions as far away as Melbourne, Australia, features live play, cash prize tournaments, and visits by industry insiders.
Boston’s first convention, in 2010, brought over 50,000 attendees. According to event producer ReedPop, PAX East has grown to be a four day event that hosts over 750 gaming companies — many of them local — and draws an annual crowd of over 130,000.
That wasn’t possible two years ago, when PAX was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and made an entirely online occasion. Last year’s convention was held without the presence of the industry’s largest game makers.
According to Penny Arcade Co-Founder Jerry Holkins, moving online was the end of Penny Arcade’s Texas based PAX South — the crowds never returned, Holkins said — but that hasn’t been the case in Boston. Part of it is the venue, he said.
“The Boston Convention and Exhibition Center is an utterly world class venue,” he told the Herald. “It is such a delight to run an event here.”
The other part is far more cerebral, the writer and game producer explained. Even in an era of online gaming, when you can theoretically compete with someone as far away as China — Holkins said he has — there is still something to be said for getting together and being in the same room with someone.
“I’m not someone who has a lot of need for social interaction,” he said. “In terms of the benefit, we can intellectualize it, we can philosophize about it, or we can try to manufacture an abstract structure around it, but at the end of the day this is a human desire. This is the desire that has been so complicated in the recent past. We need each other. We need each other to feel like people,” he said.
According to Holkins, Boston’s PAX East was the inspiration for an entirely non-digital version of the event — PAX Unplugged, held in Philadelphia — that is itself a testament to that need to get together.
“We can absolutely get that from a purely digital experience,” he said. “I’m a pretty traditional nerd, but ultimately there is a methadone aspect to never having interaction.”
David Silk, the director of communications for the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, told the Herald that PAX is one of the largest conventions to visit the city in any given year, if not the largest.
Silk said business at the BCEC has returned to about 90% pre-pandemic levels.
PAX East will run through the rest of the weekend and tickets for Friday and Sunday were still available as of Thursday evening.