So the Penny Arcade site updated their Convention page on Tuesday this week, late in the day giving out a quick heads up that tickets would be on sale 'sometime tomorrow afternoon, start checking after 12:00PM Eastern on 10/23.
The buzz was immediate, at least around where I live in New York. All throughout the afternoon, while I was still at work, I received messages and texts as my friends passed around the information, murmuring and plotting and planning on how best to move forward. A large collaboration of us formed a Facebook group, seeing who would be free to snag tickets, and who was stuck at work - we all knew that from last year, Three-Day passes were gone in less than six hours, leaving some of us in the dark, and stuck buying 3 individual day passes at a higher price so we could still go.
So while last year's PAX East we could safely say it was packed, and people really wanted to be there, this year we can say with six months to go that more people want to be involved in the gaming Community at large than ever.
How, do you ask? The tickets went up for sale at approximately 12:17 PM, two minutes after I had to get back from my lunch break, and give up on trying to get tickets for myself. By 12:45 PM, I had five texts from people like Zoë who had got tickets, passed on the news, and then inform me that Three Day passes were gone in less than forty minutes.
By 4:15, the Saturday Passes were gone. By 8 AM this morning, Friday and Sunday are dangerously close to being sold out. For a convention that sits over 65,000 people, this is insane. I knew they would go fast, but the pace was sped up past where I had thought. I still have six months to plan, to make sure I have off work and to organize with the ten or twelve other people I'm plotting with, and I already feel behind!
If you got a ticket, hopefully I'll run into you at PAX East 2014 this time around. Me and Zoë are headed back, and being there will mark it being a year since we came up with this blog. Who knows, maybe we'll have our own T-shirts and Business cards to leave around, to hopefully become something a little bigger in the cogs of the Gaming Industry.
Anything you are looking forward to specifically? Any stories about the travails of last year that you want to share? Apparently its not too late to start feeding the hype about this event.
-Wyatt
PS - Oh, and for those wonderful people who decided to take advantage and scalp tickets based on demand? I sincerely hope you get found out about it, and that the tickets you managed to weasel out go back to being sold to people who really do want to go to PAX to have a good time. I'll be here to report on it, happily.
