Due to some scheduling issues, we didn't have the chance to fly as a group from San Diego this year. John managed to somehow book our flights so that Dan and myself would fly from San Diego, land in Sacramento where Billie would also land flying out of Burbank, and we would travel as one to Seattle. Pretty much everything could have gone wrong with that idea, but somehow we all managed to make it to Seattle where we met up with John.
When we landed at Seattle John had managed to run into some Foundation 9 folks. We had seen them at PAX back in 2006, Comic-Con, and various other events. Since we had rented a mini-van we brought them along as well. Here you can see everyone looking happy in our little family van, with the back filled with all of our crap.
Our fearless leader John along with his Ikea bag filled with various presents from our favorite store, Ikea. As we arrived at the convention center we went straight to the exhibition hall where we found everyone running around preparing things for the opening day on Friday. Below you can see the exhibiton hall map, we were right next to the entrance, yay for traffic!
Everyone pretty much knows Robert these days. If in the off chance you don't, Robert Khoo is the "Director of Business Development" at Penny-Arcade, as well as the Show Director for PAX. Back in 2004, John, and Tom first met him in Park City, Utah. Here is a fun fact about Robert, he once lifted a car above his head to save a child who was on fire, fantastic work Robert!
After we did a preliminary walk around the exhibition hall we were off to our storage unit that we rented. We had shipped all of our merchandise, both equipment, etc, to a storage unit close to the exhibiton center a few days before the start of the show, it actually all worked out pretty well. Billie and Dan became extremely close throughout the trip, here you can see their relationship begin to blossom.
A quick drive to a local hand-truck dealer and we had ourselves a temporary solution for moving our stuff from the parking garage to our booth. I bring this hand-truck up because we have a picture with it later that is interesting.
Once we had everything picked up, it was time to start assembling our booth! As always, we stuck to our Ikea shelves for our primary booth displays. They work great and we can buy them at any city that has an Ikea, which is pretty much everywhere. Somewhere through this process Tom arrives in Seattle and he comes straight to the convention center and begins to construct one of the two Ikea display cases along with Billie.
The next couple of pictures you can see the booth taking some shape as we begin to unpack everything and figure out our final booth layout.
John assembled our gaming pod that he put together a few years back as Tom, Billie, and Dan started setting up our shirt displays and our portable booth graphics.
Once the gamepod was built, monitors mounted, Xbox test kits installed, it was time for some serious wire management. But before we started that process let me tell you about our projector. A few weeks before the show, Dan suggested that we buy a projector so we could shoot a huge image on the wall of Castle Crashers. After some arguing/research, we purchased a projector from Circuit City and brought it to PAX with us. Here we all are doing some test runs with a small piece of foam that we used for shipping, the image showed up pretty well so we were set on using foam on our screen
It's important to note that we are just making this stuff up as we are setting up for the show. With only a day away from the start, we decide to make a quick stop to Home Depot.
So here was the plan....... We wanted to get dinner, but before we did that we thought we would stop by Home Depot get a huge white foam block to act as our screen. Sandra from Foundation 9 was with us and was under the impression we would go straight to dinner, little did she know that we like to take our sweet time with these things, plus we got lost on the way to Home Depot and John almost drove us straight into a semi.
We spent at least an hour at Home Depot purchasing our foam/various items and then tried to fit everyone back into the van with our 8 foot long piece of foam over their heads. Needless to say it was pretty hilarious
After we got the foam back to the convention center, it was off to dinner...finally! We headed out to a nearby restaurant called "Vons", not the grocery store. They had really good meat plates/veggie plates and it was a very nice dinner after a long, long, long day. As we started to lose our minds a few things started to happen, we got louder, more obnoxious, and pretty damn hilarious (at least we thought we were) Here is a quote from that night at the restaurant thanks to Dan, "If you pee your pants it's sterile, but if you have a turd hammock going on it's not sanitary" Ahh the memories
Day 1 was complete, and although it seemed like it took forever, we got a lot done.
