This year’s Penny Arcade Expo marks the tenth anniversary of an online entertainment empire. The Expo’s creators would celebrate the milestone… if they thought it was that big of a deal.

By Sam Machkovech

The words “Penny Arcade” can mean a lot of things to video game fans. It’s an Internet comic strip, a merchandise empire, an off-shoot charity known as Child’s Play, an annual gaming expo, and even its own video game series.

But the easiest answer, and one that sums all of those up, is Jerry Holkins (above photo, right) and Mike Krahulik (left). These two proud geeks, writer and artist respectively, have spent the past ten years doing a gaming comic exactly the way they’ve wanted—and somehow built an empire around it.

Plenty has been written about the duo’s history, particularly Wired’s fantastic feature from a year ago. Rather than rehash the old stories (which, as Jerry reminds us all, can be found all over penny-arcade.com’s news posts), we instead sat down for an informal chat in preparation for this year’s Penny Arcade Expo, now officially the largest public gaming event in the United States with an expected attendance of over 50,000 fans.

In addition to prepping for the Expo, Jerry and Mike talk about their growing mainstream presence, the aftermath of their first video game release, and how they make the most of their internal tension. Also included are quotes from Penny Arcade’s president of business Robert Khoo, inserted in this interview where appropriate.


AN ENVIRONMENT WHERE MELODRAMA AND SPECTACLE ARE THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE


How are you guys doing today?
Jerry: The last couple of days have been a lot of decisions. Like, executive decisions. On the Omegathon [PAX's gaming competition for prizes], we had to finally choose a couple of last games. Every round has been juggled around to make [the Omegathon] more spectatable or more interesting.

Do you arrange the Omegathon so it’s like a setlist at a concert?
Jerry: Each individual event has to have its own arc. When we bring this thing up at the end, people will sense that they’ve arrived at the endpoint of some kind of journey, but we want each part of it to have its own excitement. There’s a different number of participants in each round, so we want to have something that scales appropriately to each group–as something to watch and as something for them to work out.

Do you feel a need to go through all the different eras of gaming in the contest?
Jerry: In the past, we really wanted to do that. Like, the PC room has been focused exclusively on traveling through id’s history. We had [players] starting with Doom, then Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3. We’ve communicated a strong, shooter-type core. But this year, for the first round, a PC round, we chose Peggle [a casual bubble-bouncing game]. We know the guy who developed it, cuz, of course, they’re local, right? They’re gonna work us up a custom level—a Peggle tournament level. Peggle’s got pretty strong penetration. Through all strata of gamers. Everybody has played, and can play, Peggle. So we think it’s gonna be a nice choice.

For the Omegathon’s final event, is there pressure to top last year?
Jerry: Absolutely.

That was the first time the competition included an as-yet-unreleased game, Halo 3…
Jerry: You know… we thought that would be really cool. But… some people were agitated by the fact that it was so modern. Especially the fact that it hadn’t come out yet. They were agitated to the extent of, they thought it might be evidence of collusion or something. That the last game of our gaming Olympics at PAX was, like, on the block, and people could buy it.

Is that a concern, that people will look at you as being disingenuous?
Mike: People did think that.
Jerry: I’m telling you what they literally said.

But does that really bother you?
Mike: 100 percent.
Jerry: Absolutely. Our whole thing with PAX, the reason it works as well as it does, is because we never give [fans] a reason not to believe it. We want to create an environment where melodrama and spectacle are the appropriate response. We want to create a convention that is epic. We can’t give them a reason to believe that it’s for, fucking, you know… that anybody can come in and say, “This is this, and this is this.” We want to take care and create it in a particular way.

I’m surprised to hear that, because when I was there, people around me went crazy. It really felt like the final scene from The Wizard, where they’re playing Super Mario 3.
Jerry: Exactly. Super Mario 3 and the Wizard has been our goal from the very beginning! But Super Mario 3 doesn’t work anything like it does in that movie (laughs).

You could always mod the game to actually work like in the movie?
Jerry: No, but we have had fantasies each year about that. Maybe there’s gonna be a year where the game that is the final round is a completely original game.


THIS ISN’T OUR FIRST TIME AT THE DANCE


Now, the first question on my notes here… it stems from the fact that I just got my copy of Geometry Wars 2.
Jerry: I bought it last night. I think it’s pretty slick. The first two modes are my favorites, easily. King is fucking brilliant (laughs). I imagine those modes are pretty good in co-op as well. Think about how fun King could be in co-op, where you’re both shooting out of safe spots. And the first mode feels like Pac-Man CE, right? Which is a good feeling. [Editor's note: A week after this interview, Jerry announced that GW2's King mode had been added at the last minute to the Omegathon competition.]

Definitely. The reason I bring that up is because I almost didn’t prep for this interview, I was so engrossed in that game. So I’m not so much interested in the “how do you come up with your ideas” question as, rather, how do you get anything done? Gaming obviously fuels your creativity, but I see all these games around–
Jerry: I’m surprised by how much we do accomplish.

But how? Do you have to put your foot down and make a certain schedule, or–
Jerry: Oh! The schedule… our whole life basically operates on a schedule. It’s sort of what makes sense of the week. The only thing that’s scheduled, and maybe this is why, is the writing of the strip. The rest is almost completely fluid. [Behind Jerry's head is a sheet of paper taped to the wall with an all-caps warning to get to work on the “news post” that accompanies every comic.]
Robert: It’s super hard. Their office is a central room within the rest of our offices. Passing their office is unavoidable, and it’s incredibly distracting. Pre-release games, press versions of games… and their job is to play games. As a gamer, it’s incredibly distracting to try to have a conversation with them, say, about PAX, when they’re playing Game X which doesn’t come out for a year that I personally want to play so badly. At the same time, I know if I sit down in their office for ten minutes, I’ll be there for ten hours.

What’s tougher then: being buried in amusement, or dealing with writer’s block?
Mike: Writer’s block is definitely tougher. We always… we get in around 9. Our day’s 9-to-5 for the most part. We sit at our computers, look at game news, and at 10:30, we start to write. If it’s a good day, we can have a comic written by lunchtime. There are days where it’s 4 o’clock and we don’t have anything, laughs, you know? Writer’s block is definitely tougher. Having too many games to play is never a problem. I mean, we play games here; we play games at home.

Does it ever turn into overkill, where you’re burnt out by playing too many games? Or do you manage it by simply picking the games you want to play?
Mike: We’re lucky that we’re in a position where no one’s telling us what to review or what to talk about. Review copies sometimes come in, but we don’t have to play them. I think Summer Olympics is over there, we haven’t even opened that yet. Whereas Soul Calibur 4, we played all day yesterday, pretty much. We play what we want, and as often as we want.
Jerry: In 2001, we did a [comic] series, The Sucking. It was a four-strip series about… we had become dissatisfied with the hobby. The conclusion that we came to wasn’t really pronounced on the series or even the site. But the conclusion we came to is that we had become jaded, I guess. That was sort of a shock to me.

I had the same thing hit me around that year; I went cold turkey, then came back to games years later when the DS came out. But I suppose you kinda luck out by picking the games you want to play.
Jerry: In your capacity as a gaming journalist, the games you would’ve been playing more often than not are gonna be retail titles. If you stick to retail titles—especially a certain platform—I think it’s much easier to get to that point. This isn’t our first time at the dance; we know about sequels and franchises. We know what they have. You know how it works. You can’t not see that structure that underpins it. But that’s not the entire medium. [Editor's note: PAX'08 debuts “The PAX 10,” a hand-picked assortment of independent games that do their damnedest to make up for this very issue.]

How many press interviews have you guys been doing lately?
Mike: A lot more press than we normally do, yeah. A lot with the game, when that came out. And then PAX has a lot of interviews associated with it, especially as the show nears. And every year at Child’s Play, we do a ton.

What’s the weirdest outlet that’s reached out to you and made you wonder, “Why do you want to talk to us?”
Mike: I’m always sorta surprised when any kind of mainstream press contacts us. Like [daily newspaper] the Seattle Post-Intelligencer or somebody like that. Like a business section. Well, it doesn’t surprise me. I guess I wonder who’s interested in that, who reads that paper.
Jerry: Just being interviewed at all is so strange. It’s that, every stupid thought that crosses my mind, I’ve already put on the web site. Every thought I have is available for the last ten years, so it’s like, what else is there? Just give ‘em the URL!

I noticed you were just mentioned on Zero Punctuation’s episode about web-comics last week.
Mike: He really just glossed over us…

But now that you’ve been on ZP, does it feel like you’ve “made it”?
Mike: No! (laughter)
Jerry: (“pfffft” laugh noise)

The video did really focus on you guys as a top-tier comic. And other sites like Joystiq will focus on Penny Arcade in its weekly wrapup. Is it weird to be a lightning rod in web comic comparisons? Do you just ignore it?
Mike: We have very little to do with the web comics community.
Jerry: But there absolutely is one. Unless we’re at a venue where there’s an actual space [for it]. We just got back from San Diego Comic Con where “web comics” is sort of a moniker, but they’re really all just working artists. The idea is that you have a web comic, and there’s a scene or whatever, but then you meet all these other people trying to make a living doing art, and that distinction at Comic Con is not useful.

A lot of alternative weeklies and magazines will print bizarre comics like Maakies or Perry Bible Fellowship. What’s to stop you from ever making that sort of leap if you have tons of readers and press?
Jerry: They’ve never approached us…
Mike: We were in Official Playstation Magazine for a while. The fact is, all the gaming magazines are dying.

Not just gaming magazines, though. I mean, expanding into other publications or outlets.
Jerry: If you don’t have first-hand knowledge of it, it’s like a non sequitur. It’s just weird.

But it’s still really funny. You don’t have to know about video games to get that the stuff is funny or weird or beautifully drawn, even more so now than in prior years of PA. Would you agree that there’s been a progression, even if not intentional, toward more universally acceptable material?
Jerry: Probably. We’ve been making Penny Arcade, what we think of as Penny Arcade, for a long time, I guess. I think that we’ve just gotten… older. We’ve gotten to the point where we sometimes want to make comics that range a little farther afield, I guess. In the beginning, we felt obligated–
Mike: Obligated to make every comic, you know, specifically about… uh–
Jerry: Sprites!
Mike: Or some video game news. In fact, there was a comic really early on… when we started, we felt like every comic needed to have [main characters] Gabe and Tycho. This was the Liar, Liar one, I don’t remember what guy that was…
Jerry: He’s from Nvidia or something
Mike: Yeah, the CEO of Nvidia or whatever is a liar. We had Gabe and Tycho in the background, like, they weren’t important to the joke. But we thought they had to be there. Now it’s sort of like, we just make comics that we think are funny.

Do you ever compare the oldest comics to today’s?
Mike: I cringe at the art.
Jerry: I have a lot of affection… now that a full 10 years separate this conversation from the production of those comics, I almost think of that as another version. As a one-point-oh version of this person. In a way, I have an affectino for that person – I think he was doin’ it, you know? (laughs) He was doin’ his best! (sarcastic fist pump) He was trying.

I stumbled upon that 25 cent Penny Arcade comic book of your earliest strips at a shop recently, and I keep that one in the bathroom to flip through–
Jerry: Yeah, it’s fun. That’s part of the reason why that first book… [the 25 cent issue] came out with the first book a long time ago. That first book includes 1998 to 2000. When we released that first book, when we made another “first” book, we wanted to include enough of it so you could see that progression. When the comic started, there were no news posts. That didn’t exist back then. It’s canonical now, but that didn’t exist back then. We hadn’t even committed to three comics a week—just one, for someone else. We didn’t even have our own site. The first three years were very tumultuous (laughs).


WE NEED CUSTOM APPLE CORE TEXT


Let’s talk about the game. How far in advance do you guys work on the Penny Arcade Adventures episodes?
Jerry: I write them as they’re being developed. They just sent us the second episode today, but we don’t have a debug Xbox here to look at it. Basically, I write [the script] while they’re developing it, because those two processes are intertwined. The art all needs to exist before we can make the game around it, so [Mike] is always one step ahead of me in terms of his game tasks.
Mike: I’m on Episode 3 now, but as the project nears completion, they come to me and say, “oh crap, we need a cutscene here,” or “wouldn’t it be better if this cutscene had an extra part attached?” That sorta thing.
Jerry: This has been really interesting: As you reach the end of a game development cycle, the amount of work becomes infinite. I couldn’t believe it last time. I thought I was done with the game–it must have been eight times. Eight times, I thought I was completely finished. Then it’s like, “We need another conversation here.” “We need you to do text for, you know, all these apple cores.” Or whatever. “We need custom apple core text.” There is so much little work. When it becomes time to fully realize something, there’s a lot of stuff that needs to go in at the very end. And of course, because writing is so cheap… developmentally speaking, writing is about as cheap as it gets. They beat down the door. They want everything.

Remind me, exactly what’s the story of the game’s genesis?
Jerry: A group of guys from Radical Entertainment (Simpsons Hit and Run, Hulk Ultimate Destruction) decided it was time to not be a part of the industry, capital I. It was time to start their own indie shop and create an environment where they could make games and not go crazy. They approached us about doing their first project. They have other projects there, obviously. Ron Gilbert is their creative captain, and he’s working on his game as well. They have a bunch of projects. But Penny Arcade Adventures is their opening salvo. They had a longtime reader who we’d known for a while, who came in in a development capacity and really pushed them to make PA their project.

Who benefits the most from this arrangement, then? Who’s riding whose coattails?
Jerry: I don’t know! It’s hard to say. For me, it’s not so bad. I poke out my head from the writing process every now and then. Hopefully the people playing the game are the ones being served. But as far as we’re concerned, we don’t take on a project unless it’s creatively interesting to us.

Was there ever any point where you two and Hothead butted heads or really disagreed?
Jerry: Pretty much everything about that game was a result of us basically pounding our heads against each other. That’s it. They had a whole setting… Mike may have a different answer?
Mike: Immediately thought of the same thing.
Jerry: They’re used to taking existing franchises, or IP as it’s called, and trying to make the best game they can out of it. They’re not unfamiliar with PA; they brought a bunch of designs, ideas about how things would progress, the way the setting would work. I think they were in the other room when they said that, and Mike and I came in here and said, “We need to create our own world.” We need to take this thing by the horns and come up with something that is radically unlike what has been described, something that we can both invest ourselves in. So we can actually survive the two years of this development process.

Did they come to you using the setting of the characters’ house, like the old Beavis and Butt-head games?
Jerry: They, like us, felt that Penny Arcade’s ordinary continuity would not make for thrilling gameplay. I’d love to see what TellTale would do with that. They could probably make an interesting traditional adventure game environment; they’ve apparently done a great job with Strong Bad, that’s all they do now. But that’s basically how [game world] New Arcadia came about. We wanted something that had that sort of steampunk [influence], with all the fittings and filigree for him to enjoy drawing, and a cosmic horror concept a la Lovecraft that I could sink my teeth into.


WHY CAN’T THESE COMPANIES MAKE SOMETHING AWESOME?


You’ve spent a long time going after game critics. Were you surprised that those critics didn’t tear your game a new one?
Jerry: We were startled.

It’s definitely rare when a game critic turns around and works on developing his or her own video game; other than Shawn from EGM, few such cases come to mind compared to, say, music or movie critics.
Jerry: What’s that fucker’s name, he’s the god of your people… everybody seems to love…
Mike: Are you talking about the movie review guy?
Jerry: No… who is that… Lester Bangs!

[involuntary facial expression]
Jerry: Yeah, that’s the right fucking face to make when someone mentions Lester Bangs.

Well, critics have done pretty well transitioning in other mediums, like Stephen Merrit or Roger Ebert.
Jerry: It’s a much easier profession, and that’s the one I recommend.

What is it about gaming that makes the transition so less common?
Jerry: It’s a multi-disciplinary.. .it’s a bizarre medium. It’s difficult to slide laterally into. Like, Luke from 1UP, he ended up over at Bungie as a community manager. A lot of times, they end up in a community management role, or a PR role—in some role that is adjunct or corollary to true development. It does happen a lot. They end up sliding laterally into the other industry.

That kinda reflects poorly on game criticism, if it’s just a segue into being a PR shill.
Jerry: It’s bizarre, right? But, you know.

Having been involved in game production, do you find your game criticisms softened by the process? Or hardened?
Jerry: Mike says… I shouldn’t speak for him, since he’s here, but he’ll tell me if I’m incorrect. He says it has made him harder on games. Is that still accurate?
Mike: When you see a game that doesn’t have… that creative spark or the… like, when I look at something like Everquest, it’s just so boring. Why didn’t they let their artists stretch their legs a bit and actually make some interesting stuff? Now that I’ve seen the process, it’s like, yeah, if you get someone who is excited about the project and then you have people who can translate that into 3D… I think you’re [Jerry] probably right. If we can make something…Why can’t these companies with all this money make something really awesome?
Jerry: It’s given me a better idea of the entire process. I have a more holistic approach to it. So, it comes down to things like, I understand things like the royalty rate, or what it takes to get regular text integrated into a game – a bunch of basic, fundamental, mechanical elements that go into the actual production of the game. Not a theoretical, not in the “why don’t they just throw the switch.” I understand what the switch looks like, how many people it would take ot throw that switch, precisely how long it would take to throw it. I think that for me, hopefully what it has done, is given me the ability to detect… not to flail as much in my critique, but hopefully to understand better what it is I’m trying to improve with my writing.
Mike: It’s also made us–
Jerry: It’s also made us richer.
Mike: Well, sure. It’s made us, um, try to provide more constructive criticism. We need to qualify our …
Jerry: Exactly. Criticism is a better job, and I recommend it.

Do you guys pay attention to negative reviews?
Jerry: There’s no question. The reality is that, the second episode should be out before the end of this year, barring some catastrophe. We actually have the opportunity to take some of those criticisms to heart. Typically, the developer isn’t sitting in the room with you while you’re playing the game, and after you’ve played a quarter of it, they ask, “Where are we going here? Wha-what did we do right? What can we improve?” And then, okay, they flip a switch, and you’re playing the next four hours. That’s, under optimal circumstances, what we’re trying to do here [with an episodic game]. We’re trying to make the combat more dynamic. We’re trying to include more, um, what people call traditional adventure game style mechanics. We’re trying to make conversations you have with people more dynamic, more varied. We’re trying to add depth where people want it. Hopefully, you will agree that that was a success. If not, we need to work harder again.
[Editor's note: At this point, I notice why Mike has been relatively quiet today; he's been reading a Soul Calibur 4 strategy guide, hidden under his desk as if he were hiding a comic book from a schoolteacher.]

One thing I said in my review is that it’d be great to go back to re-read the dialogue, the same way you can go back and review the cut scenes. There’s so much good writing, but in game form, it whips by really quickly.
Jerry: That’d be so easy! Hold on, let me send a mail real quick. [Types a letter to Hothead] That’d be… yeah!

That’s funny. Not often I talk to someone with a game idea and they actually run with it.
Mike: Well, you said you’d like to read just the stuff he made without the crap I did. No wonder he’s fucking excited.

(laughs) I like the cut scenes, too…
Mike: Oh, sure. But I’m saying, you just told him exactly what he wants to hear. “Can’t you just write a book?” “Why do you need that stupid artist stuff?” “I wish I could just read how awesome you are, that would be great.”

(laughs) No, really, your stuff–
Mike: That’s sweet, thanks for throwing me a bone.

Now, it is interesting to hear you guys say that about reviews. I’ve read in interviews that you do Penny Arcade the way you want to, that you aren’t affected by what anybody else thinks.
Jerry: Well… Penny Arcade is free. People can just come and check it out. If they don’t like it, there’s another free one in another day. There’s no question that we allow ourselves to have that attitude. But when somebody’s gonna spend $20 to take five or six hours with our game… yeah! We would like to take them seriously.


HIS FUCKING BARBS! HIS BULLSHIT.


If I had to classify myself as a gamer, I think to myself that I’m more of a Gabe than a Tycho. I suppose other gamers classify themselves by your comic’s archetypes. Is that a little odd, that you two are held up by gamers to that sort of standard?
Jerry: No, actually. Because we are incredible… people. We…
Mike: (slightly mocking tone) I’m an incredible person. Being around me is an incredible experience.
Jerry: In terms of the history of Penny Arcade, we created those archetypes to act as mouthpieces for the strip without realizing that we fell into those archetypes ourselves. That was the first thing that we hit was create these two sorts of people without realizing we were writing ourselves into it. We never had any intention of [being] those two. He drew them, and they were radically unlike us.
Mike: They didn’t look like us.
Jerry: Yeah, like cave paintings. “This bison represents all bison.”

But you had the chance to draw characters that eventually became you. And you made a cartoony, hip version of–
Mike: You don’t think I look hip? Wearing this fucking Threadless shirt here?
Jerry: That’s about as hip as you get. They’re hip, I guess, but they were just guys. With hair.

Hip isn’t the right word, then. I meant the comic representation looking different than you in real life. You don’t even have hair!
Jerry: Well, I had hair when the strip started.
Mike: But you didn’t have lush, brown hair that flowed through space.
Jerry: Flowed with sideburns. The way I usually describe it, and I think it sorta works, is that they’re avatars. They’re our icons in the context of the comic.
Mike: We speak about them in the third person. When we’re writing the comic, we’ll have an idea for a joke, and I’ll say, “Gabe would say that,” or “This is a joke Tycho would say.” We think of them as separate entities that represent us, but they’re not us.
Jerry: Like puppets.

I have to ask, not to try and stir anything up, but I noticed a weird creative tension in the Wired piece. There’s that bit at the beginning where you call Jerry out for talking “like a dork.”
Jerry: Yeah, he always does that.

And you had a similar back and forth at the PAX’07 press conference. So I wonder, doing this comic strip for ten years… I think of friends making creative things together, you have conflict, friendship meeting with business and things–
Mike: It’s really stupid.

How cleanly has your working relationship gone? How do you balance working together for ten years?
Jerry: We’re not friends. I have… He doesn’t like it, when I put it like that–
Mike: (meek voice) It stings a little.
Jerry: But we’re not friends. A friend would not endure him. In this way, in this context.

Endure what?
Jerry: His fucking barbs! His bullshit. (look at each other)
Mike: I don’t know what he’s talking about.
Jerry: “I don’t even know about barbs! I don’t even have any! I’m not barbed!” … Our creative process is pretty aggressive. It… if we were to design… we don’t let each other get away with anything, even creatively. Friends have a tendency to overlook and accept the idiosyncrasies of other people. That’s not how our creative process works.

Is there any bullying or give-and-take in the creative process?
Mike: You have to fight for what you want.

What brick walls have you guys hit working together, then?
Jerry: I think the comic could be a musical. And he never lets me have it.
Mike: I let you have it one time.
Jerry: And it was incredible–
Mike: No it was not. The fact is, I don’t think “fight” is the right word, I guess. It really is a weird relationship. Like, if he says something is not funny–”I don’t think it’s funny, I don’t like that”–but more often than not, what will happen is, I’ll say something, and if the other person doesn’t respond positively immediately, like, yes, let’s do that–
Jerry: (laughs)
Mike: If it’s just more like, mm-hmm, then you know it’s a bad idea. Just drop it. Unless I feel really strongly, I’m not going to yell and scream for a punchline. If he doesn’t think it’s good, then it probably isn’t.

Has the creative process gotten easier?
Jerry: It feels exactly the same as when we met.
Mike: Feels the same to me, yeah.

Is that good or bad? Seems to be good in the comic.
Mike: The fact is, a lot of the humor comes from tension, from the barbs.

Jerry: That difference from opinion. Yeah, from barbs which are valuable! He has a very high opinion of his barbs.

[Mike gets up to speak to a realtor on the phone.]

Well, ten years. Do you see ten more years of the same?
Jerry: We didn’t see three years, or five years, or seven, or nine. We’re not… we’re the wrong people to ask. As it stands, we provide a useful service to gaming enthusiasts. If it were not as useful… you know what I’m saying? If it didn’t provide whatever bizarre nutrient it provides, we would do something else. Right now I authentically feel like we’re providing something that is particular.

What is the best thing about working with Mike? Other than the easy answer that he’s a great artist.
Jerry: What’s the best thing about working with Mike. [pause] If he likes something, if I write something and he… likes it, then I know I have succeeded. It can be difficult to assess success otherwise. There are many axes upon which something can be discerned, but if he likes it… the way it works is that we’re each other’s target audience. The decade has been a process of trying to one-up each other. That is probably why this works–we provide each other with a consistent challenge.

So Penny Arcade itself works best when it’s kinda like a video game?
Jerry: Yeah, basically it’s a meta-game.


THE SHOW IS BIGGER THAN US


Let’s talk about PAX until Mike comes back. The numbers are growing, and people keep calling it the biggest game show of the year in the States.

Jerry: It is. It definitely is, by numbers. People keep trying to do it. They keep trying to run shows, public shows, and none of them have the energy. Frankly, none of them have our, they don’t have the energy because they don’t have our attendance. Our job as the, what’s the word… ambassadors of PAX is to create a show that tries not to hit the wrong notes. That lets you enjoy it without insulting you or without trying to get in your way of enjoying the show.

I’m curious about the first year of PAX, the real genesis of that. How did it come together while your site was still kinda growing?
Jerry: We had attended a show on the east coast. By this point we’d attended a couple of conventions. Sakura-con locally (Same venue we’re in now). Not really gaming conventions, but sort of geek conventions where they have a sci-fi or board-gaming bent. Gaming was always a part of them, but never the focus. It just seemed crazy that… well, it just seemed crazy! By 2004, we thought it deserved a real venue like this, a public venue. Not E3, which has grown more and more restrictive. A place where games and people who play games are at top billing. A lot of times, games will end up in small rooms or ghettos at these larger conventions. None of those conventions… they were fine, but they never felt right. We wondered if we could actually do it. Presumably, human beings have run these other conventions.

How did that pan out as far as cost? How did your young operation pull it off back then?
Jerry: Robert would know… my job is to create the impossible, and it’s Robert’s job to find a way to pay for it. It felt very important while it was going on. It felt like we had done something correctly. We programmed a full convention with demos… it was PAX, but a very small version. We ran it there for three years. By the last year, the venue couldn’t handle it.
Robert: It was really hard. The first year, 2004, I planned PAX pretty much singlehandedly in about two months. I’d never planned anything like this. Anything I’ve done in the past even remotely similar was bachelor parties, okay? Let’s be honest, the parallels between the two are pretty similar, as far as the planning and the logistics, the money side of everything, just making sure everything goes off without a hitch. As far as the community support, we had no idea what the response would be. Internally we said, if a thousand people show up, that would be amazing. There are LAN events out there that have been going on for a decade that don’t get half that. Of course, the first year, 3,500 people showed up. It was mindblowing.

What attributed to that early success? Why’d it work so long ago when the site was in an earlier stage of success?
Robert: PAX isn’t only about Penny Arcade. It’s a lot more about game culture. We really pushed that early on—this is focused on game communities and whatnot. Not only were we leveraging the PA brand and the PA community, but a lot of people that weren’t fans of PA but liked games in general found the concept of a dedicated gaming festival really appealing.

The thing that really stood out for me at PAX’07, my first one to attend, was the volunteer core [known as The Enforcers]. So friendly, and they take care of everything.
Jerry: Every convention we’ve been to, the tone has been set by the volunteers. It’s crucial! It’d be impossible without it. Now that we’re coming up on our fifth year, we have to sack… we need thousands of bags. It’s a tremendous undertaking. By this point, the enforcers have their own culture, sort of parallel to PAX. They are a people.

You’ve got games, speakers, panels, competitions, volunteers, concerts… and you guys are the ambassadors. Are you comfortable being the ones everyone looks at?
Jerry: That’s what we think of our role as, ambassadors. It’s nerve-racking. [Mike's] on anti-anxiety medication, which may be something I want to consider. We feel the expectations people have of the show as a physical [chokes on his own words], as a physical presence. Every day of it, we pretty much just walk the floor, greet people (nervous laugh), try to verify that they are enjoying what’s going on. We try to be as present as possible over the course of the event.

How do you balance the growth of the fest, and the forthcoming East Coast PAX, with the feeling of being genuine, like with fan’s concerns over last year’s Halo 3 reveal?
Robert: At this point in time, the show’s bigger than us. It’s huge. There are people who go to PAX that don’t know what PA stands for. It’s the nature of how the show’s grown. And we’ll always receive some criticism, like, you’re going more mainstream with the Halo thing. What’s interesting about last year’s Halo thing was that Microsoft didn’t know about it. It was completely this side deal with our friends at Bungie. In our opinion, it was an amazing opportunity. Whatever flak we got for quote-unquote selling out, well, it didn’t happen.

Do you feel like you can take responsibility for the show being so huge? That’s the way it’ll be billed by a lot of people—these two guys created the enormity of PAX.
Jerry: I’m not… I don’t think I’d be comfortable being thought of as the causation element of PAX. I think we can help catalyze things, I guess, but the reason it works, we set the context. We invite the people and make sure there’s a system in place. Then we give people a reason to enjoy it, and as few reasons as possible to hate it. The enforcers ensure that it functions. We’ve done our best to create the context to enjoy it.

You say it’s nerve-racking, but do you have fun at PAX? Do you honestly have time to walk around and play games?
[Mike walks in and says goodbye to the realtor on the phone.]
Mike: Pain in the ass. I’ve gotta coordinate four different fucking people. PAX is easy compared to this, geez. I just show up and wave.
Jerry: PAX is super-stressful, that is true. But it is… you attended it, you’re aware. Something’s happening there. There is something going on. You step in the PC room? The SCOPE of that room, that is huge. All those lights, all that glowing neon… here’s a couple 100 machines that are free to play, here’s everybody’s custom boxes, right, and that’s right across from the exhibition hall. My favorite parts of the show, I guess the parts I have the most say in. For me, that’s the concerts—I choose all the bands—and the exhibition hall, which we try our best to prune and groom. We try to bring in as many… we want to hit all the notes. If somebody expects a certain company to be there, we try to make that happen. In fact, for new games, PAX is better in a lot of cases. I don’t always have a lot of time in the work day to play through new games, and there, I get to play the new stuff that we kinda cherry-picked, and meet the developers as well.

Mike, now that I have you back and Jerry’s left the room, I wanted to ask you what I asked him: What’s the best thing about working with him? Like, he said it’s about respect and about you guys always pushing each other to be funnier.
Mike: It’s the same thing. My goal is to make him laugh. And he’s ridiculously talented as a writer… I hope you don’t tell him I said that. But it’s like, we get a lot of proposals to do comics for video games, like with Splinter Cell or Assassin’s Creed, where the comics are tie-ins with their games. And the only reason I can do those, the only reason I say “okay” to working on pretty much any project we ever consider, is because he can write a really good story. After ten years, there’s that trust.
[Jerry returns to the room and sits at his computer, not saying anything.]
Mike: Jerry, I told him that the best thing about working with you is that you have AIDS. [pause] So you’re going to die soon. And I can look forward to that.

And with that, the duo had to get back to work. The last joke stuck with me, but not so much for its dark humor or even its attempt to mask Mike’s genuinely sweet, respectful statement. What struck me about it is how the guys shrugged off this bitingly funny bit—like it’s business as usual at Penny Arcade.

The duo similarly shrugs off many other things that seem like huge deals from the outside. Robert, of course, is happy to play up the huge numbers: PAX’08 costs “millions” to produce, compared to the $30,000 mark that the original cost. He touts an online readership of 3.6 million around the world, along with an estimate of over 200,000 printed comic collections sold. Those stats don’t take into account merchandise and video game sales, either.

But there’s little in the way of bug-eyed amazement from Mike or Jerry, and in a way, it’s fitting. After ten years of work, the reward isn’t so much the money or the publicity; rather, the reward is knowing that their mixture of gaming obsessions and dark humor never had to be watered down or altered to make a genuine impact—in both comic and expo form. It’s a weird phrase, but Jerry’s right: there really is comfort in the particular.