The Pax 10

Pax, the Penney Arcade Expo, begins tomorrow in Seattle Washington. I spoke briefly about this event in an earlier post, and as I said this is one of the largest conventions in the game industry. Its popularity has skyrocketed since its inception 2004 and every year after, it has broken the previous year’s attendance rate.

The big thing about Pax is that is one of the only times the public gets to meet and mingle with the developers who actually create their favorite games. When we attended Pax East, a slightly smaller event held in Boston during the Spring, that was an amazing experience. We shared a both with Champlain college and had random people walk over and play our game. It’s a source of validation for development teams which is really important.

Most games are created in this studio vacuum, day in and day out the developers are working on the same thing and can lose faith in it sometimes. But all it takes is for that one random player to lose themselves in playing your game and everything falls back into place.

Some number of years after Pax started, the first Pax 10 was selected. The Pax 10 are 10 independent developers who are showcased for their unique and inspiring designs.

You can head on over to the Pax website to see them all, but here is one that for me personally made my jaw drop.

Puzzlejuice

Even the trailer will make your head hurt, but It’s a great brain exercise with words. Puzzlejuice is a great mix of the old and new with its tetris like base and the scrabblish way of creating words.