Mark B. – Studio Artist, Plants vs. Zombies

I had a total blast but oh my gosh did it wipe me out. Between what seemed like hundreds of boxes of swag to get out, running the “Test Your Strength” machine, keeping the booth tidy, and trying to contain Wall-nut hat mania, it was hard to find time just to get a bite to eat. Saturday afternoon, in the chaos, my lunch order didn’t come through. It was 2 or 2:30, and I was STARVING! Jeff saw the situation and came over, “Hey man, you can have half my sandwich.” Then, Philip came in and shared his lunch as well. I had a lot of fun being on panels, seeing all the amazing cos-players, and mingling with people who love PopCap games. But a small act of kindness when you need it the most, it stays with you. Thanks for having my back guys. It was awesome to have the opportunity to be at PAX East with ya.

Dana S. – Customer Service Content Manager

First of all, I sustained some major hits on this trip. I came back with a touch of con crud, and I got so dehydrated throughout the weekend that my hands cracked and bled, and then my nose started bleeding as well. On the way back to Seattle, I broke a tooth on airport food, and when I picked up my suitcase at baggage claim, it looked like this:

American Airlines customer support is awesome though, so I got a new bag. However, my Batman belt was lost along the way. Circle of life.

So, all that said, it really says something that I am so completely happy with my PAX East experience! I loved every minute of it (in retrospect, I guess — I mean, in the moment, I do remember never wanting to hear that hammer strike/bell ding sound combination again). I made some awesome new friends, saw a couple of cool panels, brought home a pile of card games to start playing, and best of all, hung out with the coolest group of friends I could have hoped for.

I also especially dug getting to talk to Peggle fans, as ever. Between the Peggle Master plushies we were giving out and the free Peggle download offer, that game was on everyone’s mind, and I love that. Extreme Fever forever!

Tara T. – Community Manager, Core Franchise

Couldn’t agree more with Mark. You were all so fun, amazing, and wonderful to work with. Even in the frustrating, starving, tired moments.

My favorite memories of the booth were the kiddos for sure. Each lil’ smile just from a simple plushy was worth every effort! The magic show was a highlight for me too. He brought a nice crowd and was super engaging. The strong man never-ending line was the biggest surprise for me. The popularity of that activity was crazy cool! The worst part of the whole event were the greedy folks who took 10 of everything without thinking twice. Seeing the inflation on ebay today is just slightly annoying. I’m still exhausted and sore, but all in all I can’t wait for the next event and can only hope we have a group as great as this one was! Thanks so much, everyone!

The gang's mostly all here!

Philip S. (hey, that’s me!) – Copywriter

Quick impressions: super noisy and I can’t believe how popular our decidedly analog High Striker hammer game was. Beyond that, I didn’t get out of our own booth too much (except to escort our zombie to and from his Kissing Booth) so I missed most of what I’m sure was a lot of great stuff on the floor. But what I took away from the whole event was that there are tons of great people in this business. From the groovy cats on my own team who worked hard and stayed loose the whole weekend, to the thousands of fans who stopped by to grab some swag or just to say ‘hey’ and ‘thanks,’ plus the two indie developers I ran into repeatedly in the break room (what up Ackk Studios and ClutchPlay Games?), and the dynamite crew of Enforcers including our most-awesome “XA” (Exhibitor Assistant) Laura, who was traffic cop, civil engineer, valet and den mother, and who we all agreed should come home with us. I spend a lot of time online where some days it seems like endless negativity. It was great to be face-to-face with so many fans and colleagues and to see how much passion and enthusiasm still exists in our industry. Oh, and the back-room swag deals with other developers was fun and sort of hilarious.

We killed it good.

Stephanie B. – Community Manager, Plants vs. Zombies

This was sent to me via the PvZ page yesterday:

Dear PopCap,

I just wanted to thank you for being the coolest booth at PAX East. I visited your booth often over the weekend but I had the best experience on Friday. I noticed people lining up to ring a bell with a mallet; I’m not sure if that game has an actual name. I’ve personally never tried those types of games before due to not having a lot of upper body strength. I normally wouldn’t attempt hitting anything with a mallet but I saw you were giving out Disco Zombie Figures and I knew I had to have one. I saw many girls fail to push their upper body strength to hit the bell and they were walking away with an energy drink. I really didn’t want an energy drink so I knew I had to give it my all for the figure! After waiting in line I got up to the green mat… and failed miserably. After three attempts I handed in my mallet. It was sad; I was sad. The guy said “Nice try” and I sighed. I was almost angry because I felt this game was really unfair for the average girl unless she had the extra muscle or had a hulky boyfriend. I didn’t have either of those things. However, after I walked away one of the the PopCap guys ran after me to give me a figure. I thanked him and I was really happy, even though I was still sad on the outside. So please thank whoever was giving out the prizes that Friday afternoon for running after the girl who was incredibly unhappy she failed at ringing the bell.     –Jennifer

Everyone did such a fantastic job. Seriously. Awesome. I heart all of you for the hard work at the event and PAX always reminds me of why I love my job and our fans. You all should feel super proud you pulled off a fantastic show! Everyone loved our booth and my favorite part was all of us working together and becoming better friends because of it.

Jeff G. – Nobody Really Knows What He Does Around Here

Other than our own booth, which we are contractually obliged to say was the best thing ever, I had a few other favorite moments at PAX East, including: Learning how to play Cards Against Humanity, being relieved that my daughter wasn’t with me while playing, attending the always hilarious Giant Bomb panel, and not breathing one molecule of clean air for three days. No, wait. That last one was awful. But overall the show was awesome, as it always is! By far my favorite gaming show, every time. And hanging out with PopCap friends outside of the office? Priceless.

“Phew!”

Okay maybe I should say a few more words, or this will be a very short blog post. The next thing we should say, most assuredly, is “thank you” to all those who attended and stopped by our booth. PopCap has been going to the PAX conventions in Seattle and Boston for the past few years, and we always have an amazing time. But this past weekend in Boston was probably the best of them all so far, as we were crushed by enthusiastic fans all weekend long, to the point where the only thing greater than our utter exhaustion was the immense feeling of gratitude we had for the response we received. So, again: Thank you!

This year was particularly stressful as far as working at a game company goes – because the booth that we had planned, around a certain unreleased game, completely fell through in the last few weeks leading up to the show. So the booth that those in Boston saw this weekend is what we might refer to as a  Hail Mary, or final act of desperation. Basically, a few of us sat in a conference room,  with flies swirling around our heads,  as we attempted to come up with a booth concept at the last minute. Someone – I don’t remember who – said, “Hey, how about a carnival?” And with lack of a better second idea, that’s what we went with.

But, hey — who doesn’t love a carnival?  With a Kiss the Zombie booth, a magician, a High Striker game, a Not-A-Lemonade Stand (loaded with free PopCap swag), and the Incredible Swag Machine itself, which dispensed our ever-popular Wall-nut caps every couple hours, we inadvertently created a three-day mob scene. Give people free entertainment and free gifts, and they’ll be happy! Who knew?

Honestly, as much fun as it is working at a game company most of the time, it really is just another office job, with all the stress, workloads, politics, compromises, and boring meetings as every other office job. So it’s easy for us to lose sight of the bigger picture. What shows like PAX East do is remind us of that bigger picture. Which is you. Spending three days with tens of thousands of happy, enthusiastic gamers, fans, and nerds of all ages, nationalities, body types, and planetary affiliations brings it back home to us just how much fun all of this is supposed to be, and how making people happy is really all we’re in it for.

We may have given you free stuff, for which you are more than welcome, but, in our eyes, you gave us the bigger gift: You showed us just how awesome it is to for us to do what we get to do. Some of you also reminded us of the importance of practicing proper hygiene, but that’s a blog post for another day.

And if you somehow didn’t make it to PAX East, you still have a chance to get the virtual goodies we were handing out at the show, including a free copy of Peggle, right here:  http://www.popcap.com/promos/pax-east-2013

Enjoy, and we’ll see you at PAX Prime in the fall! Yay!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

And this in fact would accurately describe my state of mind, as we get close to being a mere seven days away from PAX East in Boston. This is because, as is always the case with conventions, there are a million loose ends still, and, at this point, it doesn’t seem like any of them are actually going to get done. You know that feeling you get when you have a paper due, and you haven’t done the reading yet, and it’s due tomorrow, and there’s no way you could possibly finish it, and you think you’re going to flunk out and have to get a job at Arby’s? Yeah, that’s kind of my day today. I’ll give you a real world example:  Yesterday, we found out that the contractor building our booth had fallen sick and would not be able to complete the booth in time. So, with nine days to go, we still didn’t have a booth built and had no one to construct it. Oh yeah, and our swag was missing.

Granted that in the grand scheme of the universe, these are not big problems. I am aware of where this falls on the scale of things to complain about, compared to say, a famine.  Still, somebody has to be responsible for the PopCap booth at PAX East, and that someone is me. So I’m complaining. Wheeee!

Oh yeah, so we have a booth at PAX East. If’n you don’t know what that is, it’s the Penny Arcade Expo, a humongous gaming convention being held in Boston March 22-24. If that sounds cool to you, you’re right, because it is. But if you don’t have tickets already, forget it, because it sold out long ago. PopCap will be there, in what is actually our first-ever appearance on the main show floor. (Previously we have relegated ourselves to the lobby or hallways or sidewalks outside.) Which accounts for the extra panic.

Our plans of what we were going to do at PAX, and what we were going to show, have varied from week to week, if not day to day. And I’m not sure I’m entirely clear on it, still. However, what I can tell you is that — because we found it on a loading dock — we are indeed going to have fantabulous free swag to hand out, as usual. So if you are lucky enough to be going, stop by Booth 974,  say hi, and grab a cool, entirely free, one-of-a-kind PopCap goodie, and rejoice! And don’t go putting it on Craigslist or eBay afterwards, because that just makes us sad.

PAX East is one week away!  Yay! (?)

Hope to see you there!
–Jeff

Another PAX convention has come and gone, and boy, are we tired.  Not that we’re complaining!  As mentioned in an early post, the Penny Arcade Expo is our very favorite convention in the whole wide world.  Where else can you find 70,000 nerds happily nerding out together in total nerd bliss? Still, all that nerding out can take its toll, especially if, like us, you also had a bit of work to do.

Our “work” (and yeah, we know, this isn’t exactly graveyard shift highway construction) was on two fronts: Promoting our latest Facebook game, Solitaire Blitz, at our booth, and shepherding our dancing zombies around the show floor.  One thing we learned at the show was that our zombies don’t have much in the way of peripheral vision with those big heads on, so if we weren’t on hand to keep them corralled together, they’d end up wandering off in different directions.  The great thing about that is we can now add “zombie shepherd” to our resumes, which with the coming apocalypse can only be a good thing.

Our booth was done up in a nautical theme, to fit the theme of Solitaire Blitz.  It looked pretty great! The ship’s wheel was a real ship’s wheel that you could actually spin around, if you were into that kind of thing,  and the bell was also real, though we tried not to ring it too much given how little sleep any of us got.

We had a couple items of shwag to pass out at the booth—PAX-branded Solitaire Blitz playing cards, and Otis the worm headbands, which you can see here:

We were aware going into the show that it might be a stretch to get folks to wear a headband with a worm on it on their heads, so we incentivized them by announcing that were giving away one very popular tablet device a day to someone we saw on the floor wearing the headband.  And we meant what we said! Here was the lucky winner from Day 3 of PAX:

Finally, our booth was also graced by the presence of a local Boston magician named David Hall, who performed a variety of amazing magic tricks at the booth – often conveniently using our Solitaire Blitz playing cards – throughout the weekend.  And believe us—this guy was good.  Some of us watched his tricks over and over for three days, and still couldn’t figure out how he was doing it.  Any fear we had that this was going to look like a bad 4^th –grader’s birthday party was assuaged the minute he had us baffled. Which was with the very first trick he did.

As for the dancing zombies, what can we say? They rocked, as always.  If you’ve seen them before, either in person or on YouTube, you know how awesome this troupe is.  To pull back the curtain a little, we can tell you that this is a troupe of Seattle breakdancers, who, when not earning money doing things like wearing zombie costumes, travel around the world and compete in breakdance competitions.  They worked up a great routine for us, which you can see below,  but they also indulged in a some freestyle whenever they could, which even without the zombie masks would have been amazing. With the masks, we were blown away with their endurance, timing,  and athleticism.

Finally, your humble blogger here did his very best to make an utter fool of himself throughout the show.  The following photo, taken from Harmonix’s Rock Band Night at the Brattle Theater, is merely one example  We will let it speak for itself.  Though we apologize in advance for any psychological trauma it causes.

Our humble thanks to all of you who stopped by, said hi, watched the zombies, or grabbed some cards or headbands.  We had a blast, and hope you did too.  If you didn’t make it to PAX East this year,  we hope to see you at a future show!