This was my first time at PAX East, or a games convention of any kind. In Seaport, near downtown, in Boston. In the nicest convention center I’ve ever seen. Video games, tabletop and board games, RPGs, PC gaming, trading card games, a running competition between two things for absolute most of them in giant piles everywhere: dice and Pokémon. Look, normally I’m writing these about MICE. That’s my con background, C2E2, BKCF. Pittsburgh Comicon back when Evan Dorkin MC’d the Harvey Awards.
Anyway, aspects of PAX I was accustomed to. Cosplay (still trying to figure out the banana Thor dual-wielding Mjolnir maracas, PBJT?). Small talk with someone whose art print you’ve just snagged while they search for their thing of bags in the piles behind the table. The booth with all walls pillars free surface area covered in plush, or the booth with the library of old games, old card sets, specific ones that are priced for collectors. I was actually delighted by the synthesis of what I liked about MICE (Riso prints from weirdos) and what I missed about the cons of yore (a peddler’s fair of niche rarities).
PAX East, however, is built different. You go because you love to play games, yes, and when you’re there, that’s what you’re going to do. It’s what I did – though not in the full scope the convention offers. PAX is games, and while I went for their video games of the indie variety, “games” for them covers the many aforementioned iterations as well as arcade cabinets and developers with a Steam Deck setup who have their fingers crossed they’ll get listed on Switch 2. Yeah, there’s plenty of shopping to be done, but the true draw is spending the day trying out people’s new projects.
There were huge facets of the day completely unknown to me because I was only there to do two things: smash buttons and eat mac n cheese (and I could only justify a single portion of mac n cheese). Which is to say, my rambling ambling journey at PAX East is only going to focus on one aspect of the con. I spent my Thursday at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, wandering around discovering. Waiting in line to play video games on the precipice of release.
Games:
Most of what I played at PAX was indie games. Meredith Gran’s Perfect Tides: Station to Station. A lit-forward slice of life game, pixelated in a modern and pretty way, very much like reading a minicomic from a micropress. Tire Boy from Team6 Game Studios was a lot of rolling around idyllic landscapes with giant animals at high speed. Big fun. Lots of games, you can feel them trying to fill up the screen (in inventive ways) around the comparatively minute characters you play – this one utilizes the room to zoom. I liked how the Good Story Guild crew for Cat Secretary were hyping their anti-AI stance behind the screen as well as on it. Getting to use a Steam Deck to try out a demo on one of these was cool in part for me simply because I’d never gotten to use a Steam Deck before. Wait in line, maybe a free enamel pin if you wishlist, grab a controller. I’m into it.
Or a joystick, thanks to my personal MVPs of the show, Retroware. 2025 is turning out to be a banner year for Toxie; their Toxic Crusaders game is a thing of radioactive perfection. Retroware understood the assignment. The look is a magnificent synthesis of the cartoon and the circa cabinet beat ‘em ups you wished consoles would get. I played another game of theirs, Iron Meat, a side-scrolling shoot ‘em up with an extra helping of absurdity, that was better than the originals it paid homage to. Made me wish I had played Toxic Crusaders instead of just watching.
Joysticks were upstairs – Retroware also outfitted the real, free play arcade upstairs, as well as creating a faux one in their booth on the expo floor. The Northeast boasts an embarrassment of excellent arcades, I have seen some stuff at the Electromagnetic Pinball Museum you wouldn’t believe, and still the assortment of cabinets Retroware brought to PAX East were a flex. Really fun, a studio rooted in the software, the hardware, and vamping the aesthetic while putting gameplay first.
Upstairs, in the conference rooms, were retro experiences that also thoroughly blissed me out. Several of every console that took a disc or a cartridge from NES forward was set up around the room, with a catalog of games you could check out of its pop-up library and play. Down the hall, the arcade, lots of fighting cabinets, a couple driving games, some wild, Time Tunnel-looking rhythm games I have never seen in my life, Super Monkeyball. Virtual On, the side-by-side competitive mecha fighter arcade.
What I locked in on was the Die Hard Arcade, which is like Streets of Rage in a 3D environment (Double Dragon Bushido Blade). The violence cartoonish, its bo-oi-oing noise and a hearty groan before they collapse when you kick someone in the crotch is the kind of serotonin surprise that video games seem to inexhaustibly provide. It’s goofy. And fun! The arcade is a place of joy; it was cool to attend a convention where that was a primary draw down on the expo floor as well.
The Pokémon booth was where tradition brushed with routine, Exclusives and Big Names, where you went to play the game but also, for some moreso, for the convention exclusive gift from the booth at the end. Both, lucrative fun. And both kinds of Pokémon game, video and card, each with its own exclusive. I played the Scarlet and Violet game for the Switch (it was fun, you get to ride a lizard that’s also a motorcycle) and I got a little Pokémon shammy and an enamel pin. Fate threw me in with another yinzer, a terrific dude from Pittsburgh working our table for the booth, so s/o to Guy on the Couch Cards and Gaming, five minutes from the Dawn of the Dead mall. Magic was the other Big Name there, supporting their highly anticipated crossover with Final Fantasy with elaborate photo ops focused on the fans. Nintendo isn’t here, however, and neither is Square Enix.
Past PAX East attendants would spend hours on line to try out big name games. And, well, Marvel Studios stepping away from Hall H at SDCC was anticipated with dread and met with unbridled positivity, celebrated by many as “a comic convention about comics again.” I went on the opening day of PAX East, relatively tame as far as announcements and events are concerned compared to the coming weekend anyway, and I played cool fun games all day long, despite the absence of the all stars. And I barely scratched the surface of what’s there.
Merch:
Go to a games convention and buy a weird Riso print from somebody, that’s awesome. I got this card from Weird Works and the cat’s hat says “I (heart) Peeing?” That’s what I’m talking about! Buying stuff, from the people who made it, it is always a thrill. Artists! Studios that make dice, or accessories to outfit cosplayers and LARPers, you can smell the leather across the aisle. An RPG sourcebook marketplace for micropress self-released gaming systems, quite tempting. Gaming PCs that look like cyberpunk fantasy terrariums. Mega64 were there to sell stuff, I was starstruck- I’ve been a fan of their public video game reenactment videos for (gulp) like twenty years now. Got a Kozik vibing shirt from them. Just as the people running the indie game booths were the developers themselves, the folks here are selling their own stuff.
Sort of. There’s the grey area, licensing from indie games, when you’re small time but still making plush at scale. The struggle between creators and noncreators selling others’ IP, with subsequent splinter discourses on fan art, is deeply, territorially lodged in the mainstream comic convention scene. Here, on the PAX East floor, it doesn’t feel like such a competition between vendors (to be fair, only people who got booths are there). In the video game world, the distinction of fan art is harder to parse, the Fangamer booth that has the Hollow Knight stuff also has Street Fighter stuff done by cute designers, a Metal Gear Solid dressed up dog plush that begs the question “how did we get here” as well as “wouldn’t you like to take me home.”
I don’t remember seeing anyone with a fan art print booth, or much fanart at all. Unless you want to count dice, then whoa. Lots of dice stuff besides dice. But the licensed stuff at the corporate booth is just as canonically flexible as the outlaw artists flying their mashups under the radar. Iam8bit was there, too – another example of cultural fusion once removed from the source but still “official.” Licensed scores. But their bringing together of video game soundtracks and physical album design introduces record collector aesthetic sensibilities into video games’ vocabulary in a legitimized context. It feels a little grim to be attributing cultural advances to licensing agreements, but I can’t help but be fascinated by such a rigid approach to ownership where what is and isn’t interpreted as official is so broadly flexible.
There was also specific stuff from vendors selling collectables. The weird Pokémon plush with their tongue out you can’t get from the Pokémon Center. Individual top-loaded cards. Secondhand games, accessories, consoles. Gaming stores with every conceivable booster pack, out of print board game, curated curio boxes. Locals who come to sell. Beside them are those deadstock reseller companies who have the cute clothing and accessories that were from Macy’s two or three seasons ago, Animal Crossing snapbacks and Kirby backpacks.
This side of PAX East, the back-issue-bin flea market aspect that defines the old school comic convention, was something I hadn’t experienced in a while, something I missed. Love that you can go to one end of the expo floor and get con-exclusive Pokemon swag direct from the source, and on the other side you can buy a Ditto Squirtle plush out of a big plastic bucket overflowing with bonkers variations. The allure of being able to get your hands on stuff you wouldn’t elsewhere find otherwise, it sure gets one out of the house, doesn’t it?
Programming:
Panels! Tournaments! Look, I didn’t go to these. They seemed fun. I have watched speedrun streams and they’re hypnotizing. Watching a Bomberman Live-off was tempting (RIP William Carpenter). There were release panels, and educational panels, and industry advice panels. In the days since, I haven’t heard much big news as far as releases go (FNAF in the new Dead by Daylight) but I’ve heard that Giant Bomb bought itself from Fangamer, and that is cool, important news. So everywhere it seems on the surface there’s a lot of fun, but the more into your niche you are, deeper you dive, the more PAX rewards your interest.
There’s also live music until midnight. The relationship between video games and dance music is another 2,500 words, easy. I have some good stories about MAGIC Vegas afterparties (Buzzcocks) but am no longer built for going from ten in the morning til midnight without at least a safety meeting in there somewhere. There are several hours of programming and parties on the schedule after the floor closes, with or without me, not just unofficial or sponsored by, but honest to goodness con parties thrown on site. On the more low key end, there were informal meetups at the con for the Twitch streaming rave community whose clubs are all on Final Fantasy servers.
Also shout out to the food, which was worth the typical eyebrow-raising con price tag. Food truck mac n cheese (NYC Mac Truck) was absolutely life affirming. It is a long day and you deserve better than con pizza from under a heat lamp.
On the scene:
PAX East is trying to be community forward. The no harassment policy is right there on your badge. No bathroom bullshit. Inclusive, accepting, celebratory. All as it should be. Masking not mandatory but still quite a bit of it going on. There’s a PAX Together initiative that features underrepresented creative voices in gaming, highlighting both exhibitors and programming. Official meetups. Quiet spaces. Water stations.
The casual coexistence of individual creators and small businesses as vendors was really refreshing for me, it’s something absent from the free conventions supported by arts grants I tend to frequent, and unfortunately often seen as competitive in the traditional con spaces where they do bump against each other. Does a good con have limited space for people, but room for a company who is a household name and doesn’t have to sweat how the rest of their year goes based on how well they do this weekend? Will people show up to a con without the Big Two present (yes gladly)? Comics continue to struggle with establishing their cultural legitimacy, contributing to an elevated state of awareness about their worth. The where are the comics at comic conventions sentiment turning sour is a problem a convention that includes trading card games, video games, PC gaming, RPGs, and board games is incapable of by design.
Also, a huge draw to PAX is you can have a great time without buying anything besides a badge. It’s different there. On another page.
But! The struggle that video games people are going through is happening outside of what you see at the con. The ubiquity of the QR code is because these games need you to wishlist them. There’s a huge numbers game that they have to play, that everything on the floor is a pivotal part of. All the work they’ve put in leading up to that point comes across in how good the booth experience is, how much you enjoyed playing the game, whether you smash that button or not. Tremendous responsibilities for the artist that fall firmly outside of making the art itself, which should sound all too familiar to comic creators, illustrators, designers, micropress publishers, and the rest of the Artists Alley gang.
When I talked to Gran about her game, and how much I liked the way the pixelated characters scaled down when you went outside versus big inside the apartment, she talked about the person who did the background design for the game, using their first name, and the same for the person who was developing their coding jump from PC to consoles. I don’t have any fix for the conflict over shrinking space and whether or not rising tides lift all dinghies. But I do see an example here of everyone coming together to make it happen, and I mean everyone, and believe that putting that into practice is how things get fixed. Together we succeed.
Standing on one of the second floor glassed-in bridges that connect the various conference rooms by crossing above the expo hall, I was a little awestruck. BCEC is a tremendous space and none of it has gone to waste. I don’t know how PAX East did it- an event that is largely booths with no direct financial return for those who get them needs big investors to pay the cost of renting this space, for the rest of us to split an affordable difference- and it’s nice to see an event that’s so important to gaming’s future remain financially accessible to attendants and individual exhibitors both, even in the absence of established giants. If that’s how it is moving forward? Cool.
PAX East returns to Boston in March 2026. PAX West Seattle is in August 2025.
