Day 1... Warning - More spelling mistake than usual, i'm quite tired. =) We finally got in Boston @ 2.00 AM, took a quick nap and walk into the Pax @ 7.45 am. It was really exciting to get inside as an exhibitor while a human wave was waiting in line outside. We started to get our stuff setup and by 9.00 the media started to visited us. IGN, Kotaku, ARGnet and many others asked about the game and where curious to know more. (We told them how awesome the community is!) @ 10.00 AM the PA system announced that the door were open, but quickly we heard a rumbling sound followed by thousand of players rushing in. From that point to 6.00 PM it has been pure madness. We didn't had a single seconds to breath as players gather around "The Black Watchmen recruitment center" =) and took a shot at the two puzzle there. It took about 30 minutes for the first puzzle to go down and 2 hours for the second one to get solved! By noon, about 20 peoples manages to solved the puzzle, some coming 2 to 3 times over 4 hours to give it another shot! By 6.00 PM we got a good 40 players who manage to solved the puzzle and already distributed a thousand flyers of The Black Watchmen. More importantly, we have open up the universe of ARGs to hundreds of new players who are psyched to know such game exist and such community is out there! Sadly, there is no working Internet @ PAX (!) and even the cellphone have a hard time working as the celltower are being flooded by gamers. My plan was to take some time to give you update while we had some dowtime @ the booth. No internet and horde of players took care of my plans. =) I'll grab a quick bite and will head to the IRC channel / forums later this evening. If you are from PAX and new to the forums, a big warm WELCOME!
Day 2... Warning - More spelling mistake than usual, i'm quite tired. =) IN-SA-NE. The wave of people, the fun, the collaboration to solve puzzle, the community.. everything, this industry and the people with it is just plain awesome! We took the time to talk with our neighbours, everyone is exhausted but quite excited by the experience! Before noon we already ran out of another box of Black Watchmen flyers. By 3 one of the briefcase broke under the sheer amount of people trying to unlock it. Patricks went on a ride to find a new one but we just manage to got a 3 digit lock. So now it's Open the lock! instead of Open the case. People of all style get into the game, tat's what's make it so fun. I hope we have the chance to welcome them on the forums! Oh and someone broke the record at solving the first puzzle, less than 5 minutes! But the second stood still in the path of many players. So far we have 85 peoples who opened the first puzzles and 23 who manage to open the second, out of a good 300+ folks who tried. By the end of the day we had no more voice but a great time! So on that, I'm going to change my time (daylight saving) and loose an hour of sleep. =)
Day 3... Warning - More spelling mistake than usual, i'm quite tired. =) After dodging Boston traffic for 1h, we manage to got to our booth! This by itself was a mini arg. Today was different, a lot of players from previous days were back to get a shot at the briefcase, with a good amount of success I might add! It was also a great opportunity to celebrate with our new agents who manage to successfully complete the Boston mission! We had a total of 225 peoples successfully opened the case, 27 for the Hard puzzle! More than 1 500 flyers were handed out, 2 100 visits on the website during the weekend (an increase of 1 200 from last week), 116 new newsletter opt-in. If this experience bring only 100 new players to the game, we will cover all our expenses! We are looking forward to see the fallout of the event in the upcoming weeks. We started to pack at 6.00 PM psyched by our experience. On our way back we had enough time to put some final touch for the Beta that we will announce soon, pretty exciting! =) We finally crossed the border at 12.30 AM with a friendly border patrol agent! (for real!) I got home at 1.30 AM, Patrick and Forgues got home at 2.30 AM for a good long night of sleep... Thanks everyones for being with us during PAX East 2015!
Glad I could be a part of this, (Poke Trainer Academy hoodie is me) along with @Rhino, @Inigo, and @ScapeZero
I wasn't at pax, I spent all weekend at Marvin's Muffins. What conspiracy? There is no conspiracy, stop being paranoid.
