As our Design Director Kiko Villasenor and I are the only two people to have attended every PAX, and as Kiko doesn't especially delight in public speaking, it falls to me to be The Chronicler. We'll have other ways for you to travel through all that history this year, I think you'll be impressed, but there are a couple real things that are worth setting down.
PAX is older than Twitch, obviously, but it's also older than YouTube. It is based on a combination of Your Local Community Convention and the Electronic Entertainment Expo, also called E3, which has fallen into Shadow. We had to fake credentials for years to get into that show, and by the time we could routinely get in there under our own power we were too busy with PAX.
The very first PAX show in Bellevue, which locals will emphatically tell you is not Seattle, was in a place called the Meydenbauer Center. There was a local LAN place in the parking lot behind it we used to like going to. The show was only called PAX then, because there were no other PAX shows. It didn't even need the Prime moniker to differentiate it. It was just PAX, 2004. It had 1337 pre-registrations. I'm always surprised anytime something that we do works, because for whatever reason many of the things we attempt haven't been attempted before. But when I heard that number, so auspicious to the gamer of the time, I don't know. It seemed like a portent. The first year, the show was 24 Hours. Uh, yeah. It was never 24 hours again. It turns out that you can drink enough Bawls to stay awake that long, but it tends to transform you into a dark prophet.
The show lived in that building for three years, growing until it literally could not contain the show. The third year, the year we knew would be our last there, attendees formed a religion around a large blue ball and began to worship it. It's not the first religion founded at PAX, and it probably won't be the last, but the Meydenbauer had become a sacred crucible birthing Gods by the minute and we had to decrease the rate.
