I’m at San Francisco International, waiting for the plane for my flight to Seattle to empty its current crowd of passengers so I can board. It’s an eerie sight here, though: I don’t see a single member of the video game press. This is quite the opposite of how PAX travel normally goes. San Francisco is home to a high concentration of game writers, and normally the flight to PAX is a big cluster of nerds. Had those planes crashed, suddenly there’d have been a ton of game editor job postings on Craigslist.
Not today, though. I see no competitors, no former comrades, not even my fellow 1UP/IGN cohorts. I imagine a bunch of people traveled a day or two ago to attend the PAX Dev pre-show event, while the IGN crew headed down early this morning to juggle Halofest duties. I haven’t even gotten on the plane and already I see signs of how big PAX has become; it’s such a massive event now that other events have fallen into its orbit. The rubber sheet of the game industry calendar has a massive weight warping it out of shape, and that weight was born of an Internet cartoon about dudes with Pac-Man shirts. I would not have guessed that, back in 1998.
