GenCon Day 1B: Memories...

Leaving the headaches of the hotel behind, we just get down to biz of helping run our GenCon booth. Albert and I roll in and the gang has done a great job—everything operational and running smoothly. More kudos to Karen for kickin’ booty on the planning side.

The last time I was at GenCon was about ten years ago, in Milwaukee. My, how things have changed! GenCon was like that cousin you only see once in a blue moon. All of a sudden it was all grown up! Instead of three or four mega booths from the computer and video game scene, and a bazillion 10’x10’ spots for dice vendors, GenCon was flooded with high-powered marketing. Right on!

Tens years prior, I was on the show floor to set up the whole booth. I was literally bolting our booth together, installing games on-site… all sorts of stuff. This time around, I had the abject pleasure of walking in with everything already completely copasetic. I felt like GenCon was a Mecca of roleplaying, and I was on a pilgrimage. All I had to do was walk through it, greeting its denizens and leaving our mark upon its populace.

The booth was swamped from the word go, and we had bunches of folks showing up for all sorts of stuff. Mostly swag runners at first, but they won’t bite unless you get between them and their prey. Once we got our schedule running and knew who had to be where and when, we were a well-oiled machine.

Of course, I met a bunch of NCsoft people I hadn’t yet had the pleasure to chat with, and of I chatted with a lot of fans coming by to the booth. With nine computers and three big ol’ plasma screens, you’d think we would have enough to show the love to everyone who came by. Alas, we could never have enough machines (Dell, you listening???) to sate the need to play games at the show.

I got a chance to walk the show a bit later. Here’s a bunch of pics of what I found.

The Naruto craze continues (left), but thankfully there's some live action imitation Dungeon Runners (right) to balance it out.

Big crowds (left) and starvin' artists (right) abound.