I go to PAX West every year, and every year I go as a civilian. I buy a badge, I wander, I buy more t-shirts than I need, and I go home. This is the first year I went with a camera and an actual reason to talk to people, and it turns out that changes the whole show. Walking a convention floor looking for someone to interview is a completely different activity from walking it looking for a t-shirt. I recommend it, mostly.
Photos and video by Gregory Morley.
I only had a Saturday badge this year, which meant no leisurely four-day drift through the halls. Saturday is also the most expensive single day of the four, and having now spent one, I understand why. One day, two buildings, more floors than I could reasonably cover, and a hard stop dictated by how long my pup will tolerate being alone before she starts rearranging the apartment. That constraint turned out to be good for the piece. When you have six hours instead of thirty, you stop pretending you’ll circle back to a booth later.
Some background for anyone who has never been to one. PAX is a gaming festival rather than a trade show, and that distinction is the whole reason it exists. Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the pair behind the Penny Arcade webcomic, started it in 2004 because they wanted to attend a show that was actually for gamers instead of for the industry, which at the time meant E3 and a press badge you couldn’t get. So PAX is open to anybody who buys a ticket, and it’s built around playing things rather than watching announcements about them. Video games, board games, card games, role-playing games, arcade cabinets, tournaments, panels and concerts, all under one roof.
The first one drew about 3,300 people to a convention center in Bellevue, just across the water from Seattle. It has since become four shows a year on two continents, with Boston, Melbourne and Philadelphia joining Seattle and a fifth landing in Houston in 2027. Seattle’s is the original, which is why its name kept moving. It was simply PAX until the Boston show launched in 2010 and this one became PAX Prime, then it was renamed PAX West in 2015. This year’s ran Friday the 4th through Monday the 7th of September, with more than 300 exhibitors and something like 100,000 people moving through it over the four days. It spreads across two buildings of the Seattle Convention Center in the middle of downtown, about two blocks apart. The halls are called the Arch and the Summit, and on a good Seattle weekend the walk between them is one of the better parts of the day.
The Floor
The Arch is where the money is. Its expo hall takes up Level 4 and it’s the AAA floor, the one with the queue management and the staff in matching shirts. SEGA had Persona 4 Revival playable. Konami brought Silent Hill Townfall and a Metal Gear walk-through. Riot opened the whole weekend with a keynote from one of their co-founders. Bandai Namco, Atari and Larian were all in there too, along with the hardware names, AMD, Corsair, Secretlab, SanDisk and Edifier. Most of them were demoing what’s coming rather than selling what’s out, which I’ll come back to.
Razer was the official peripherals partner this year, and their booth was built around the Esports Green Collection, a matching set of mice, keyboards and headsets you could walk up and try without booking a slot. I tried them. But the thing I actually stopped for was sitting off to the side.
Razer AVA is a holographic AI companion in a lit cylinder roughly the size of a pint glass. It runs a 5.5 inch 3D holographic display with an HD camera, dual far-field mics and a down-firing driver, and it tethers to a Windows PC over USB-C. An animated character lives inside it and talks to you, and you can swap which character that is. Razer showed it at CES in January and it’s expected to ship in the second half of this year, with no price announced yet and a refundable twenty dollar deposit holding a spot in line. It was crowded enough that I stood back and watched other people talk to it instead. A talking hologram that lives on your desk and keeps you company is either the best or the worst possible product for me specifically, and I did not get long enough with it to work out which.
The Summit is the other half of the show and it is stacked vertically, running from Level 0 all the way up to Level 5. Console and classic console freeplay, VR and the PC area sit at the bottom on Level 0. The tabletop expo hall and tabletop freeplay own Level 2. Higher up you get theatres, the arcade, the cosplay rooms, the handheld lounge and, on Level 5, the Rock Band stage. You can walk this building for a full day and still be finding rooms at closing time.
My favorite thing in there has nothing to do with gadgets. There are Dungeons and Dragons tables where anyone can walk up and join a game, beginners very much included, and I have still never done it. I stand near them. I watch. I have watched for several years now. PAX even puts out “Looking for Group” markers so that someone sitting alone can signal they want strangers to join them, which removes the last excuse I had. At some point the distinction between observing the culture and loitering gets thin, and I am aware of which side of it I’m on.
Here’s the part I think people underrate about this show. Both freeplay halls run on a lending library. On the tabletop side you walk up, check out whatever board game you were curious about from a wall of hundreds of them, take it to a table and play it. Nobody is standing over your shoulder waiting to pitch you something. The console side works the same way, a library of hundreds of titles and hundreds of consoles to play them on, and there’s a dedicated Classic Console section where the machines are period-correct and hooked to CRTs. If you want to sit down in front of an original Nintendo and play something you haven’t touched since childhood, you can, and it costs you nothing beyond the badge. The handheld lounge is the one exception, since they don’t loan systems there, so bring your own and use the charging stations.
The PC area is the other thing I always detour for, all of it running on CLX machines with a separate section for people who haul in their own towers for the weekend. It was packed. There is something reassuring about a room full of people who committed to a bit this hard.
Cosplay is way down. It used to be on par with any Comic Con I’ve been to, and this year it felt like one in ten attendees, if that. I don’t have a theory. It’s just noticeably not what it was.
Level 5 has a crafting corner with projects actually running, and the Rock Band stage, where you and your friends get up in front of a crowd and play. The line was short. I did not get on the stage, on account of the friends requirement, but I want the record to show the line was short and that was not the obstacle.
The Summit’s rooftop lounge was the nicest surprise of the day. Good weather, completely packed, with a 21-and-over section fenced off to one side.
And a block away they close off the street beside the Paramount Theatre, a 1928 movie palace that survived long enough to become Seattle’s home for touring Broadway shows, and they fill it end to end with food vendors. That’s where I ended up. I get the beef and cheese piroshky every single year. It is the one tradition I have that requires no coordination with another human being, and there is always a table for one.
The Interviews
Five conversations this year, all of them with people who make the thing they were standing behind. Each one is its own video below.
ELO Gaming
ELO Gaming is a small Canadian company making mobile gaming hardware, and I talked with Brett, their head of engineering. The product they actually ship is the Vagabond, a $99.99 mobile gaming controller that works with anything USB-C, phone or tablet or PC. The one he wanted to talk about and couldn’t demo is Sentinel, a pair of XR gaming glasses that funded on Kickstarter and then ran straight into the component shortage. He’s a good talker and the whole thing is worth watching.
Find them at eloesports.com.
Epic Desk
Epic Desk makes artist-designed deskmats and playmats, and Derek walked me through how the business actually runs. The number that stuck with me is the roughly 45 artists they commission on a rolling basis. The thing on the booth wall that stuck with me harder was “REAL ARTISTS, NO AI HERE,” which is a firmer position than most companies will put in writing. Deskmats run $49.95 to $59.95 and playmats around $39.95. One of their mats is getting its own full review here shortly, so I’ll have a lot more to say once I’ve actually lived with one.
Find them at epicdesk.shop.
Ahlquist Interactive
Ahlquist Interactive is more or less one person. Hunter Ahlquist has been building an action RPG called The Dreamer Must Die around a full-time job for about four years. Hunter Golden and Brian were working the booth as, in their own words, the hype guys, which meant there were two Hunters and it took me a minute. The game is listed as Coming Soon on Steam with a playable demo up right now. Watch the interview for how Metroid Prime, Kingdom Hearts and EarthBound all ended up inside the same game.
Find them at ahlquistinteractive.com.
Find the game, and the playable demo, on Steam.
Drinks with Frenemies
Frenemy Games Studio makes Drinks with Frenemies, a party game built entirely around sabotaging the people you’re playing with, and Eric gave me the tour. They’re nine years in with nine editions out, ranging from ones you could play with your parents to several you very much could not. Smaller packs are $19.99 and the bigger decks $29.99. His advice about what you should be drinking while you play is worth the video on its own.
Find them at frenemygames.com, or hopefully in your local game shop.
OffShoots
OffShoots is a wooden balance game from Dan, a toy designer who spent three years trying to build something else entirely and kept accidentally making tree branches. You take turns adding leaves until somebody knocks the tree over. All the rules fit on the back of the box. It’s $29.99, or $34.99 for the Made In America edition. The origin story is the good part, and it’s in the video. OffShoots is also getting its own full review here soon, once I’ve found enough people to knock a tree over with.
Find it at offshootsgame.com, or on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble.
The Vendor Hall (my favorite part of PAX)
Everything above is the show. The vendor hall is the part I’d pay for on its own. It has the same character as a Comic Con floor, which means dice in quantities that stop making sense, gaming peripherals, D&D mats, DM folders, dice towers, and enough superhero, sci-fi and fantasy t-shirts that I walked out with my wardrobe handled for the next few months. There were publishers there too, selling sci-fi and gaming books.
I spent more time in the Summit’s tabletop hall this year than I ever have, which is where two of the five interviews came from. Watching somebody sell a game they designed themselves, off a table, to a stranger, is a specific pleasure. Downstairs from it, the tabletop events floor breaks into zones that are more specific than you’d expect, a TCG zone, a miniatures section running paint-and-take sessions, a Deception Zone for the social deduction crowd, and an entire sea of Crokinole boards sitting out with learn-to-play cards on them, waiting for anyone who wandered past to sit down and flick a disc. The indie video game side is the same energy with worse lighting, and that’s where I found Ahlquist Interactive.
Then there’s the PAX Art Hub, over in the Arch, which turned into my favorite part of the day. It’s the PAX equivalent of Artist Alley, a mix of independent creators and artists with actual game credits to their name, and that kind of room is where every piece of art in my office and my apartment has come from. I spent the whole time I was in there assuming I’d somehow walked past it in previous years. I hadn’t. The Art Hub is brand new for 2026, which means PAX went twenty-two years without a proper artist alley and finally fixed it. It’s where the rest of my money went. You get things there you cannot get anywhere else, and most of it is rooted in sci-fi, fantasy or gaming, so whatever your particular thing is, somebody in that room has made art about it.
What One Day Costs You
What a single-day badge really costs you is the evenings. PAX runs a tournament called the Omegathon across the entire weekend, where attendees who registered in advance get randomly drafted into round after round of games they aren’t told about beforehand, and the whole show closes on a secret final round in the main theatre. This year that finale came with the Phinney Ridge Steel Band, a Seattle steel drum outfit playing video game music with Eric Barone sitting in, the man who built Stardew Valley by himself. Friday night belonged to Magic Sword, an electronica trio, opening act a Seattle woodwind quintet.
I was at home for both. So if you’re planning a first PAX and can only justify one day, go in knowing the show floor is the smaller half of what you’re buying.
What’s Changed
PAX gets a little more commercial every year, and this year I could put my finger on why it bothers me. Years ago I could walk this show and find real deals on computer peripherals from small companies making strange, specific things like custom joysticks. Now the pattern is big companies arriving not to sell you anything but to show you something in development, or something you can pre-order later. Even Razer, who did have product for sale, only brought what they could carry rather than the actual line, out of a booth smaller than I expected.
Which is exactly why the people I interviewed matter more to me than whoever built the slickest queue on the AAA floor. Epic Desk had mats on the table you could buy and walk away with. Dan had OffShoots stacked up next to him. Eric had the decks right there. The discounts and the exclusives all live in that half of the show, and so does the version of PAX I keep coming back for.
That’s PAX West 2026. One badge, two buildings, five interviews, several t-shirts, one order of piroshky, and one Dungeons and Dragons table I once again failed to sit down at. Next year I’m sitting down. Maybe.