Penny Arcade, the newly Fremont-based gamer-culture megalith, wants to add reality television to its list of conquests. The two-part pilot of PATV is part Penny Arcade primer, part vlog gamer manifesto, part tear-jerker, and part Leni-Riefenstahl-esque nerd-rally propaganda film—but with PSPs and Game Boys instead of torches.
Here's the WTF, for you non-nerds: Penny Arcade is a webcomic with four million monthly readers, responsible for such theoretical advancements as the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. (In equivalent readership units, that's approximately .22 NYTimeses, or four Slogs.)
- "Imagine the Deadliest Catch, but with Penny Arcade."
So will PATV take off? Past performance is no indication of future results, but Penny Arcade is an almost magical success engine: In 2004, they started a gamer convention called PAX, and a few thousand people showed up. This year, attendance was over 60,000, and they filled the entire downtown convention center with awesome nerdery and indisputably seized the spiritual mantle of E3—and next year, they're adding another PAX, in Boston. In 2003, they started a charity called Child's Play with a mission of pure cuteness: getting video games to bored, sick kids in hospitals. So far it's raised over $5 million. And Penny Arcade just moved to new, bigger offices in Fremont. Why? They wanted enough room for a ping-pong arena with bleacher seating.
The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.
