Next week marks the tenth annual Penny Arcade Expo, located in the beautiful state of Washington. To help celebrate the occasion, Defunct Games is proud to debut our exclusive look at PAX 2006. Join us as we look at this smaller, more personal event, featuring early appearances of Klei, The World's Smallest Dungeons, Guitar Hero II and much, much more. And don't forget to subscribe to the Defunct Games YouTube Channel for your chance to win your very own 2006 swag bag!


Let's put 2006 in perspective. While it may not sound like that long ago, PAX 2006 took place before most of this current crop of consoles launched. At this point nobody owned a PlayStation 3 and people were still doubting the Wii's place in the next-gen system war. The Xbox 360 was around, but just barely, as none of the system's iconic games had been released and we were still years away from the Kinect.

Needless to say, all the footage in this documentary is old. Seven years ago I had never shot and assembled a video; the whole experience was brand new. As a result, the video I made back then was terrible. The audio sounded like it was recorded in a tin can, the video was shaky and the editing was troublesome. The whole thing was an absolute mess.

I have been vexed by that PAX video for seven straight years. An entire console generation has come and gone, and yet I still think about the horribleness of that first video. This year I finally had enough. It's finally time to make a PAX 2006 video I can be proud of.

Unfortunately, I didn't have any of the original footage. This presented a problem, as it limited what I could do with this remake. It's also bad because the footage is far from HD quality. After some tinkering, I feel like I was able to overcome both of these obstacles. This video quality will never look as good as I would like (and it will always be shaky, due in large part to my inexperience behind a camera), but I feel that the content is compelling enough to make you forget all about that.

Let me know what you think and make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel for a chance to win a very special (and very rare) swag bag from this Penny Arcade Expo. Details about that contest coming next week.