Salt Lake City has never had much luck with video game conventions. And it’s not for lack of trying, the most notable attempt being Geex, which ran for several years with limited success but as best as I can tell hasn’t appeared since 2011. But things are different now, the Salt Lake Comic Con has turned into a surprise success, bringing in well over 100,000 attendees at its peak and quickly ranking itself in the top ten most visited comic conventions worldwide.
With that kind of geek turnout you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking it would be just as easy to hold a successful gaming convention, but it’s a little more complex than that. Attending cons costs exhibitors a hefty sum, not just to reserve their place on the showfloor but also to create and ship their booth setup, their demo stations, and pay their employees to man them. It’s much easier (and cheaper) to fly in a celebrity to shake hands and sign autographs.
So I can understand when I don’t exactly see a huge list of names on the exhibitors list for the Salt Lake Gaming Con’s inaugural event. Microsoft wound up being the headlining sponsor and had a pretty good sized booth, although from what I could tell there wasn’t anything present that hasn’t already been released and so if you already own The Master Chief Collection you were probably a tad underwhelmed.
Sony stepped in at the last minute and brought a demo of Guitar Hero Live with them, but by the end of day two some rambunctious attendees had damaged the demo guitar which made the experience more frustrating than fun. Still this was probably the biggest unreleased game at the show. Curiously this is also where some of the show’s unfortunate disorganization begins to shine through. While I believe the organizers have a lusty enthusiasm for games I think they also have a lot to learn about putting on a convention, and those lessons can start with how they promoted the demo of Guitar Hero Live on their site:
So if you saw this, you’re probably getting some conflicting information. The header says Rock Band 4, the art is from Rock Band 4, but Rock Band 4 was definitely not at the convention. In fact, neither was Guitar Hero 4. If we’re going to be numbering things Guitar Hero 4 was World Tour and Guitar Hero Live will actually be Guitar Hero 7. It might not seem important, but I would have been upset had I purchased a pass with the intention of playing Rock Band 4 and then couldn’t find it at all. This isn’t the last time the con’s site gave out incorrect or misleading information, but we’ll save that for later.
If you’re only interested in AAA games then the story pretty much ends there. I don’t blame the organizers, it can’t be easy to convince Nintendo to ship all their stuff out to Salt Lake to demo at a convention that’s running for the first time ever. I hope the attendance numbers were good enough to persuade some more exhibitors next year, because that’s really what a show like this needs to be successful. Having said that, it’s curious to me that companies like EA, Disney Interactive, and WildWorks who are all local to the area had no presence whatsoever.
Thankfully if you were looking to try out new games the Utah Games Guild had a pretty impressive booth laid out with a lot of great indie games for attendees to get their hands on. We’ll be highlighting some of those in greater detail over the next few weeks but standouts include Together: Anna & Saif, an adventure game with a heavy emphasis on cooperation; Momentum, a 3D physics based platformer; and Legacy of the Elder Star, a space shooter controlled entirely with the mouse.
There were a few other indies outside the game guild’s section, including the folks at Fourth Axis who had the foresight to design their game around the Oculus Rift which will always generate the longest line possible at a convention.
By and large the least successful part of the convention had to involve the special guests and panels. Let’s start with the first person listed on the SLGC website under the special guests list: Mr. Steven Ogg.
Steven was not at the event, a quick glance at his Twitter indicates he never left LA. So why is he listed at the very top of the page of Special Guests?
The site doubles down on bad information when it comes to Metal Gear composer Rika Muranaka’s panel. Not only does the website spell her name incorrectly multiple times, but it also lists a conflicting date and time in the event’s description.
The “Main Theater” was located all the way at the opposite end of the convention without any real signage to speak of. If there was a map or exhibitor list to be had we never saw it. Eventually we just asked someone and made our way down to the Deus Ex panel, which by the way was also listed incorrectly on the official Facebook page. The turnouts to each panel were sad but really it’s a miracle anybody showed up to these things.
The panel opened with a trailer for Mankind Divided, or at least the bottom half of Mankind Divided. Obviously nobody thought to test the video on the theater’s screen first. And then out comes Adam Jensen himself: Elias Toufexis. No introduction, no fanfare, just Elias, a chair, and the thirty people who figured out where the main theater was. Toufexis was perfectly polite and gracious, answering questions and talking about his experience with the game, but I’m not sure you could blame him if after staring at the likely thousands of empty seats in the theater he didn’t wonder if maybe this wasn’t the best use of his time.
We didn’t attend the other panels so hopefully things ran smoother, but if they were as disorganized as Deus Ex and Rika Nakamura’s shows then perhaps they shouldn’t even bother with panels next year.
I want to be really clear here, I want this event to be successful. I know it might come across like we’re being nitpicky, but I think the criticisms outlined here are hard lessons that the event’s organizers are going to need to learn if they want to have continued success hosting this convention. All in all, it seemed like the turnout this year was good, and the SLGC’s Facebook page has already announced dates for next year’s show, so let’s hope things go even better and we can have ourselves a new yearly tradition in SLC.
