PAX East 2015 has come and gone, but some booths will not be forgotten. The environmental setup of a booth helps developers really pull people into their games by transporting attendees into a new world. Here is a collection of photos that I thought did the best job at this by looking great and setting themselves apart from the rest of the show floor.
Wargaming had a huge setup designed to look like something pulled out of the World of Tanks and World of Warships world. The entire booth had a concrete and steel look and even featured some crumbling parts to look like it was a war-torn building. This all meshed up very well to provide a good sense of environment that matched the game.
Hot Pockets gets my Best Booth That Wasn't A Booth award. They had a food truck stationed directly out front of the convention center. They constantly had a line outside of it as they passed out free Hot Pockets to anyone who came along. No promotional material, didn't ask for any email address, just a constant free stream of Hot Pockets.
Guild Wars 2 had a very jungly booth for their new expansion Heart of Thorn. They had fake foliage surrounding everything at their booth. In some spots, it was difficult to see what was going on inside the booth. It was very easy to spot the Guild Wars booth from a distance as a tree inside an expo hall sticks out like a sore thumb.
The booth for Oculus was set up to bring people out of the show floor and into a makeshift living room. The booth itself had an entrance on the front and exists in the back and rooms with soundproofing walls surrounding it. When being inside the booth you almost forgot that you were in the middle of a loud expo hall as it was much quieter and relaxing inside the booth.
Blizzard's Overwatch booth was something that was easy to see from almost any spot in the expo hall. The entire booth was glowing orange and had huge displays on each corner showing game footage. Lines wrapped around the booth and into the center where people were sent to booths in each corner to play their new game Overwatch.
For Capcom, Monster Hunter is big, and they did a great job supporting it this year. They created a Monster Hunter themed trailer to sell merchandise from and had three tents surrounding it, creating a great looking hunter caravan. Two tents contained New Nintendo 3DS XL's with Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate and one tent was filled with 3DS charging cables for attendees.
The Cards Against Humanity booth wasn't easy to find, but it was worth the search. Their booth consisted of 2x4s, cardboard scraps, some duct tape, and their cards spread all over the table. Also featured at this booth: game developers were posted every day to sign cards from their game and hand out swag. This was the most low budget booth in the entire convention center, but this made it the most hilarious.
Grey Box had a huge booth this year for their game Grey Goo. They had their booth built around a center stage to demo their new RTS game. It was very easy to see their booth from a distance due to the glow that it emitted. And statues!
Twitch had a huge booth that you saw as soon as you walked into the Expo Hall. This was the most well-lit booth as the front of it was set up like a studio complete with lights, cameras, and sound equipment. It gave attendees a great opportunity to see behind the scenes of the live-broadcast of a show.
Alienware had more to show than just PC hardware. They also deemed it worth to show off their custom Pick-up truck that had color changing LEDs all over it, speakers strung across the roof rack, and 6 game stations that pulled out of the back of the truck bed. On top of all of this, the lights would change to the music that was being played.
Published: Mar 9, 2015 03:33 pm