Penny Arcade- I need a title

By: John Caruso

Have you ever wanted to make a living playing videogames or writing a comic? Well, since November 18, 1998 Jerry Holkins(Tycho) and Mike Krahulik(Gabe) have been doing both. Three times a week (Mon, Wed, Fri) they publish their very popular ‘gaming webcomic’, Penny Arcade(www.penny-arcade.com) (a genre of comic which I believe they pioneered). Penny Arcade focuses on two avid gamers, Tycho and Gabe, who are loosely based on Holkins and Krahulik themselves.

For those not familiar with what a webcomic is: literally it is a comic that is published on the web, but it is much more than just drawing a comic and putting it on a website. Another webcomic creator, Tim Buckley of Ctrl+Alt+Del(www.cad-comic.com), said this about webcomics, “the realization that there were a bunch of artists out there, financing and publishing their own work, without censorship, and without the need for a larger corporation or newspaper, just hit me really hard.” This is the very nature of the webcomic, and because of it most are usually followed by a rant by the creator- a way of making themselves heard. Here they talk about issues they want to be known, what they were thinking about when they made their comic and just about anything else that is on their minds. As I mentioned before, they make a living playing videogames as well. So, for Penny Arcade, Tycho and Gabe mostly use their rants to discuss the games they are playing and other events in the gaming industry.

Tycho and Gabe are so well known in the video game industry that they are sent demos of the latest games to test and review. And they include these reviews in their rants. This is part of what makes Penny Arcade so popular; they give meaningful reviews on the latest games. This popularity has also spawned a fan club, the Penny Arcade Cult (www.pacult.com).

For their latest project, as they don’t only create their own comics, they were hired to create a 5 page comic by UbiSoft for the well-known movie-turned-videogame: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for the Playstation2. And it doesn’t stop there, Gabe let a little hint out as to their next project, “No swords or horses in this one, but you might see some flash bangs.”

You might be wondering how exactly they do make money on their webcomic, since it’s not published in any newspaper and they run the site themselves. Penny Arcade has relied on advertisements and reader donations for the most part. There was an early part in their career where Penny Arcade almost disappeared because of a lack of funding, but the readers helped keep the site alive and since then it has been going strong. Their site receives 120 000 unique hits per day, and rank first in daily traffic out of all webcomics.

So, the next time you sit down in front of your computer, make sure you go and visit Penny-Arcade.com and enjoy their humour and video game insight.