Penny Arcade is a webcomic focused on video games and video game culture, written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik. The comic debuted in 1998 on the website loonygames.com. Since then, Holkins and Krahulik have established their own site, which is typically updated with a new comic strip each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The comics are accompanied by regular updates on the site's blog.
Nolan Kay Bushnell is an American businessman and electrical engineer. He established Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre chain. He has been inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame, received the BAFTA Fellowship and the Nations Restaurant News "Innovator of the Year" award, and was named one of Newsweek's "50 Men Who Changed America". He has started more than 20 companies and is one of the founding fathers of the video game industry. He is on the board of Anti-Aging Games. In 2012, he founded an educational software company called Brainrush, that is using video game technology in educational software.
The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets is a rock band from Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada. Their music largely consists of often tongue-in-cheek homages to the works of H. P. Lovecraft, specifically the Cthulhu Mythos.
Jerry Holkins is an American writer. He is the co-creator and writer of the webcomic Penny Arcade along with its artist Mike Krahulik. Holkins sometimes uses the pseudonym "Tycho Brahe", which is also the name of a Penny Arcade character based on Holkins.
Michael Krahulik is an American artist for the webcomic Penny Arcade and co-founder with Jerry Holkins of Child's Play, a charity that organizes toy drives for children's hospitals. He goes by the online moniker "Jonathan Gabriel" or "Gabe". Krahulik does not physically resemble his comic strip counterpart, as the character was not originally meant to represent him.
Scott R. Kurtz is an American webcomic artist. Known for creating the daily online comic-strip PvP, Kurtz is among the first professional webcomic creators.
Howard Phillips is an American video game consultant and producer best known as an early employee of and spokesman for Nintendo of America in the 1980s.
Child's Play is a charitable organization that donates toys and games to children's hospitals worldwide. It was founded in 2003 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, authors of the popular video games-related webcomic Penny Arcade. The charity is seen as a way to refute mainstream media's perception of gamers as violent and antisocial. As of 2017, Child's Play had processed $44,538,978 in donations since its inception.
Privateer Press is a role-playing game, miniature wargame, acrylic paint, board game and card game production and publishing studio. Privateer Press is based in Bellevue, Washington, United States, where they have their headquarters and American factory/distribution center. They have also licensed a factory in the United Kingdom to increase production capacity for worldwide markets.
PAX is a series of gaming culture festivals involving tabletop, arcade, and video gaming. PAX is held annually in Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Antonio in the United States; and Melbourne in Australia.
"A Modest Video Game Proposal" is the title of an open letter sent by activist/former attorney Jack Thompson to members of the press and to Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein on October 10, 2005. He proposed that, if someone could "create, manufacture, distribute, and sell a video game in 2006" that allows players to play the scenario he has written, in which the character kills video game developers, he will donate $10,000 to the charity of former Take-Two Interactive chairman Paul Eibeler's choosing. The title of the letter alludes to Jonathan Swift's 18th-century satire essay A Modest Proposal.
The Michael G. Foster School of Business is the business school at the University of Washington in Seattle. It was founded in 1917. The school has more than 50,000 alumni, and is accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. The school offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. Enrollment each year is about 2,500 students in its undergraduate and graduate programs and more than 1,000 working professionals in its executive education seminars and lifelong learning programs.
Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is an episodic action-adventure role-playing video game series based on the webcomic Penny Arcade.
Poker Night at the Inventory is a poker video game developed by Telltale Games. It features four characters from different franchises: Tycho Brahe from the Penny Arcade webcomic, Max from the Sam & Max franchise, the RED Heavy from Team Fortress 2, and Strong Bad from the Homestar Runner web series. The game was released on November 22, 2010. A sequel, Poker Night 2, was released in 2013. The game was delisted from Steam in May 2019.
Zeboyd Games is a developer of 8-bit and 16-bit-style indie role-playing games. Zeboyd is run and its games are created by Robert Boyd and William Stiernberg. The studio got its start with Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World; later made the third and fourth installments in the Penny Arcade Adventures series; and has since switched to the 16-bit style RPG Cosmic Star Heroine and Cthulhu Saves Christmas.
Strip Search is a 2013 online reality television game show created by Penny Arcade and produced by Bionic Trousers Media. The show featured twelve artists who competed over thirty-one episodes, with the series' winner receiving a cash prize and integration into the Penny Arcade offices in Seattle for one year.
Notable events of 2004 in webcomics.
"Loss", sometimes referred to as "Loss.jpg", is a strip published on June 2, 2008, by Tim Buckley for his gaming-related webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del. Set during a storyline in which the main character Ethan and his fiancée Lilah are expecting their first child, the strip—presented as a four-panel comic with no dialogue—shows Ethan entering a hospital, where he sees Lilah weeping in a hospital bed: she has suffered a miscarriage. Buckley cited events in his life as inspiration for the comic.
