People frequently ask me where I came up with the idea for the PAX Pokemon league, and it’s always a little difficult for me to track the exact moment. Over the years, I think I’ve distilled it down to 2 major influences.
In the early spring of 2010, I came across a video from PAX East where someone with a poke-walker (remember those?) racked up an absurd number of people they were able to connect with for extra gifts. If my memory serves me, it was over 100 people in less than 15 minutes. I’ve searched and I can’t quite find the original video, but I have seen many like it. Seeing this video was the main catalyst for starting the league.
My other piece of inspiration was the old Pokemon TCG circuit where there would be “gym leaders” at stores that you had to battle to win badges. Now I never played the Pokemon card game competitively, but I knew vaguely of this competitive system that existed locally. This idea of playing against real people to win some sort of badge was interesting to me.
By looking back in the Penny Arcade Forums, the first post for the Pax Pokemon league was in April 2010. (Here’s a link to that thread) I started by asking if there would be anyone interested in being gym leaders, and the initial feedback was amazing. At one point we had 16+ people interested in participating in the League. We owe a great deal of gratitude to the PAX Buttoneers, for letting us use their discount code for ordering buttons as gym badges. The early days were full of grandiose ideas, dreams of the league’s future, and poor communication. Initially everything was done in one giant e-mail thread that quickly ballooned and became unwieldy. Much of the early organization of the League is thanks to Andrei, who went on to start and run PPL East for several years.
As PAX 2010 approached, we had several leaders drop out at nearly the last moment. We went down to 12 leaders, which was just barely enough to meet the badge requirements. The first year, we didn’t have bright green scarves, but instead had red bandanas, a choice which very much hasn’t aged well.
At PAX, things went somewhat well. After the first day, we realized it was too hard to track down all the leaders. “Eva Lucian”, an eevee theme gym leader, was especially hard to find and to my knowledge battled fewer than 5 people all weekend. We dropped the badge requirement and elite 4 requirement to 6 and 3 respectively, and everyone who made it to face Professor Pine the champion claimed victory. It was then that I learned I am not good at competitive Pokemon gameplay.
I learned a lot from that first year of the PAX Pokemon league, but as I mentioned before the first modernly recognizable PAX Pokemon League was PAX East 2010. From there, we’ve grown and changed, we had a web-comic to hype up the League one year, we considered putting together some video shorts for another year (of which only one got made), at one point we were estimated to be the 2nd largest fan-driven event at PAX (behind the Cookie Brigade), the leadership of the organization has transferred several times into more capable hands, we’ve grown to include ALL the PAX’s including unplugged, switched game versions several times, and never stopped arguing about the ruleset. It’s been a wild 10 year ride for the PAX Pokemon league, and I hope to be able to ride for at least another 10 years.
~Professor Pine,
AKA Patrick, founder of the PAX Pokemon League