Gen Con, Day 1

Gen Con! The grandaddy of the gaming conventions, the center of the tabletop adventure universe. We first attended in 2003, when the Dead Gentlemen and The Gamers were complete unknowns. By the end of thate con, we'd sold 400 DVDs and met a gaggle of gaming celebrities we now call friends. And we'd also been asked the question we'd be getting for the next five years: "When's the next one coming out?"
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The answer was five years. Five years from conception to copies for sale. Photography began in January of 2005, and we premiered the making-of documentary (which is on the DVD) at that year's Gen Con. Finally, we had an answer to "When's the next one coming out?" And, of course, our answer was wrong. Repeatedly. In 2005, we knew it would be out in 2006. In 2006, we thought it would be out in 2007. In 2007, we hoped our fans would not drag us out of the con and burn us at the stake. But thankfully, mercifully, Anthem Pictures -- our distributor -- gave us a definitive answer on "When's the next one coming out?": August 14, 2008, at Gen Con.
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So it was with profound relief and unmitigated excitement that our party of six departed for Indianapolis last Wednesday night. We'd be catching an 11:15 pm red eye out of LAX. Things got off to a great start when my car didn't. Start, that is. Engine wouldn't even turn over. And it's not like it had been running fine not six hours earlier. But before the panic could set in, wonderful neighbors Matt and Jessica gave us a lift to the rendezvous point. We arrived at the airport with two hours to spare. What a relief. We should have no trouble from here on out.
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We promptly waited to check in for an hour and a half. Apparently, Air Tran's computers were down. So they decided to lift our spirits by playing the check-in line version of musical chairs, where they wait for you to get to the front of a line and then tell you that, ha ha!, you've been in the wrong line the entire time! Yaaay! An hour into waiting, we got to start over at the back of the line. An hour and a half into waiting, we'd moved a total of negative ten yards. The one good thing about the bottlenecking at the check in line was that there was no line at security. We got to the terminal right as the boarding was ending, and moments later were in the air. Now, we'd been going since seven that morning, so were looking forward to getting some sleep on the plane. That wasn't exactly in the cards. See, Air Tran loves the air conditioning. They also, in their peculiar form of customer service, provide no blankets. So we got to shiver our way across three time zones in the middle of the night. I think I passed out for a stretch or two from sheer exhaustion. Never flying Air Tran again, that's for sure.
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We arrived in Indianapolis at 3:00 am, right as the sun was rising at 6:00 am Eastern Time. The light triggered the "It's morning! Time to get up!" zones in our brains, and gave us a bit of a much-needed boost. Which immediately deflated when Enterprise could not find our rental car reservations. So Don shuffled us onto a shuttle to Budget, and reserved a pair of vans via his blackberry en route. Not long after that, with our spirits high, we rolled up to our hotel, which did have our reservations. But we would not be allowed to check in until 3:00. Oh, and you can't leave your bags here, either. So no showers, no change of clothes, and as a bonus, we got to lug our luggage around all day. Let the hatred flow through you. Soon, your journey to the Dark Side will be complete.
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After a massive breakfast at a waffle house -- a waffle house, not the Waffle House, as we learned to our disappointment -- we met up with the DGs already in town and trekked to the convention center. Once we got into the Exhibitor's Hall, everything would be okay. Once Gen Con began, all the suck of the last eight hours would be erased. So it was no surprise to me when, after picking up DG's con badges, we discovered that Gen Con had forgotten one for me. Which is understandable. I mean, I only wrote and directed the damn movie [/mini-rant]. We did have a badge for Matt DeMille, though -- DG's production designer, the same Matt who gave us a lift when our car wouldn't start -- but he was unable to attend the con. A little Sharpie action made the badge mine.
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BELOW: Monday's signing line at the Paizo booth

So -- exhausted, irritable, hungry, and marinated in my own travel sweat -- I finally got to the booth. Dead Gentlemen Productions didn't have a booth this year; we were occupying a corner of the Paizo booth, set aside for cast and crew signings (Paizo is DG's game industry distributor). I meandered over to a rack of Dorkness Rising DVDs by the register, dozens of them standing at attention in matching shrink-wrap -- and all the bad feelings, the annoyances and the petty inconveniences, just melted away. Here it was, after five years of wondering if it would ever come out. Here was our movie for sale. And it wasn't just for sale on the rack. It was already up on Netflix and Amazon (though Amazon seems to think it's some soft-core porn starring David Duchovny -- what's that about?). And from what Cindi told me, pre-orders for those two and others have already exceeded any other film Anthem's ever done. Hearsay, yes, but the good kind. The kind I'm going to repeat here.
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So the hall opened, and the fans descended on the booth. Eight hours later, the hall closed. Sales were good.
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And by good, I mean they were flying off the shelves. We (and by we, I mean Paizo) sold just under 500 DVDs. To put that in perspective, the most DVDs Dead Gentlemen had ever sold at a convention were 400. We smashed that record by a hundred in the single day. And the rate of sale was more than one DVD per minute -- 497 sales in 480 minutes of hall openness. Paizo only brought a thousand DVDs, and it was evident by midday that at least half of that would be gone at the end of the day. So Don sent an email to Chuck, president of Anthem, saying we needed another 1,500 DVDs. A minute after sending that email, Don's phone rang.
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I was sitting two seats left of Don when he got the call. The following dialogue transpired, near verbatim:
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DON: Hello?
CHUCK: Are you shitting me?
DON: What?
CHUCK: Are you shitting me?!
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Don assured Chuck that no, he was not indeed shitting him -- we needed more DVDs. Immediately. So Anthem overnighted reinforcements to Paizo for Saturday. With luck, we wouldn't sell out on Friday. Or with luck we would, depending on your point of view. It's really hard to convey the enthusiasm and excitement of the first day of the con. We saw hundreds of fans, many we recognized and many new. One group even showed up in costume as their own chapter of Demon Hunters: a nephilim, a were-rat, the Dark Gray Ninja, and Bernard, the knife-wielding, eyepatch-sporting potted plant. We bled most of our Sharpies dry.
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After the hall closed, we grabbed a quick bite at Champions before heading over to an IMAX screening of Midnight Chronicles by our friends at Fantasy Flight Games. I wish I could review it, but I can't. I'd been awake for 36 hours when the screening began, and exhaustion + darkness + comfy chair = Matt falls asleep. Thank God the soundtrack was louder than my snoring. What I remember of the movie was very cool and looked great, but I couldn't tell where plot ended and bizarre fatigue dreams began.
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We got back to the hotel -- and finally checked in -- just before midnight, and hit the bed at roughly 800 miles per hour. Despite Brian's truly Olympic performance at snoring, we managed to get enough sleep to function the next day. Because the con had just started, and there was still a long way to go.
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Don meets his doppelganger