Noah Balmer

Example of Penny Arcade Comic Strip

Penny Arcade Article from Wired

I can remember when Penny Arcade began. I was handing out this great new underground software called 'napster' on floppy disks around my highschool. I never was really into Penny Arcade. I would look at it in class in highschool or when i was really bored at home, but never for a week straight. After reading this article in Wired last month I realized how large the gaming population has become.

---"The term geek has acquired a patina," says Holkins, a writer prone to ornate verbiage and renowned for his witty blog posts that accompany each strip. He's right — the word is being reclaimed as a badge of pride. But the creators of Penny Arcade aren't among these geek-come-latelies. They're unreconstructed geeks of the old-school variety — which is to say, of the high school variety.----

I was a geek in high school but I was also in the weight lifting class. I rode in the cusp between being a complete nerd playing Mario on my TI-86 (yeah I had the 86, I paid extra so i didnt get the 82plus so that I could play better games) and between the joks with muscle cars (I drove a pimped out 69 Cadillac I bought with money I earned in a lucrative but grimy way on the internet). I feel like i was one of the first nerd/cool hybrids.

The point is that it is amazing to think that a comic strip that is so specific can have such a huge following. I wouldn't be surprised if this strip was in the Sunday comics in the San Francisco newspaper a few years from now.