Penny Arcade
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.
By 2005, Penny Arcade was among the most popular and longest running webcomics online, listed in 2010 as having 3.5 million readers. Holkins and Krahulik were among the first webcomic creators successful enough to make a living from their work. In addition to the comic, Holkins and Krahulik also created Child's Play, a children's charity; PAX, a gaming convention; Penny Arcade TV, a YouTube channel; Pinny Arcade, a pin exchange; and the episodic video game Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness with Hothead Games and Zeboyd Games.
Overview
The strip features Krahulik and Holkins' cartoon alter egos, John "Gabe" Gabriel and Tycho Brahe, respectively. While often borrowing from the authors' experiences, Holkins and Krahulik do not treat them as literal avatars or caricatures of themselves. The two characters spend much of their time playing and commenting on both computer and video games, which forms the basis of the humor in the strip. Most of the time Gabe serves the purpose of the comic and Tycho the comic foil. The strip can feature in-jokes that are explained in the news posts accompanying each comic, written by the authors.Both Krahulik and Holkins make a living from Penny Arcade, placing them in a small group of professional webcomic artists devoted to their creations full-time. Originally, like many webcomics, Penny Arcade was supported solely by donations. A graph on the main page indicated how much people had donated that month. After hiring Robert Khoo as their business manager, Holkins and Krahulik switched to a different income stream based on advertising and merchandise revenue alone. According to Holkins, the website handled more than two million pageviews daily in 2006. On November 13, 2005, the website was redesigned in celebration of their seventh year running and to match the designs of the Child's Play Charity and Penny Arcade Expo websites. Afterwards, the site has been redesigned multiple times.
Attributes of the comic strip
As a topical video gaming news comic, there is little plot or general continuity in Penny Arcade strips. Any story sustained for longer than a single strip is referred to as "dreaded continuity", something of a running gag in the newsposts. A character who dies a violent death in one strip will come back in the next, perfectly whole, though occasionally these deaths have an effect on later comics. For example, often, when Gabe kills Tycho or vice versa, the killer takes a certain Pac-Man watch off the dead character, but only if he currently has the watch. Profanity and violence are common in Penny Arcade and the strip is known for its surrealism; zombies, a talking alcoholic DIVX player called Div, Santa Claus, a robotic juicer called the "Fruit Fucker 2000", and Jesus, among others, are known to drop in often and for petty reasons. Other such occurrences are implied, if not shown, such as mentioning Dante from Devil May Cry living in the building next door. However, the comic does occasionally expand into more serious issues; one even had Krahulik, in the guise of the character Gabe, proposing to his girlfriend of two years, while another had both Gabe and Tycho praising Casey Heynes for standing up to bullying.Some of the strips are drawn from the perspective of fictional characters within a game or movie. Occasionally, Gabe and Tycho are featured as they would be as characters or players in the game themselves, often having some sarcastic remark to make about some feature or bug in the game. At times the comic also depicts meetings between game developers or business people, and features or mocks the reporters of a news article that is commented on in Holkins' newspost.
Penny Arcade has a theme song, "Penny Arcade Theme", written and performed by nerdcore artist MC Frontalot. It was written as a thank-you by Frontalot for the creators of the webcomic linking his website to their front page and declaring him their "rapper laureate" in 2002. The song appears in the dance game In the Groove, released in 2004.
Protagonists
Jonathan "Gabe" Gabriel
's comic alter ego is energetic and free-spirited, but has a propensity to become extremely angry. As a contrast to Tycho's expansive vocabulary, Gabe usually speaks using only simple, common words. He almost always wears a yellow Pac-Man shirt, and has a Pac-Man tattoo on his right arm. His eyes are a shade of slate blue.He has a fascination with unicorns, a secret love of Barbies, is a dedicated fan of Spider-Man and Star Wars, and has proclaimed "Jessie's Girl" to be the greatest song of all time. He has a wife and son. Gabe is a diabetic, though he continues to consume large quantities of sugar products.
Krahulik named his son "Gabriel" in honor of the character.
Tycho Brahe
' comic alter ego is bitter and sarcastic. His eyes are burnt sienna, and he's almost invariably clad in a blue-striped sweater. Tycho enjoys books, role-playing video games, using large and uncommon words in conversation, and deflating Gabe's ego. He is an enthusiastic fan of Harry Potter and Doctor Who. He also plays Dungeons & Dragons often, and adopts a wildly theatrical style when acting as a dungeon master.Tycho occasionally makes reference to his scarring childhood, during which his mother physically abused him. Tycho also has a drinking problem.
In Poker Night at the Inventory, Tycho is voiced by Kid Beyond.
Podcast
Krahulik and Holkins had a podcast that they produced from 2006 until 2018, releasing new episodes irregularly. They began to record and release audio content on March 20, 2006, titled Downloadable Content. The podcasts specifically captured the creative process that goes into the creation of a Penny Arcade comic, usually starting with a perusal of recent gaming news, with conversational tangents and digressions to follow. As well as being a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Penny Arcade, Krahulik and Holkins discussed possible subjects for the comic.The format of the show was mostly "fly-on-the-wall" style, in that the hosts rarely acknowledged the existence of the microphone. There was no theme music, intro, or outro. The podcasts were of varying lengths, beginning abruptly and ending with the idea for the current comic. New episodes were released irregularly, with six month gaps not uncommon.
Although the shows were initially published weekly, Holkins stated in a May 2006 blog post that they found difficulties when trying to produce the podcasts on a regular basis. The duo planned to keep recording podcasts occasionally.
Since airing the first episode of the new PATV in February 2010, the podcast has not been updated. A new segment has since appeared on PATV called "The Fourth Panel," which presents a fly-on-the-wall look at comics creation much as the podcast did.
On May 8, 2013 Penny Arcade launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the continuation of Downloadable Content. The kickstarter was successful, with new Podcasts being added each Wednesday. Downloadable Content is "currently on hiatus," with the latest episode dated August 23, 2018.
Games
Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is an episodic video game based on the strip. The first two episodes were developed by Hothead Games, and were built on a version of the Torque Game Engine. The first episode was released worldwide on May 21, 2008, and the second on October 29, 2008. They were self-published via the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live as well as the PlayGreenhouse.com service created by Penny Arcade to distribute independent games. The game features many elements of the Penny Arcade universe in a 1920s steampunk setting. In 2010, Krahulik and Holkins announced that the remainder of the series had been cancelled, to allow Hothead to focus on other projects. At PAX Prime 2011, however, it was announced that the series would be revived and developed by Zeboyd Games, with a retro style similar to Zeboyd's past titles. The third episode was released on Steam and on Penny Arcade's web store June 25, 2012. The fourth and final episode was announced in January 2013, and released to Steam and Xbox Live in June 2013.A teaser trailer released by Telltale Games on August 28, 2010, revealed that Tycho would appear in an upcoming game alongside Team Fortress 2's Heavy, Homestar Runner's Strong Bad and Sam & Max's Max. The game, called Poker Night at the Inventory, was officially revealed on September 2, 2010.
Two stories that were published on the site were released as motion comics for iOS developed by SRRN Games, "The Last Christmas" in 2010 and "The Hawk and the Hare" in 2011.
The 2008 North American release of Tekken 6 has a skin for Yoshimitsu based on the Cardboard Tube Samurai. In 2012, an official DLC skin pack was released for Dungeon Defenders featuring Tycho, Cardboard Tube Samurai Gabe, Annarchy and Jim Darkmagic skins.
Cryptozoic Entertainment released the licensed deck-building card game Penny Arcade The Game: Gamers Vs. Evil in 2011, and followed it with the expansion pack Penny Arcade The Game: Rumble in R'lyeh in 2012. Playdek released a digital conversion of Penny Arcade The Game: Gamers Vs. Evil for iOS in 2012.