Over five years ago, Video Games Live made its first-ever debut at the Hollywood Bowl before an audience of 11,000 people. Featuring the video games from all eras, the show is an immersive concert event that combines live orchestra music with synchronized lighting and live action. What started out as a novel concept, pushed forward by industry veterans Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall, has become an internationally touring sensation that made its return to Seattle on Saturday night. more ›

People were lining up over a day in advance to get into the awesome launch party for Microsoft's latest offering in their critically acclaimed Halo franchise, Halo: Reach. The event gave rabid Halo fans the chance to playtest the game and count down to the midnight launch together in the futuristic comfort of a hazy, laser-filled auditorium at Seattle's Experience Music Project. While the fans fragged each other at one of the many stations set up to demo the title, this Seattlest snuck in behind enemy lines to get some exclusive time with two of the key people behind the game: Bonnie Ross, the general manager for the Halo franchise, and Josh Holmes, the studio creative director and the visionary behind the Halo: Reach experience. more ›

GAMES (AND THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE/PLAY THEM): If you're a gamer, then you've already planned to spend your entire weekend around the convention center for the Penny Arcade Expo. What better way to spend the last days of summer than indoors playing the latest and upcoming games, talking to developers and hearing gamer-friendly music? It's officially sold out, but it never hurts to try. If that doesn't work, there's always PAX East in March. Convention Center, Friday-Sunday. more ›

Mario and Luigi seem to be having a tough economic level to get through, as their coin count and the rest of U.S. video game industry sales have been slipping. The beginning of 2009 looked promising, until March when sales were down 17 percent from last year--which happened to be a big year for local game companies--proving the once booming game world is not immune to the recession or those sneaky Goombas. Eyes are on the falling shares, but no reset button needed--just yet--for local companies, as Nintendo's Wii leads console sales with 601,000 units sold, while Capcom's horror shooter "Resident Evil 5" is a best-selling game for the Xbox 360. more ›

Saturday we made it back to PAX with the idea of spending the day in panel discussions. We of course ended up wandering the grounds taking everything in again (the people watching is nothing short of epic), playing more games in the exhibition hall, and only made it to a couple of panels before calling it a day. more ›

Seattlest took a break from the HQ today to head down for some early time at the Penny Arcade Expo. We wanted to get our pass and our bearings a bit before the bulk of the crowds arrived, and it's shaping up to be quite the weekend. Lines were already long, crowds were building, and the swag was flowing freely. It's nerd nirvana, and you won't want to miss out. more ›

Bumbershoot has completely dominated the press this week, but for gamers, this weekend holds importance because of the Penny Arcade Expo, the gaming convention run by the local crew behind gaming/geek culture comic Penny Arcade. The Penny Arcade Expo (aka PAX) starts tomorrow (tonight if you include the pub crawl), marking the the fifth anniversary of the event, and as with every prior year, it looks to be the largest yet, with an expected 45,000 gamers flooding the Convention Center. Seattlest experienced the geekery first-hand two years ago, and we're diving into the madness again this year. more ›

One of the highlights of this past weekend was heading down to the Northwest Pinball and Gameroom Show, held at Seattle Center. For an entrance fee, attendants got free access to over a hundred games, mostly pinball, with a few video games mixed in. It was a great way to kill a few hours, and to even learn something, with seminars featuring Steve Wiebe of the documentary King of Kong, and pinball designer legend Steve Ritchie. In all it was one of the better events we've been to at Seattle Center, amping up the pinball experience from Shorty's (although unfortunately lacking in the hot dog department). more ›

Who knew? more ›

Last night at Benaroya Hall, author Richard Powers read from a new short story called "Modulation." It was classic Powers; a dense, far-reaching, and meticulously vivid tale of a computer virus that infects music player devices via filesharing sites. He weaves the story around four different individuals: a Japanese hacker recently released from prison and now employed by the RIAA to huntdown filesharers, a Brazilian journalist researching soldiers in Iraq who blast ear-crunching music from their vehicles when they go out on missions, a forlorn music scholar on the eve of his retirement from a mid-western University, and a young laptop battler who agonizes over keeping track of the ever-multiplying sub-genres of electronic music and enthralls with his live performances of entirely computerized music that rely heavily on audio samples from early-80s video games. more ›

Redmond native and actual Guitar Hero Carrie Brownstein did some work on the advertising of the game Rock Band. You might have seen these commercials; four rocker-lookin types sit around and cut on each other in the jaded and weary fashion of musicians on the road. That's not her work, thank god. She was on a different team pushing a different concept. Anyway, she's got an article up at Slate today about her experiences with the game, which, ultimately, she ends up kind of liking in an "it's not as evil and fake as American Idol" kind of way. Of course anything less than an absolute trashing of the game leads us to suspect she's still on the payroll, but she's a music writer so we'll say no. It's an interesting take on the game either way. more ›

It's official, Seattlest has a new love: The Georgetown Liquor Company. The draw? Well it's got the words "liquor company" right there in the name which should be enough, but we know that you, our dear readers, demand more substance to make a recommendation valid. Thankfully, when we showed up we found that it's got a well-tended, full bar, all the excellent food is vegetarian and it has old-school console video games like the Atari 2600 and the Nintendo NES hooked up to TVs (not to mention a big red octopus on the wall). Perfect. more ›

Before she came out, walked to center stage and stole our hearts, we were lucky to have made it to the Moore in time to catch the last couple songs from the ex Moldy Peaches guitarist, Only Son. Actually it was more like two songs and a story. A story put to music, told pretty much off-the-cuff and in the first-person about a guy in a grocery store. He sees a girl. She's cute, but he's insecure and awkward and thinks maybe he should avoid the inevitable crushing rejection and just go home to his ever-loving and non-judgmental video games. It could have been one of those you-had-to-be-there moments to really appreciate it, but Only Son (Jack Dishel) was funny and charming and talented enough to win us over. more ›

FESTIVAL: The first-ever (official) Lebowski fest in Seattle kicks things off at the Showbox. Tonight's the chubby dance-rock of the oft tighty-whitey-clad Har Mar Superstar and a screening of the Coen Brothers' classic. Tomorrow's bowling with The Dude at Kenmore Lanes. Wear your best bathrobe and pound some white Russians, or you'll be out of your element, Donny. more ›

"I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, care if I'm old." more ›

Before we begin, we'd like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family of James Kim. We are not, by any means, trying to discount that tragedy by juxtaposing posts about the Kims with more light-hearted posts. It's the nature of doing a compilation such as this one: we're trying to give a full slice of the goings-on in the Ist-a-Verse: the good, the bad, and the ugly. more ›

Best thing we learned at last night's quiz: Gabriel Garcia Marquez looks like "Agatha Christie on a bad day." more ›

8bitjoystick called Seattlest out yesterday (which we love, btw, whether you do it on your random blog you expect us to magically find, or you have at us in the comments or you send us email. Please, tell us what we're missing and we'll consider it internally and then publicly enumerate the reasons why you're wrong.), and, befitting a blog about video games, 8bitjoystick is all over us for our lack of video game coverage. more ›

We're anxiously awaiting the 2008 movie based on the WTO events in Seattle, although we hope "The Battle in Seattle" is only a working title. They're filming right now, but don't rush to the window hoping for a glimpse of one of the stars - We think they're in Vancouver. more ›

Microsoft has had a Halo movie in the works for a while now, but it looks like it was killed this week. Universal was supposed to produce the Redmond-written script, a budget was set of $145 million and no less than Peter Jackson was set to produce, but late last week it was revealed that the studio wanted to renegotiate terms and Microsoft bailed. A great post on the subject at GigaOm asks, "The real mystery is why Microsoft is still plowing ahead. Has anyone bothered to tell them a Halo movie must be one of the most ill-inconceived film projects ever?" more ›

Police attribute an arson in the Central District last night to a fight over an XBox. From KIRO: more ›

If you are anything like some us at Seattlest, you've wasted months, if not years, of your life playing video games. Oh, for all of those hours. The things we could have done. more ›

Once Leilani Lanes closes, the 32-lane West Seattle Bowl will be Seattle’s biggest bowling alley. more ›

“The sun never sets at Sunset Bowl.” more ›

Where were you when you heard the news? more ›

Seattlest decided that we were going to relive our undergrad experience not long ago. We slept until noon and then sat around in the kitchen waiting for lunch to be served, but apparently Seattlest's fiancee ignored the hair nets and recipies we'd left out and had gone to work. We ate a few slices of the pizza we ordered at 3am but were either too stoned or too wrapped up in video games to eat at the time and crashed on the couch until ten when we started calling around for a kegger. Oh, shit! There's a paper due tomorrow! We hastily wrote ours and then cut and pasted a few others together for friends before spending four hours wandering around the neighborhood looking for a computer lab with a functioning and available printer. At which point we said, "screw it," went home, went to bed and went to work in the morning. Ah, post collegiate life. more ›

Saturday October 1st is the International Mountain Biking Association's annual "Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day". Plenty of research shows that parents who lead by example and participate in sports and outdoor activities will have kids who do the same--so get off the couch, turn off the XBox (you're 37 years old for the love of God), and go plunk your offspring on a set of wheels. more ›

Kids love bad ideas. They can’t get enough of them. They will spend all summer inside playing video games, they will throw rocks at the girl they like, and they will borrow their dad’s car and try to take the miles off by running it in reverse. However there are some bad ideas that kids just don’t like, for example the WASL. more ›

Nate McMillan-- our favorite Sonic of all time-- is now the coach of the Portland Trailblazers, a thought that is harder to swallow than Paul Bunyan's left boot. And this on the same night that the Mariners leave Kansas City losing two out of three to the punchless Royals. more ›

The wildly popular and absolutely hilarious online comic Penny Arcade is penned in Seattle; Fremont and Kirkland, last we heard. It's mostly about video games so if you play video games religiously there's a good chance you follow the strip religiously. If you follow the strip religiously than you've already heard that the creators are coming out on the bright side of a long legal tunnel involving their books and their rights to publish books right now. That's great news, right? Because these guys are really funny and we'd love to see them making some noise offline with the books they have on the way. more ›