Since 2003, Indianapolis has been host to Gen Con, one of America’s largest role-playing game conventions. The event takes place at the Indianapolis Convention Center.
Gen Con began in 1967 as an informal gathering of war game enthusiasts at Lake Geneva, in the Wisconsin home of Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax. A year later, Gygax organised the first formal convention at the Lake Geneva Horticultural Hall with roughly 100 attendees.
Gen Con’s name is a derivation of “Geneva Convention”, given the convention’s origins in Lake Geneva. The name is also a play on words, as the Geneva Conventions are the name of a set of important international treaties regarding war, and the earliest Gen Cons had a focus on wargames.
Attendance steadily rose from five thousand paid admissions in 1985 to a peak of 30,000 in 1994, making Gen Con the premier event in the role-playing game industry. In 2005, it was reported that Gen Con generated the most direct visitor spending of any annual convention in Indianapolis.
In 2006, Gen Con organisers announced plans to provide more show space for video games, to allow video game businesses a place to show their products after the downsizing of the Electronic Entertainmnt Expo (E3), the annual trade show for the computer and video games industry. Gen Con described their intentions as to “pick up where E3 left off”, despite Gen Con’s owner Peter Adkison several years earlier claiming that he did not want Gen Con to become a “mini E3”.
Gen Con LLC also runs Star Wars Celebration, the official Star Wars convention. The second and third Star Wars Celebration events, held in 2002 and 2005, to mark the release of ‘Attack Of The Clones’ and ‘Revenge of The Sith’ respectively, were both also held at the Indianaplis Convention Center.
Celebration III in 2005 saw over thirty thousand fans attend over the course of the weekend. One of this celebration’s most noteworthy events was the unprecedented Q&A session with Star Wars creator Geroge Lucas, his first such appearance since the Star Wars 10th Anniversary Convention in 1987. With approximately ten thousand fans in attendance over the course of three half-hour sessions, Lucas personally answered several dozen fans’ questions about the saga.
Gen Con’s success has lead to the show travelling to a number of other countries including France, Spain and the UK, where the event has been taken place annually since 1994, at various locations throughout the country.
Gen Con 2008 takes place in August and promises to be another fun-packed weekend which will undoubtedly attract many convention-goers, so hotels in
Indianapolis are likely to be in demand by anyone wishing to get in on the action for themselves, so it makes sense to book early to avoid disappointment.
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