Penny Arcade — PAX panel schedule listing for 'Why So Serious?' gaming industry discussion

Penny Arcade

1998webcomicclassic

Published September 21, 2026

Penny Arcade is a video game culture webcomic launched in November 1998 by writer Jerry Holkins and artist Mike Krahulik, running through in-comic alter egos Tycho and Gabe1. It helped define the "two gamers on a couch" format, later grew into the PAX convention empire, and generated some of the loudest culture war fights the gaming internet has ever hosted3.

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Overview

Penny Arcade is a three panel gag strip built around Tycho Brahe and Jonathan "Gabe" Gabriel, the fictional stand ins for writer Jerry Holkins and artist Mike Krahulik7. The pair sit on a couch, argue about whatever game they are currently rage playing, and the punchline usually lands in the third panel with Gabe doing something violent or stupid. Even after the strip broadened into television, sports, and parenthood material, gaming stayed the anchor topic7.

The comic reads as a diary of the industry it covers. New releases, patch disasters, and console launches get skewered inside days of shipping, which is why fans treat the archive as a rough oral history of PC and console gaming from the late 1990s onward. Alongside the strip, Holkins writes a companion news post that gives the joke context, and that blog is where most of the studio's biggest fights played out, from apologies to full essays defending editorial choices12.

Beyond the strip itself, Penny Arcade grew into an events and charity operation. It runs the PAX conventions in several cities, publishes on its own domain rather than through a syndicate, and used its blog to host multi day dust ups that pulled in press coverage well outside the usual webcomic audience34.

Origin & Background

Platform
Loonygames (host site) / penny-arcade.com (own domain from 1999)
Creator
Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik
Date
1998

The strip was created by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik in November 1998 and originally ran on the gaming site Loonygames before moving to its own domain, penny-arcade.com, in 19997. The very first strip showed Gabe stuck waiting for a level to load in the first person shooter SIN, a game notorious at the time for punishing load screens, which set the tone for a comic that would mine everyday player frustrations for jokes7.

Holkins handled the writing under the pen name Tycho Brahe while Krahulik drew as Gabe, and both continued to run the site directly rather than through a publisher, giving them unusual editorial control for the era1. That direct line to readers is what later made the comic's blog posts, rather than the strips themselves, the flashpoint for the site's biggest controversies2.

How It Spread

Penny Arcade's reach grew steadily through the 2000s as the strip built one of the earliest paid ad models for a webcomic and used the money to launch the Penny Arcade Expo, better known as PAX, which grew into a chain of North American and Australian gaming conventions3. The blog attached to the strip became a second product in its own right, with Holkins's essays regularly picked up and argued over on gaming forums and press outlets.

The site's real virality, though, came from controversy. In August 2010 a strip mentioning "dickwolves" set off a multi year fight over rape jokes and merchandise, tracked in painful detail by the community timeline on Debacle Tumblr, which logged blog posts, shirt drops, and back and forth tweets between Krahulik and critics from August 2010 through 20116. Border House Blog and other games criticism sites returned to the strip repeatedly in that window, cementing Penny Arcade as a recurring case study in games media ethics arguments4.

A second wave hit in June 2013. Krahulik defended a mobile game called HappyPlayTime, covered by Kotaku, on the grounds that "women have vaginas," which drew accusations of transphobia52. Days later a PAX Australia panel titled "Why So Serious?" was announced with a description dismissing charges of sexism and racism in games, prompting Fullbright, the studio behind Gone Home, to publicly pull its game from the PAX Prime Indie Megabooth in protest3. Krahulik responded on the Penny Arcade blog with the posts "Twitter Sucks Sometimes" and "Well That Escalated Quickly," both of which were widely quoted in follow up coverage21.

Timeline

1998-11

First Penny Arcade strip published on Loonygames, showing Gabe waiting for a level to load in SIN[7].

1999

Strip moves off Loonygames and onto its own domain at penny-arcade.com[7].

2010-08-12

First Shakesville post objecting to the "Dickwolves" strip, kicking off the multi year controversy[6].

2010-12-01

Krahulik announces Penny Arcade Dickwolves pennants and t shirts on the site's blog[6].

2011-01-24

Courtney Stanton publicly declines a speaking slot at PAX East over Penny Arcade's handling of the Dickwolves fight[6].

2013-06-19

Krahulik posts "Twitter Sucks Sometimes," publishing an email exchange with his trans friend Sophie after backlash over his HappyPlayTime tweets[2].

2013-06-21

Fullbright announces it is pulling Gone Home from the PAX Prime Indie Megabooth, citing Krahulik's statements and the PAX Aus panel description[3].

2013-06-21

Krahulik posts "Well That Escalated Quickly" on the Penny Arcade blog, walking through the previous day's PAX Aus panel argument[1].

How to Use This Meme

Penny Arcade is read rather than remixed. New strips post on the official site with a companion news post by Holkins that explains the reference, and long time readers typically follow both together. The "Tycho and Gabe on a couch" layout became a template that later gaming webcomics openly copied, so newcomers looking to understand webcomic gaming humor often start by scrolling the archive from 1998 forward7.

Frequently Asked Questions