I’ll tell you now that my favorite part of New York Comic Con was the free hand-outs. Josh and I amassed enough free stuff together that I am going to give it its own post. Most other cons do not give away stuff on the scale that Comic Con does. IGN even hosted a whole panel dedicated to passing out stuff to fans who would line up hours in advance for it (we did not get in, however)! Everything in these photographs, with the exception of the passes, was free!!
Josh and I had a pretty good haul this year! As you can see from these photographs. The Nintendo booth was my favorite place to get free things; they were handing out pins and shirts to anyone who tried their new games. I got to play the unreleased Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and afterwards I received a free Skyward Sword T-shirt. I also played Ocarina of Time, Starfox, and Pokemon Battle Rumble on the 3DS and got pins and a pokemon draw-string bag.
There was a woman passing out posters from a Cartoon Network game, and I got a bottle cap opener for giving a free-movie site my email address. While Josh was walking around sunday, he snagged us two Funimation shirts and Ativision tote bags. While he was exploring the show-floor, hunting for SWAG, I was playing Uncharted 3, and unreleased 3rd person shooter for the PS3. My team won, and so we all got free shirts.
There were also tons of people handing out post cards and flyers and business cards all weekend. Which still counts as free stuff, even if it is mostly printed SPAM. Some of it has really cool artwork on it. Vendors were also often handing out stickers with their websites on them. Kind of like a business card, but more people want it.
Let’s see… someone handed us some X-box 360 lanyards and Josh got two free Mega-man comic books signed by the author just for waiting in a short line, while I went over to the animal planet booth to get a big-foot lanyard.
Finally, we also experienced a glorious instance of free-stuff when we attended the “Indy Plush Maker’s Workshop.” After telling us about their toys and the industry, the toymakers threw free toys at the Audience. Josh and I each got a medium sized toy from Kid Robot, as well as a pack of little dancing guys, called “Breakers” by the Kid Robot peeps. We also got some pins from “I Heart Bears.” Mine is a bear dressed as Rogue from the X-men.
My review of the NYCC will be up soon, and you can then read how I felt about the rest of the convention. As for the free stuff, I loved it!!
[...] Show Floor One of the biggest draws of this convention is the show floor, similar to a dealer’s room at other conventions. It is an absolutely massive room, filled with vendors, artists, and industry leaders like Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Capcom, and Ubisoft. Obviously the vendors and artists are there to try to sell you stuff, but the industry booths are there to let you play their unreleased games and give you free stuff, which is awesome. Nintendo was particularly generous this year, offering a different free souvenir for each awesome, unreleased or brand new game that you tried. I collected quite a bit of free stuff over the course the weekend, either by playing games, standing in a short line, or just walking around and having stuff handed to me. You can read more about the free stuff that I got in this post on free stuff at NYCC. [...]