Want to know a secret? We here at Penny Arcade HQ are fucking addicted to Ping Pong. I don’t mean the game by Rock Star either. I mean the real deal table in the basement shake hand or pen grip forehand loop Table Tennis. In talking to some of our friends around here we discovered that our love of the sport is not unique. If you live in Seattle or you came to PAX you should know about Pink Godzilla. They run an import game store downtown and they also happen to have their own internal Ping Pong ladder. When they found out we had our own ladder they immediately began the shit talking. A challenge was issued and the match went down last Friday.
It was their top six against our top six and I’m happy to say Penny Arcade came out victorious. Of course it helps when you have this mother fucker on your team.
Kiko took some awesome photos of the match and you can see them on his Flickr site. You can also read the Pink Godzilla write up over on their site.
Everyone played great and we all had a blast. So much so in fact that we’ve decided to try and cook up some more action. Seattle has a ton of game developers and every single time I visit one of their studios I always see a ping pong table. So we’re going to issue a challenge to anyone in the game industry. If you can pull together your best seven people and you want to take us on please send me an email with the subject “PING PONG CHALLENGE!”
Now let me stress that we are not all as good as Robert. We’ve got some definite beginners on the team and a few of us who take it a little more serious but we really run the gamut. The main thing is we just love to play and we really like the chance to play new people. So here are some of the rules if you want to join us.
-You must work in the game industry in some capacity. Obviously if you’re in or around the Seattle area that would be best.
-You need to bring seven people and they must be ranked so that your number one will face our number one and so on all the way down the ladder.
-We adhere as best we can to the USATT Table Tennis Rules. This isn’t Beer Pong.
-Games are played to 11 with service rotation every 2 points. A match consists of best 3 out of 5 games.
-It’s not required but we also have a couple doubles teams. If you can field a team or two as well, we’d love to get our doubles on. We consider these to be exhibition matches.
-Players must bring their A game. We will not allow any weak shit in our house. If someone is caught bringing weak shit we will exclaim in a very loud voice “Yo, why you bring that weak shit up in my house!”
-Victory as of right now means street cred and bragging rights. If this ends up being popular and we can get a little game industry league going I think we should definitely make some sort of trophy to pass around.
So shoot me an email if you’re interested. We have a decent table here at our office with a good amount of space but we’re willing to play an away game if it’s not too far. Oh and if you’re looking at Kiko’s flickr page and you see the posters of Gabe and Tycho in Ping Pong gear you might be wondering what the fuck that is. Well, I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.
-Gabe out
