Anime Vegas…the good, the bad, the unforgivable.

   by Marcio Guastavino
There were many attendees this year. Lining up from the very first sign of sunlight and partying till the midnight hours. As an attendee I’m sure Anime Vegas was every Otaku’s dream (especially those old enough to drink and gamble) and that guests were plentiful and surprising. They even got Yoko Ishida to perform some of her greatest hits on stage! That and all the good stuff happening off the floor, including panels with the guests of honor, gameshows, panty raids, dance parties, a cat-girl maid cafe and Anime screenings going on all day! Unfortunately, there’s more to be said about the massive technical difficulties we encountered as exhibitors there.

One of the first things we had problems with were the TVs in the game room. We lost half of the working TVs the first day due to malfunctions. Meaning half of the potential video gamage we could have had going was kaput on the very first day. As we progressed through the weekend we slowly lost more and more TVs to what seemed to be faulty wiring. There’s different speculations about what happened, but in the end it didn’t matter what had caused it, only that we had just three working TVs to use.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, apparently we were put in a booth area that was too dangerous to supply power to directly. Don’t they check this stuff out before hand? We almost didn’t get to have any running power at our booth this year. Luckily it was averted by an extension having to cross the booth next to us, but jeez what a hassle. This of course messed with most of our initial schedule and we ended up skipping some of our planned events. No worries, we went out and bought our own extension cables just so we can keep going and continue with our plans.

Third day comes by and all I can tell is that we don’t have power for a bit. At this point we had one of our TVs at the booth burn out (we had two at first, but I guess someone up there decided one would have to do) so we could only have one system going on at a time. Once power was up we went about our business and decided to end the day with an old fashioned swag give away. When I’m an attendee I love getting free stuff thrown at me. Again, unfortunately we gathered too many people at our booth. Seeing as we had a corner spot next to another booth not only did we have fire hazard problems we also got complaints from the booth next to us. So…because we gathered the crowd favorite for that small amount of time WE get punished for having a crappy section? If I recall last year was much more different. There were NO problems and everything went down without a hitch. In fact, we did a similar routine and we had a blast doing it. Why was this year filled with so many issues?

Whether it be from a lack of planning or maybe an insufficient amount of man power to do th job, I’d have to say that for exhibitor’s this year’s Anime Vegas was on the down side. I’m not saying we all had the same problems, but I kid you not when I say that all of this happened to us on what was suppose to be a smooth, FUN weekend at AV’s 4th year out. Should I expect to go next year? Maybe, but not as an exhibitor. Problems need to be resolved first. Areas where potential problems could happen should be checked and confirmed and there should be a little more freedom for exhibitors. I understand that safety is of the utmost importance, but the fact that most of the safety rules prevented us from doing most of our planned schedule is kind of a let down. It may just mean that Anime Vegas needs to move itself to a better location. A BIGGER location.

What can I say then? A complete failure? No not exactly we’re still getting great guests to come down here (it’s Vegas, they may come down for a little extracurricular activities as well)  and music artists as well. It’s just the overlooking of the more potential problems that could have been easily averted this year. I hope that next year Anime Vegas is given the chance to expand like it should. It’s not just the guys whose hard work goes into throwing the convention either, but the fans need to rejoice and speak there minds a little more. Nothing is scarier than a crowd of Otaku who demand a little bit more for their buck.