Penny Arcade: Leaders For Our Time

Good old Time magazine, around since 1923 and sometimes still reading as if it were stuck in that year. And yet, their Time 100 annual list of the people that move and shake our world often yields surprises, both pro and con.

This year video games get their due, and naturally Seattle is in the spotlight. No, we’re not talking about the advance buzz on Halo: Reach, which is already threatening to drown out discussion on financial reform. We’re also not talking about the Boy Scouts, who just introduced a merit badge for video gaming (only about 30 years too late for this former scout-cum-Atari-addict).

This is about Penny Arcade, specifically creators Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, who now share the list with such luminaries as Barack Obama, Temple Grandin and Lady Gaga. What started out as personal geeky obsessions turned into an immensely successful webcomic (they now do the comic as a full-time job), but Time also calls them out for Child’s Play, their charity that provides free games to children in hospitals, and for the Penny Arcade Expo, which, with 60,000 attendees last year, is now the Washington State Convention and Trade Center‘s largest event, knocking out of first place the perennial fave, the Northwest Flower and Garden Show. (The Expo has proved so popular over the years that this year they launched PAX East in Boston, which featured special guests Leonard Nimoy and ubergeek Wil Wheaton for a sold-out geekstravaganza.)

Not bad for a couple of geeks who used to waste far too much time on video games. Now if only I could channel my own geeky obsessions into a similar success story…