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Trivia / Penny Arcade

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  • Accidentally-Correct Writing:
  • Ascended Fanon: Tycho and Gabe were not originally intended as Author Avatars, but when fans assumed such was the cause, Jerry and Mike decided to roll with it. Even then, the characters are mostly distinct from the creative team's.
  • Awesome, Dear Boy: Gabe was overjoyed when Nintendo hired them to produce a comic to promote The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, despite his schedule being full.
  • Colbert Bump: Any website that Tycho links to in his blogpost that isn't used to getting several thousand pings will be crashed by the massive influx of people who read Penny Arcade. In the words of the bard himself:
    Putting up a link is actually considered a hostile act by some comics. The bandwidth drain our readership — well, you, I guess — can place on a site is almost indistinguishable (at first) from a Denial Of Service attack.
  • Development Hell: Episode 3 of Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness was seemingly in this inferno, until the creators said the video game series was over and the storyline would continue as a novel. Episode 3 would eventually get Saved from Development Hell when it was picked up by the creators of Cthulhu Saves the World, taking on the form of a 16-bit RPG. It was a Summer 2012 release for Steam, Xbox Live Indie Games, and mobile devices, and episode 4 was also developed.
  • Make-A-Wish Contribution: A child named Nathaniel used his wish to visit the Penny Arcade offices one day. He got a cameo in the strip for it.
  • Schedule Slip: Relentlessly avoided. Things that would cause multiple-week delays for other comics cause single-day delays for PA. It took Gabe getting the swine flu to force them to reach out for guest strips. They have missed exactly one strip in all their years online, that was the day after 9/11, and even then they put up a placeholder image telling readers what was up.
  • Screwed by the Lawyers:
    • One comic mocking American McGee's Alice got them into trouble with American Greetings' lawyers because they chose to satirize American McGee creating a very violent and sexually explicit Strawberry Shortcake game — they were aiming for a franchise much mocked as saccharine in the 80s and had unfortunately chosen a franchise American Greetings had coincidentally chose to revive shortly before the comic was published. The comic was taken down, but they made their grievances clear in a subsequent comic. They also encouraged their fans to Keep Circulating the Tapes in the dark web.
    • When asked by a Wikipedia user in 2019, Muriel Fahrion — the original designer of Strawberry Shortcake — said she did not pay attention to the controversy at the time as she wanted to stay positive following her husband's illness and sought to continue working as an illustrator to pay her dues.
  • Technology Marches On: Inevitable considering how long the strip has run. Some ideas are reinvented to suit new mores — the Fruit Fucker 5000 was originally a parody of the rambling cable-TV gadget advertisements popular in The '90s, but has since moved on to parody Apple's range of iProducts.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Olympus, an actual dream of both of them, is an arcade utopia which will never come to fruition because neither Gabe or Tycho have millions and millions of dollars.
      Gabe: Imagine it's like a really classy Dave and Busters, like with dark hardwood bars, glass rooms full of high-end audio and video equipment... Khoo said not yet.
      Tycho: He said we didn't have a million dollars.
    • Both Jerry and Mike have said that without Robert Khoo, their business manager, they would have sold themselves into slavery for what, at the time, would have seemed like a really good idea. For example: their book rights.

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