King Con 2016
Where to start!
This was our first time attending King Con, in fact, we'd never even heard of it before they made the move to the Stadium of Light - a huge venue with ample space for con-goers, dealers, artists and special guests with plenty of free parking available!.
We'd bought early bird tickets which allowed us to enter from 9am - we decided to head in for 10am as our friends had bought standard tickets so wouldn't be arriving until 11.
This was our first time attending King Con, in fact, we'd never even heard of it before they made the move to the Stadium of Light - a huge venue with ample space for con-goers, dealers, artists and special guests with plenty of free parking available!.
We'd bought early bird tickets which allowed us to enter from 9am - we decided to head in for 10am as our friends had bought standard tickets so wouldn't be arriving until 11.
We spent the majority of our time wandering the main dealers hall, before heading upstairs to look around the artists floor before checking out the 3D printers and picking up some bubble tea. We did wander up to the next floor after that, but we think we'd left it too late in the day as we couldn't find what we were looking for and some dealers had already started packing their stalls away by 4:30.
There was a small problem at around 11am when the fire alarms went off - just when it had started to rain! But it was fine, we spent less time outside than it took us to evacuate! Mind you, we did see a total buffoon stopping to take videos and photographs whilst evacuating - just so they could grumble about the fire alarm going off. Sorry, but, is that really worth risking everyones safety?
The dealers hall was filled with bigger dealers than we've seen at Sunnycon - Travelling Man were even there! We picked up some Neko Atsume and Naruto blind boxes here. In fact, we cleared them out, I got Sasuke and Kakashi, but I only wanted Naruto!, Lou then got Sai and Chelsey unboxed Naruto! I'm hoping they have them in store too as my fiancé said he'd go pick me a couple up as I ended up with double vision again the next day so I couldn't really go get them myself.
Special guests included Gerald Home (Star Wars), Miltos Yerolemou (Game of Thrones, Star Wars), Jerome Flynn (Game of Thrones, Ripper Street, Soldier Soldier, Robson & Jerome), Charles Martinet (Mario, Luigi, Wario), Neil Fingleton (Game of Thrones, Dr Who, Avengers AoU, 47 Ronin, Jupiter Ascending) but I was really only interested in Charles Martinet, he's probably the biggest, most well known voice actor that has ever attended a North East UK convention, sure Sunnycon had Veronica Taylor (Ash Ketchum's original voice actor) in their first year, but they've struggled to bring over any guests of that size ever since.
The guests did charge for autographs and photoshoots, similar to the charges at Sunnycon earlier in June, but King Con charge less for their tickets and also provide maps and timetables for each visitor, which is something Sunnycon neglect to do but is much needed!
King Con feels more like a smaller scale Expo than a Convention due to the fact that they actually have more than a make-shift game room will old consoles, they had actual arcade games, a planetarium provided by Kielder Observatory, a fire show, a workshop with Teeside University where you could create and take home your very own basic video game, and Darlington College were there showing guests the basics of building games, teaching Angry Bird science and solving crimes in their CSI area in the Science Zone and it was included in the price of your ticket!.
King Con also had a roaming Pikachu! and a dancing dinosaur.
My video from the convention will be live on YouTube from 12pm tomorrow!
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