Holkins and Krahulik took time out of their hosting duties at the 2009 Penny Arcade Expo to talk to Kotaku this weekend. We chatted in front of the camera and under the boom mic of a crew that's filming a reality show around this pair of the world's most successful gamers.

How successful? Three sold out days of Penny Arcade Expo 2009 at the Washington State Convention Center, expanding next year both to the first PAX East, in Boston, and, with the addition of a four-story annex across the street, to an even bigger 2010 Seattle show … Successful enough to garner millions of readers of their online comic strip… And, Krahulik told Kotaku, when I pressed him to name the most expensive thing he ever bought at once, successful enough to buy a Mercedes three years ago in cash.

One of Krahulik and Holkins' achievements has been to turn their love of video games into an opportunity to make video games. They helped put together Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, their 2008 Xbox Live Arcade debut. They have released two episodes of the adventure game and say they are now "on the cusp" of an announcement about their game development future. They declined to provide specifics, so we talked about what they learned from the first project.

The lesson: Game-making did not turn out to be the joy they both may have anticipated.

"I discovered that I had no desire to make games," Krahulik told me during our interview.

"And I discovered that I like writing games a lot," Holkins said. "I would describe the process internally as very complex."

For both their comic strip and the game, which was developed by Hothead Games, Krahulik had art tasks. Holkins did writing.

Krahulik didn't like his role. "I think it's a lot more work than making comics," he said. "I don't think the end result is as entertaining. For me, what I like is drawing a comic, putting it up in a few hours and I get immediate feedback. .. And if you don't like that comic, there's another one Friday. With a game, I worked on that for two years, but my work was all concept, right? None of that work shows up in the game. Nobody sees it. I get no feedback."

"You get feedback on other people's work," Holkins quipped.

But while Krahulik is happy enough with his comics job, Holkins found game-making much more fulfilling. "The process is so different from our regular writing process [of the comic strip,] where it's mostly about a process of refinement, of distillation," he said. "You can write in a much more broad way in games… I could add as much text as I wanted to [in the game]. And so, for me, a lot of ideas that, under the ordinary strictures of the writing process, would be gone, I was able to keep and then polish up. … I found that process of characters having conversations in my head that I would transcribe very enjoyable. And I think it's excellent training for other kinds of writing that I might be asked to do in the future."

Holkins said that his future writing could involve books or scripts. I suggested songs. He said he already writes those.

Their comic won't stop. Their shows are bursting and beloved. They're on a game-making cusp. They seem not even slightly miserable, but if anyone thought that two guys who love playing games would automatically love making games, that's not so. It's more complex and more interesting than that.

Also I want to thank Chris Person for filming and processing the video.

Gabe pointed out late last week that the webcomic duo appeared in the January 30, New York Sun crossword puzzle. The one up there, to be specific. Twelve down reads:

"Tycho's pal in the webcomic 'Penny Arcade' (4 letters)."

I can't think of any honor greater than being deemed crossword puzzle material.

New York Sun Crosswords

First of all let me just say that the game has everything you would expect and want from a Penny Arcade game. A terrific art style, fun gameplay and hilarious dialog. You kick off the game with a great character customization screen. You can play a male or female character and for a comic style game, you get a surprising amount of variety in facial features, clothes and body types. One great mechanic has your character checking him or herself out whenever you change outfits. The amount of work that goes into the customization is pretty amazing seeing as not only do you see your character in 3D for the game scenes, but he/she is rendered live in 2d as well for the comic book cut scenes.

After the comic panel style intro featuring your customized character, you join up with Gabe and Tycho to solve the mystery of the giant marauding robot that opens the game by tromping it's way through your yard. Once your team is together you can use their various powers (individually and together) to plow your way through such iconic enemies as hobos, clowns mimes and even barber shop quartets. Just as in real life, Gabe's powers rely solely on fisticuffs and up close combat while Tycho (whos moves are the most powerful in the game) takes care of the ranged combat with a tommy gun and his trusty book (reading is power!). Your player character is the melee weapon fighter, starting off with a rake and eventually upgrading to other weapons along the way. Battles are turned based with timed initiatives and each special move requires a "mini game" to complete such as mashing the space bar repeatedly or doing timed moves with the directional arrows. Team combo moves can be done with two or three characters relying on a meter system to let you know when your power up is ready for use.

Watching the game really made me reminisce about the old point and click Lucas Arts games, on which PAA is heavily based. Engaging in dialog with NPCs will give you a variety of choices in answers, many resulting in additional razor sharp commentary by Gabe and Tycho. It should be noted that there are no voiceovers in the game and all conversation is done through comic style word balloons with dialog that had me laughing aloud a lot.

The game is set to be released simultaneously on MAC, PC and Linux with the XBLA version coming soon after. Despite the doubts that many people had concerning the game after the first trailer was shown, I think I can confidently say that gamers will be more than pleased when the first episode is finally released later this year. And in case you were wondering, there will be teabagging, but I'm not going to tell you where. That, you will have to discover for yourself.

They are also running a contest at the show to find a name to be used for a character in the game and PAX goers were encouraged to submit their real names for possible inclusion. I went ahead and submitted mine so perhaps I'll be lucky and my ridiculous sounding name will be chosen. I mean I know it's no Florian Eckhardt, but then, what is.

Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Website [Hothead Games]

In the wake of the execution-style slaying of E3, a peal of protest has gone up from those who really enjoy the temporary sterility, epilepsy and astigmatism that is the result of more than five minutes spent on that infamous showfloor.

Over at Penny Arcade it looks like a new era is dawning, as PAX (pictured at right, being hardcore) and E3 were the two big game conferences and now that the king is dead, long live the king. Says Gabe:

I personally never thought of E3 as our competitor. The two conventions had very different goals. Now E3, at least as we know it is gone but the focus of PAX has not changed. PAX is about gamers not publishers and geek culture instead of multi-million dollar business deals. We have no desire to turn PAX into a new E3 so don't worry about that. The only place I think we might see a noticeable change is in our exhibition hall. It's already quite a spectacle but I think that the lack of an E3 event means our exhibition hall is going to get f***ing nuts.

Hopefully not too nut-f***ing. Although if PAX becomes truly decadent, we can look forward to the tightlipped, impeccably-ponytailed soccer moms that make up 80% of the Bellevue, Washington population being mistaken for booth babes on their breaks at the local Uwajimaya, with hilarious results. Eliza "Crossroads Mall" Gauger

Read more [Penny Arcade]
Official PAX Website! (reg stays open until the 3rd) [PAX]

The personal blog of the Xbox Team's Andre Vrignaud yesterday yielded a fantastic treasure: the heretofore unreleased Xbox 2 Rumor Control strip by Penny Arcade. Says Vrignaud about the strip's origins:

Anyway, after Xenon was greenlit an Xbox-wide meeting was planned where Robbie would detail our plans and get all the internal teams focused on the project. This was to be the internal "big bang" meeting, and we thought it would be pretty cool to see if Penny Arcade might be willing to do a strip that we could distribute with the meeting announcement. I'm pleased to say that they agreed to do us this favor, and the strip you see here was the result. The only "guidance" we gave was that we were looking for a strip about Xbox 2 rumors - that's it.

Vrignaud is taking the admirable step of offer the comic at full resolution on his blog, about 1.2 megs of pure joy. You can print this thing out as a poster if you want, or maybe on one of those stitch-your-photo-into-a-throw-blanket things they do at Rite Aid. Mm...Comfy Arcade...

I've taken the liberty of resizing the monster jpg into something lusciously large, but small enough to be readable on monitors, and stuck it after the jump. I suggest you visit Vrignaud and get the fullsizer, though. Especially if you have a nice printer. Eliza Gauger

Unreleased Penny Arcade Xbox 2 Rumors Strip [Ozymandias]