Child's Play raises over $300,000!

Written by John Scalzo on January 18, 2005

News: The final numbers are in and the boys from Penny Arcade and all their friends and readers made the Child's Play charity drive a huge success.

After last year's Child's Play charity drive was such a rousing success, the boys from Penny Arcade made this year an even deal. In the end, $310,000 in video games, video game machines, toys and cash was donated.

Child's Play was originally conceived last year to provide toys and games for the Seattle Children's Hospital. This year, the drive was expanded to include five hospitals:
Children's National Medical Center in Washington D.C., Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, San Diego Children's Hospital, Children's Hospital Oakland and the Seattle Children's Hospital. It was started by the creators of Penny Arcade, a webcomic about the video game related adventures of Tycho and Gabe. As an aside, I think it is also the Internet's best webcomic as I am a huge PA fan.

For this year, the Child's Play charity dinner was set up and gamers packed the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington for a black tie affair that netted $14,000 alone from donations and a charity auction. Among the items auctioned off included a tour of Nintendo of America, the chance to play Halo 2 against the boys from Bungie and the best prize of the night: being drawn into a Penny Arcade strip. Bidding for that item was so intense the honor was given to anyone who agreed to donate $1000. Tycho and Gabe will only say that "a handful" ponied up the dough for that.

In addition to the Amazon Wish Lists for each hospital, there were many corporate sponsors of Child's Play. Some of them include Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, PopCap Games, Nokia, Midway, Valve, The PvP Forums, CheapAss Games and Wizards of the Coast. This is by no means a full list. That can be found by clicking here.

"We're gamers, so our goal for this year was to try and beat last year's score of $250,000 [in donations]," commented Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade. "Through the incredible munificence of our readers and the gamer/geek online community we were able to attain that goal. Next year we're going for $500 thousand!"

And I hope they make it.

So congratulations to Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, Mike "Gabe" Krahulik and everyone else that volunteered. You guys did a great thing and the gaming community is lucky to have you.