On October 20, the third geek festival Almaty Geek Games Expo was held in Almaty. The event took place on the territory of the Baluan Sholak Sports Palace. More than 5,000 people came to enjoy the celebration of geek culture, comics, video games and bright costumes, including both Almaty residents and guests from other cities of Kazakhstan and Central Asian countries.
This year, the AGGE program lasted one day: various competitions with spectators, speeches by media personalities, and raffles for prizes and gifts from the exhibition sponsors took place on the main stage. Guests of the festival, Kazakhstani youth, also had the opportunity to take pictures with their idols and receive their autographs. It is noteworthy that the Kazakh British Embassy also provided its support to the festival, thanks to which famous illustrators Michael Lake and John Higgins arrived at the event.
Festival organizer Mukhambetzhan Seidzhanov told Bluescreen that the main goal of AGGE is to create a single platform for people united by their love for geek culture, where they can feel free. Mukhambetzhan also noted that before holding such an event in Kazakhstan, he visited major exhibitions in Russia and the UAE.
“Geeks are a very broad audience; I personally am a big fan of comics and cinema, and a little later I came to anime. From my own experience, I know that it can be difficult for such guys to meet like-minded people who share their hobbies. They cannot always make acquaintances and find friends. Here it becomes easier for them, because they can feel at ease, relax, because there are people nearby who are interested in the same things as them. In general, we even have a slogan – from fans to fans, since we ourselves really love what we do,” he says.
Mukhambetzhan concluded that in the future he and his team will strive to cover other cities of Kazakhstan with this event.
In addition to the main program on the main stage of AGGE, for the entertainment of exhibition guests there were shops with themed goods, a gaming area of the Kazakh platform Pinger.Pro with arcade machines, computers and racing car simulators, as well as an alley of illustrators, comic book publishers and a video game development laboratory.
One of the festival participants, KBTU student and young indie developer Aknazar Bolat, presented Bluescreen with his own horror game called Sorrow. He said that he created a project based on the Unreal Engine 5, and at the same time assessed the state of the gamedev industry in Kazakhstan.
“I came to game development while studying at KBTU, when various courses and lectures on this topic began to appear. I was interested in all this, so I decided to try myself in this area. Right now my game is still in the demo stage, but I’ve been planning its release on Steam for several months now. In general, if we talk about gamedev in Kazakhstan, now this industry is gradually moving forward and more and more independent developers are entering the market. The only problem remains that in our country there is still no one big game development company that would take all this to the next level,” shared Aknazar Bolat.
A traditional event at the geek culture festival was a fashion show of cosplayers who prepared images of their favorite anime, movie and game characters. The show was opened by a specially invited guest of AGGE – Kazakh professional cosplayer Aigera Dunamis. This year, the girl appeared before fans in the image of “Wonder Woman,” the heroine of the comic books of the same name from DC Comics.
“When the movie “Wonder Woman” starring actress Gal Gadot was released in 2017, I was very inspired by her image of a strong and powerful woman, and I also really liked the design of her costume. Her character is so energizing, as if you want to become just like her. I couldn’t create a costume for this heroine that same year, it wasn’t possible, but I knew for sure that someday I would do it anyway. Five years later, I realized that I had gained enough experience and was ready to recreate Wonder Woman. It took me three months to prepare the image, and later I won an award for it at a cosplayer competition in Astana. But to be honest, I created this costume not for the sake of awards, but for the sake of the people whom I managed to inspire. They came up to me and admired my image, and I gratefully accepted their reactions and compliments. This is the best energy, the best emotional charge you can get. I would like to wish all beginning cosplayers – go ahead of your fears, don’t be afraid of mistakes and love what you do,” Dunamis shared.
The festival program ended with the summing up of the results of the cosplayers’ competition in various categories and the drawing of prizes among the festival guests. Participants of the competition received various gifts from sponsors and organizers of Almaty Geek Games Expo.
