The
Gainamatsuri or
Gainax Festival was a weekend long event sponsored by
Gainax for its fans. The first Gainax Festival was held in March of
1994, at the
Mikami Hot Springs in
Gunma Prefecture. Numerous guests were invited, all of them being associated with
Gainax in some way. A number of different events took place over the weekend including
discussion panels,
film screenings,
karaoke,
video game contests, and
charity auctions. Apparently when the
Gainax boys play, they play hard, in an
otakuish sort of way of course.
The second Gainax Festival took place in July of
1995, at the seaside resort of
Itako,
Ibaraki Prefecture and was different to the first in that it used a
LAN within the event site together with a
BBS to create
Synapse, an attempt at making a
virtual convention space on the
Internet in conjunction with the live convention site. This was more than six years ago, when the
net was new and strange and wonderful and this sort of thing had
never been done before. That is very impressive considering these guys are just an
animation studio (though they do produce computer games).