Alex Owens | Downtown News

As the Comic-Con keeps getting bigger each year, longtime attendees can’t help but look back at the early days when the event was held in one or two rooms of the El Cortez Hotel.

Those days aren’t coming back, but gamers and geeks can get the next best thing with Gam3rCon, a convention held July 24-27 at the 10th Avenue Theatre (930 10th Ave.)

Now in its fourth year, Gam3rCon offers an affordable alternative to the “Con,” where people can play their favorite role-playing games, compete in video game tournaments on a 40-foot screen, and even reminisce in the Retrocade, a room dedicated to the classic systems of the past where people can play old-school Atari, Sega, and other games they – or their parents – played as kids.

Gam3rCon spokesman Brian Bielawski estimates 5,000 people will attend the four-day convention, which, he admits, is a far cry from the 50,000 expected each day at Comic-Con. However, each year, Gam3rCon has grown exponentially larger.

“We hope this is the year we finally outgrow the 10th Avenue Theatre,” said Bielawski, who started Gam3rCon back in 2009, in part, to promote the play, “Gam3rs,” he’d written with fellow organizer Walter Meyer.

“It started out to get people to the play,” Bielawski said. “With so much going on at the Con, we figured people wouldn’t walk that far to go to the play.”

And there was another reason: “Some people think there is not enough gaming at Comic-Con,” Bielawski said.

As part of the festivities, “GAM3RS,” which has been presented all over the country, will have four performances at Gam3rCon, and there is also a new play contest.

“From a writing standpoint, gaming offers a lot of possibilities for storytellers,” Bielawski said. “It’s a long story, between 10 to 50 hours of play are needed to win a game. It’s beyond a mini series. There’s a lot of plot and themes that you can do on a large scale, but then putting the player in the driver’s seat is just mind-blowing.”

There will also be an exhibition of fine art paintings by some of the gaming industry’s top artists, performances by a variety of musical artists whose songs will focus on gaming and/or the characters featured in the games, and also panels on topics like how to break into doing video game voiceovers or how gaming affects parenting.

Although Gam3rCon takes place during the same days as Comic-Con, it keeps different hours – between 2 p.m. and 2 a.m. – and that means there will be rooftop parties in the evenings and other events that will be going on long after the Convention Center has closed its doors.

“We tell people, ‘Go to the Con during the day and come to us at night,’” Bielawski said.

Day passes for Gam3rCon start at $20 and four-day passes are $50. For more information, check out gam3rcon.com

Alex Owens is a San Diego based freelance writer.