Inside an 80-year-old warehouse in Seattle’s SoDo district, cubicle-size mainframes buzz like angry bees, creating a cacophony of white noise. Fluorescent bulbs bathe the white walls and white floors of the computer room in artificial light. It feels more like a laboratory than a high-tech hub, but everywhere you look, decades-old PCs and microcomputers—all wired innards, boxy screens, and switch-covered consoles—are whirring away like it’s 1979. This is the Living Computer Museum, the latest brainchild of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. In this nerd heaven, you’ll find some of the rarest tech specimens in the world—including the only working PDP-7—all restored to their full operational glory. It’s a computer mausoleum like no other and a testament to what locals already know about our fair city: Seattle is geek town. And we’re darn proud of it.
All your geeks are belong to us
Living Computer Museum
Museum of Flight
In 2011, Forbes.com ranked Seattle among the top 10 geekiest cities in America for three specific reasons, “Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft.” But local nerdcore employment options go beyond the software giant that Bill Gates built. Notable tech titans here include Amazon, Boeing, Expedia, Facebook, and Google. Not to mention the around 100 gaming studios, 500 startups, and 100 biotech companies also tapping into the local talent. “If you look across the landscape at all the technology hubs across the country, I’m hard pressed to find another market that has as much going on in it as Seattle,” says John Cook, cofounder of Seattle-based tech news site GeekWire.
May the fanboys be with you
To reveal a city’s true geek cred, one only need look to its people. Here in Seattle, we have scores of gamers (both the Xbox 360 and d20 sort), comic book buffs, manga and anime fanatics, bookworms, music and movie die-hards, molecular gastronomists, nerdcore hip-hop groups like Death*Star and Optimus Rhyme, and live-action role-players (or LARPs for short). Dozens of planeswalkers, seated elbow-to-elbow, throw down in Magic: The Gathering tournaments at Ballard’s Card Kingdom game store every Friday night. Local vloggers, such as Issaquah’s Chris Pirillo (LockerGnome) and Seattle’s Scott Heimendinger (Seattle Food Geek), dish about everything from stormtrooper hoodies to vacuumcompressed watermelon on YouTube. (Pirillo’s following runs so deep that he streams a live video feed of his home office 24/7 so his 275,000plus subscribers can rubberneck at their leisure.) And in bars across the city, geeks battle it out in a test of trivia wits before a nerdy quizmaster. “Geek culture is best defined as people who are smart and passionate,” says Greg Leeds, president of Renton-based Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary that produces Magic and the popular role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Case in point: Wizards’ office, located in a business park 20 minutes south of Seattle, has become an unofficial tourist destination for geeks. “In the summertime, people come to the parking lot and take a picture with our sign in the background,” Leeds says. “The bold ones come to the lobby and start talking to the designers, trying to give them suggestions.” As vlogger Pirillo puts it, “I’m passionate about things that I get into, and I don’t care what other people think—that’s a modern definition of a geek. You can be geeky about anything.” So, without stalking a game developer, how can you celebrate geek culture in Seattle?
Here’s where to press play:
visitseattle.org
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