[E3] is dead. Long live E3.

Local H Jay

https://kotaku.com/when-is-e3-canceled-electronic-expo-summer-games-fest-1850285081

So this year, 2023, was supposed to be the first in person E3 since the pandemic came and swept us all away into the shores of time. People have been saying E3 is dead for as long as I can remember but it's finally feeling true. Despite this, E3 had an incredible impact on the industry and was the best way to spread word of mouth for new games, especially in the early days of the internet. I would pour over gaming magazines detailing new reveals from the show. The hype associated with E3 announcements is a gaming tradition that carries on today at other, similar shows and events.

I thought this might be a good time to go back and remember some of the good, the bad, and the memes of E3 and some of those legendary reveals.

https://youtu.be/hVYw64W8PTA

https://youtu.be/cq6L1HV5gz4

https://youtu.be/PRC70JWKm6Q

https://youtu.be/89GB6bC9_N4

https://youtu.be/l1vmrMAqeWM

https://youtu.be/pJElsNaC6yQ

This article has a few notable moments, and amusingly, some of these games are still not released
https://www.denofgeek.com/games/e3-best-game-reveals-announcements/

Aegeri

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTAKSBvuT-A

Arguably one of the worst interviews ever for a company. The amount of damage this one interview did was astounding, especially the infamous Submarine question.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfp8PRBW8WU

My favourite ever disaster game reveal at E3: GREAT JOB JEREMY.

This then led to one of my FAVOURITE Giant Bomb quick looks of ALL TIME:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVwfvpKKGHQ

GREAT JOB RYAN.

RidleySaria

I’ll never forget Nintendo’s E3 2008, the conference where I got up and walked away in disgust. After that I became a PlayStation owner for the first time.

Local H Jay

Oh man the Kinect reveal also had me cracking up back in the day
https://youtu.be/pXN7vLPsDSM

Forar

I once had dreams of attending E3 in person.

Nowadays I'll settle for compilation videos and hawt taeks from the forums.

Local H Jay

Also thinking back on it was wild seeing people react to the Wii being revealed in real time on these forums. That was a wild time.

And yeah, I'd love to have gone to one, but PAX is more than enough for me (and these days I'll probably settle for just one day over a whole weekend)

One year I went to RTX but haha... Uh...

Shadowfire

The things that make me want e3 to survive have been gone for a long time. If there's no Kentia Hall, we don't need a physical space. I'd rather they invest that money back into their developers* instead.

lol. lmao

reVerse

Maybe?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOI4XJecOc0

NEVER!

cloudeagle

I somehow got to go to one in 2001. That was a good one to go to - I got to see all of Nintendo's Gamecube launch titles, including Smash Bros. Melee and Eternal Darkness, Halo's extravaganza of Halo, Oddworld, and a bunch of other long-forgotten weirdness, plenty of Sony's stuff (the original Jak and Daxter sticks out in my mind), the pure WTF of Square's announcement of Kingdom Hearts, Sega's last gasp of Dreamcast stuff in a chill lounge, and plenty other things. Since I was press at the time I got to Sony's big afterparty (which featured, I think, a performance by Eminem, or maybe it was some other similar nu-metalish thing? I forget).

Despite all that I think I vastly prefer PAX and other such conventions - for all the gaming glitz you could never quite escape the fact that it was mainly geared to the press and retailers, not fans that just wanted to geek out.

Local H Jay

I'm late to the Tim Rogers train but him at E3 is pretty great content
https://youtu.be/KXLHXVE4c3E
https://youtu.be/RoGFbhE9SSg
https://youtu.be/KsH0s2_S_Ck
https://youtu.be/2dZuUD8drUA

Undead Scottsman

If you haven't watched the Konami E3 2010 presentation, I'd definitely recommend checking it out at some point. It's just a non-stop barrage of nonsense, cringe and just baffling decisions and is probably the low (high) point of that era of E3. The amount of cringe at E3 started dropping significantly at that point, until basically Ubisoft was the last one standing in that regard. Everyone else went and got respectable.

I've said it in another thread but E3, as an event to show off games, really sucked in the long run. Companies spent millions of dollars forcing their teams to crap out demos and trailers for this thing and then holding booths and presentations; it was frequently cringe and stupid, and the ESA is a horrid organization who fucking doxxed a ton of journalists (remember that?).

But the loss of such a big networking event for the industry is going to sting badly. E3 was one of the few times enough of the industry was in one place where a lot of business, especially unplanned business, happens.

Also it's been gone for a few years now and he'd doens't have Giant Bomb's resources anymore, but I always held out hope that Jeff Gerstmann would take to the night couch at least one final time. Ah well.

Jazz

Shadowfire wrote: »

The things that make me want e3 to survive have been gone for a long time. If there's no Kentia Hall, we don't need a physical space. I'd rather they invest that money back into their developers* instead.

lol. lmao

The weird and wonderful stuff in Kentia Hall was just amazing.

I was fortunate enough to go to two of them, 2001 and 2005, both excellent years for forthcoming machines, and have plenty of good (if now less coherent than once they were) memories from those times. I didn't get to go to the big pressers or afterparties or anything, just the show floor etc, but a great experience to be there when it was in its pomp.

I miss E3 and will miss it, but it's not been that for a long while now.