E3 really was a massive moment. Shame we won’t really have stuff like this again. I miss the yearly cringe.
Thankfully there’s still the swathes of other comic, video game, and anime conventions out there to get your dose.
ETA: have we all forgotten about San Diego Comic-Con? The literal largest comic convention in the world that most big production companies use as a major event to announce upcoming projects?
But…that’s not specifically about video games?
E3 cultivated an “insider” appeal that not many large cons tried to match. You could look forward to game reveals that you’d mark on your calendars.
PAX has a more indie feel and Gamescom feels much more like an actual trade show.
All the video games magazines would do an E3 issue and I remember binging on all the game announcements and event photos. Good times
E3 taught me a lot about how to sneak into paid conventions and invite-only after parties. Had just moved to LA and a new friend brought me along and taught me the ways.
Care to elaborate?
Yeah, he invited me there, said he got me a ticket. What he actually had for me was a toolbelt, high biz vest and a hardhat. He used to work as an electrician for these events. So we walk in and store our things. In the evening the big publishers would hold private parties. We did the same routine to get into Sony’s. It was the mid 2000s and we ended up doing this for multiple events before disbanding :)
We’ll never get another “$299” moment again :(
A .biz domain still feels really scummy to me
E3 doesn’t exist anymore?
E3 doesn’t exist anymore?
Damn time does indeed progress.
They never really recovered from covid. All the big game studios just did live streams of varying quality and then realized that it’s much simpler for them to just do that than go to a big conference. They stopped going to the conferences and started just doing their live streams.
It also didn’t help that Sony and Microsoft would have their own conferences for their consoles and any games that were releasing on those consoles. Then a lot of the time those games would also be releasing on PC at some point so they didn’t need a separate announcement for that they just tell you at the PlayStation/Xbox conference.
Then the studios started to have their own conferences, because they couldn’t possibly tell you about a new game in 10 minutes when they could spend over an hour telling you the same stuff.
It wasn’t a trade but a gaming show
Not originally. It was a trade show.
