At E3 2017, I had a plan. The annual convention was always attended by a wide range of game developers, giving journalists like me the opportunity to talk to notable people from around the world. I decided it would be the ideal place to chat with Japanese creatives about the then-resurgent mood surrounding the country's video game efforts. First on my list was Toshihiro Nagoshi, the infamously fussy creator of the yakuza series. In an attempt to break the ice, I asked the elegant director where he had bought his shoes. He responded, very simply – and in a very serious tone – “very expensive.” The only English words he spoke during our entire conversation.
Now that E3 is dead, for real this time, I can't help but remember these kinds of memories. In many ways, covering E3 as a member of the press was a nightmare; the lines were too long, as were the hours spent roaming the show floor, going from appointment to appointment (before returning and filing stories from a hotel room). It was big, loud and exhausting; apparently it was not a good place to have interesting conversations that could turn into insightful articles. And yet, the overwhelming energy of E3, with so many developers crammed into a convention center for days in a row, meant it was also a chance to fully immerse myself in what I loved most: writing about video games.
There was and is nothing like it, and for that reason, I'm really going to miss E3. Shows like Summer Game Fest have popped up to replace E3, and publishers continue to take matters into their own hands with regular livestreams. But these are primarily online events. They don't have the mass of personalities in one place that E3 had. They're better at spreading news and trailers, but you miss out on being denied by iconic game designers like Nagoshi.
E3 has been around since the '90s, which means that when I was a kid growing up reading EGM and gamepro, it was a place I had to go to someday. In a pre-Internet era, before games were announced through tweets and thousands of mother 3 Fans could go wild at the words “Nintendo Direct,” it was a place where attendees could glimpse the future of gaming in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. And those attendees were relatively limited. It was a spectacle for the press and people working in the industry, something that only further enhanced its almost mythical status.
I finally had the opportunity to attend in 2014 as a rookie reporter here in The edge. The Los Angeles Convention Center was huge and intimidating. There were bright lights and sprawling booths filled with statues of zombies, robots, and Sonic the Hedgehog. But as the years went by, I figured out how to navigate the physical space and the onslaught of meetings and appointments. In fact, I became The edgeThe de facto scheduling master of E3, creating everyone's schedule as if he were playing a game of Tetris.
And I got pretty good at squeezing everything I could out of the trade show. Conversations with former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé and current Xbox head Phil Spencer about the state of the business became an annual occurrence. Even more exciting, however, was being at a press conference where something interesting was shown and then not only playing it, but having the opportunity to talk to the minds behind it immediately afterwards. There were Cory Barlog, Koji Igarashi, Yoshio Sakamoto, Takashi Tezuka, the duo that led Monster hunter worldand many others.
And many of these meetings included funny stories that never made it onto the page. Like the time when, for some reason, I decided to ask two veteran designers what Gooigi would taste like. The entire room, not only my interview subjects but also the PR representatives and translators, burst into laughter. (This would turn out to be a surprisingly prescient question.) Or when I was taken to a secret room at a Ubisoft event to see a very early version of Beyond good and evil 2 and hear Michel Ancel emphasize: “Now we really believe that we are going to make this game.” (Ancel has since retired from game development, and six years later, the sequel has yet to be released.)
Then, the time came when I asked Masahiro Sakurai, the beloved director of the smash bros. series, what kind of reaction did you have after telling the development team how great the game is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate I would be. At first, he didn't have any answers for me… but then a fellow developer who was in the room chimed in to say that he remembered everyone being very quiet. Finally, Sakurai chimed in with a great line: “From where I was standing, all I heard was dead silence.” She did the piece she was writing.
It's not that these moments could never happen without E3. There are still in-person events like GDC and the industry has become quite accustomed to virtual interviews. But there's something to be said not just for the scale but also the concentration of E3: about a week where you have no time to do anything but think and talk about games. I won't miss the exhaustion it gave me, but I will certainly miss the stories.