My Five Favorite E3 Stories

Hello. There's been a lot of bad news over the last couple of weeks that is going to continue, but I thought I would break it up a little bit with some fun stories from E3's past. I was reminiscing a little bit after I did that um video a couple weeks ago about the real reason that E3 um uh died and talked a little bit about the retail component of E3 and how that disappeared and that's what actually killed the show. I was reminiscing a little bit about uh some of my favorite memories uh from going to E3 cuz I always loved going to E3. Um I went for for quite a few years um almost a decade and always had a good time there schmoozing and playing games and being part of the the spectacle of it all. It was a lot of fun and I thought I would share some some stories, some of my kind of uh memories of E3's past um at least the uh the safer work versions, the ones

that I can share uh without getting yelled at or canceled or whatever. Um so let me give you a couple. Number one is from E3 2011 and this is a weird one. Um this was uh I believe it was my first E3 and I went to the Nintendo press conference and uh for people who don't remember, this is the time of the Wii. Um the Wii was was the hottest thing on the planet. It was selling millions and millions of units everywhere. It was showing up in old age homes. It was breaking into the casual market. Um everybody had a Wii remote and was playing tennis and golf and bowling and whatnot. Um and Nintendo came out and Reggie Fils-Aimé, the president of Nintendo of America, came out and said, "I would like to announce" this is me paraphrasing, I don't remember exactly what he said, but he said, "We are announcing Wii U." And then they played this video and it showed this tablet and it just kept saying Wii U over and over

again. I remember, I'll never forget this, I was sitting next to him, my colleague Keza MacDonalds, um now works for the Guardian, now is the author of the great book Super Nintendo. Um uh uh and we looked at each other and we were like, is this a new console or Wii accessory? And just sitting there and watching that and not being clear even though we were in the audience, um I think set the tone for one of the biggest reasons the Wii U failed, which is that nobody actually knew what it was and we could tell from the get-go being in that press conference and seeing the confusion. Um and I remember they they let us there were like VIP um wristbands that you could get if you were part of I guess what they consider the VIP press. Um I was working for Wired at the time and I got a VIP wristband and I got to go backstage and check out the Wii U and that's when it became a little bit clearer that this is a brand new console, but at the time everyone just had no idea. They were like, Wii U, is that That's a tablet you

can buy for your Wii? Like, what is this? Um then a year later, another funny Nintendo story at E3 2012. This is This is a good one. Um so, this was an era, if you don't So So nowadays most games that are made in Japan and have any sort of profile are localized in English. Um uh most games do not just kind of stick in Japan, but back then, uh and really any period before like the modern era, there were plenty of games that were released in Japan and never actually localized in the US um or outside of Japan in Europe or anything like that. Um uh because the companies involved didn't see it as worth it. They didn't think there was enough of a market for those games. And one series of games at the time um that was not all that popular in outside of Japan um and this might seem I'm to think about now, but it was Fire Emblem. And so at E3 2012, uh Fire Emblem Awakening uh either had just come out or was about to come out

for the Nintendo 3DS. Um and there was a big question about whether it would be localized here in English. Nobody actually knew, and Nintendo hadn't said anything. Um and I remember Reggie Fils-Aimé was doing this little press conference thing. Um he was talking to journalists um at one of these like little kind of conference rooms. Um it wasn't a big press conference or anything. It was a smaller kind of behind closed doors thing. And I remember even what he was talking about. Must have been a presentation about some other 3DS games or something like that. And I remember asking him um This was my first year at Kotaku, so I was uh I'd been there for about 5 months, and I remember asking Reggie Fils-Aimé, "Oh, hey, so is Fire Emblem Awakening coming out in North America?" And he was just like, "Yes, uh it'll we we've announced that it's part of our lineup, and it'll be out such and such next year." Whatever he said. Um and uh me being the the young the young news hound that I was, I remembered that it

hadn't actually been announced for the US. And so uh this was this was a scoop, a scoop that I got from Reggie Fils-Aimé saying firsthand, "Oh my god, this game is is coming to the US." And I remember writing it up, tweeting it, yada yada, breaking the news. And then Nintendo, to kind of damage control, had to send out a tweet of their own being like, "Yes, Fire Emblem Awakening will be coming to the United States. More news on that as it's available." Which is very unorthodox way to announce a game. And it turns out that Reggie just completely by accident announced it in this in this little press conference because I asked him about it. That was very funny. Um All right, a couple more couple more memories uh from E3. So E3 2015, um there used to be this thing before E3, about a month beforehand or a few weeks before E3 would actually start, there was this event called Judges Week. And so, Jeff Keighley, who we now know as the host of the Game Awards and Summer Games Fest, at the time he ran what I believe he called E3 Awards,

something like that. Where essentially, um, there would be these quote-unquote official E3 Awards, where you could win game of the show, or best whatever of the show, and they would have press vote on them, sort of like the Game Awards. Um, except if instead of being about actual games, it was about demos and hype and trailers. E3, I think 2014 was Evolve. I don't remember what all the all the years' winners were off the top of my head. But what he would do is, so one of the rules was that in order to be eligible for one of these awards, you had to have a playable version of your game. And, um, it it it a lot of times at E3, what they would have, a lot of these companies would just have kind of hands-off demos, where they would just show a trailer, or show gameplay footage, without actually letting you get your hands on the sticks. But for this award eligibility, you had to be playable. And so, what they would do is they would have this event called Judges Week, where they would have a bunch of journalists fly out to LA, usually Santa

Monica, and they you would get on a bus, and you would be kind of ushered from company to company, in their little hotel rooms, where they would have game demos for you to play, so you could properly assess the demo, and vote on them at E3. I believe this was this was certainly one of the only years we did this at Kotaku, cuz we just we ultimately thought it was so silly and dumb to be giving out awards to E3 demos. So, after this, I think we decided not to do it anymore. But this year, E3 2015, I went, and it was a very bizarre experience. It was like the summer camp-like thing, where you would be going on these buses with all these other journalists and eating eating sliders at every event and it was a very surreal experience. I remember they would take us like we got to go to Konami's office and play Metal Gear Solid for 3 hours. That was actually the coolest thing. 2K had us play Battleborn if you remember that game

the the Gearbox game that died pretty quickly cuz it was came out just when OverWatch did. There were other games too. I remember going to a Warner's thing and we played Arkham Knight and Mad Max pretty cool demos of those two games. There's a whole bunch of stuff. But there was one thing in particular that stood out to me because we got ticket to this one little hotel room and put in front of these demo stations and told to play this game for a couple hours. And we played it and it was just so like mid I guess you would call it these days. That's not the slang we used back then, but it was just it was mediocre. People were not super impressed. People didn't really know what to make of it. We left the demo all just kind of talking to each other and be like why did we have to waste our time on this? And that company was Epic Games and the video game was Fortnite. 2015 E3 judges week we all played Fortnite for 2 hours having no idea what would it what it would eventually turn into. That game of course was

released 2 years later and also had kind of like a mediocre reception until they Epic Games wound up creating a Battle Royale mode based on PUBG and added that to the game and then suddenly it became phenomenon. So man, that was that was a strange time playing Fortnite before anyone had any idea what it would turn into. This was of course the I believe it's called Save the World mode later where it was kind of like Minecraft meets Left 4 Dead and it was just a very strange experience. Another memory by the way, this is not really a story, but just kind of a weird memory. Some people might remember that E3 used to have what were called booth babes, um, which were these conventionally attractive women, um, often times in skimpy clothing, dressed up, who would just be there to kind of appeal to, um, uh, the crowd, I suppose, and bring people into the the the booths and the showcases and whatnot. Um, one year I remember, uh, at Nintendo's booth, they had demos

for 3DS games, but for whatever reason they decided that the 3DSs themselves had to be attached and uh, on the necks of, um, women models that they had hired to work the, um, E3 booth. So, in order to demo, like, the new Kirby game or the new Paper Mario, you had to play it holding a 3DS that was attached to a woman who just had to kind of stand there awkwardly watching as you played a 3DS game about 5 ft away from her. Um, just another another bizarre experience of attending E3. Um, one more story and then I'll read a fun email that I found or at least paraphrase a fun email that I found. Um, this story is from E3 2019. So, this was the last E3. Um, also a Nintendo story cuz Nintendo was just the most fun company to cover at these things. Uh, they would always bring all their Japanese developers out and you get to talk to them. It was pretty much the only time you got to talk to a lot of these developers like

Miyamoto and Aonuma and Sakurai and other people who are just legendary developers. So, it was always a lot of fun to do the Nintendo thing at E3, which reminds me that like in that previous, uh, video that I did, The Real Reason That That E3 Died, I talked about how there's this kind of misconception that Nintendo going to Nintendo Directs is what killed E3 when really Nintendo was a massive presence at E3 and one of the key reasons for a lot of people to go. Anyway, so, it's E3 2019. One of the things Nintendo used to do is they would actually gather some trusted press people and allow them to watch early versions of the Nintendo Direct. So, they would have you come in, you'd agree to the embargo, and you could prepare your coverage. So, you could watch the Nintendo Direct, take notes, and then prepare so you can write articles in advance, and it would just make things easier for you. You could get everything right. You could make sure you had everything good to go, and you didn't have to just like move quickly and potentially make mistakes. So, if they had a Direct where they announced, I don't know, Metroid Prime 4 or like a new Mario game or something,

you could have a story ready to go, and it just made things way easier. It was a big boon. It was We We appreciated it very much when they did that. Um And so, they did that at E3 2019. They gathered a bunch of press people in this little theater at the LA Convention Center. We all sat there. We watched the the Direct. It was great. And um then we went back and got to uh to to write it up and stuff. Um and so, the way things worked at Kotaku at the time is we would have this this process for um doing the news of the show. Because at Kotaku, we were a pretty high-volume gaming blog. We wanted to cover as much news as possible, especially the interesting stuff. And the way the way it worked is I would kind of I was the news editor, so I would oversee um the shift of people. And I would be like, "Okay, this is coming up. You, writer, take this. Okay, you take this. You take that. You take this." And I would tell people what to do and how to cover it, and I would just kind of like oversee the whole process. Um and so, in the case of the Nintendo

Direct where I had actually watched it, I could just prepare people in advance and be like, "Okay, this is what's coming. This is what's coming. All right, we're going to do this. We're going to do that." Um so, uh we got through the end of this Nintendo Direct, and it was coming to an end, and I was like, "All right, that's it." Um I closed my laptop, got ready to head to the show floor cuz uh the E3 actual convention was about to open, and I had to go there and take appointments and whatnot. Um closed my laptop. Suddenly, uh I think I was sitting with Kirk Hamilton, my colleague at the time, now my co-host at Tripleclick. He was like, "Hey, there's something else." I was like, "What do you mean there's something else?" He's like, "People in Slack are saying there's something else." And I opened up my laptop to catch the very end of them teasing a sequel to Breath of the Wild, which at the time they just called the the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which they had not put in the version of the Nintendo Direct that I they they showed us early.

That they had just kept as a surprise for everybody on the actual live stream that they put online, which completely threw us off. We had to scramble to get up a story cuz I was telling people, "Oh, it's over. We're done. We're like, we're done. You don't have to worry about it anymore." I was freaking out. It threw a wrench into all of our plans that morning. Almost wish that we hadn't gotten to see it in advance because then I would have been just kind of expecting new stuff all the time. Not would have not I wouldn't have known when it was supposed to end. But in instead, I thought it was going to end and turned out tuned out early, missed that, and it was just a bit of a mess. But hey, we got Tears of the Kingdom out of it, so that's pretty cool. One more thing I'll share, one more fun fun story, which I found in my inbox. I was doing a little bit of digging and and found this that I I'm going to read this this email. This is from several years ago. Hi Jason, we'd like to offer you and Kotaku the exclusive on some awesome E3 news from Arby's, a brand known for its

gamer focused social media channels. Each day of the expo, Arby's will be building and hiding two to three cardboard creations based on some of the games that will be announced at E3 around the convention area for attendees to find. Arby's official Twitter account will then tweet out a cryptic photo of each creation that will include visual clues and suggestive copy about where in the convention area fans might be able to find the artwork. The coolest part? Lucky fans who find an Arby's creation will not only get to keep the art, but they will also find a slip attached that contains Arby's gift cards and a handwritten note that reveals the real surprise. This creation is actually a golden ticket that will grant the lucky fan a unique experience inside of E3 such as jump the line for demos, closed door videos, a swag bag, yada yada yada. We'd like to announce the Arby's E3 art drop campaign on Friday, June 9th.

Please let me know if you're interested interested in the exclusive. Um I was not interested in the exclusive. We turned that one down, but that is the type of thing that happened at E3, especially when they opened it up to the public and and things got pretty ridiculous. Um man, that that that doesn't happen at Summer Game Fest. No Arby's Arby's golden ticket promotions at Summer Game Fest, but maybe that's for the best. It's like kind of it's for the best and for the worst. I do, as I said before, I miss the spectacle of E3 and Arby's is one of those things that comes with it. Anyway, hope you enjoyed a little bit of reminiscing. Hopefully this breaks up a little bit of the horrible news that has come and is coming. Um but yeah, man, who among us does not miss E3 for one reason or another. I certainly do. All right, I'll see you all next time.