[COLUMN] Reminder: E3 Conferences Used To Be So Much Worse | by Marty Sliva

Like a lot of you, I miss E3. I miss downtown Los Angeles transforming into a video game wonderland for an entire week every June. I miss the emphasis that developers and publishers put into trying to one-up each other and come away with the most talked about game of the show. I miss what felt like a concentrated wave of hype that went into each and every major press conference. It felt like folks would really save their big guns for the big stage, which led to unforgettable moments like the reveals of God of War 2016, or Final Fantasy VII Remake.

But the thing is, we tend to remember the highest of highs from E3 past. What we don’t bring up is how between those amazing moments, we were often left with long stretches of corporate banality, tech demo wankery, and some truly baffling cultural decisions. While what we have now certainly isn’t perfect. I honestly think that when it comes to showcases themselves, what Geoff Keighley has been putting on with Summer Game Fest is a much smoother and more enjoyable experience to watch than a majority of those that came before it.

Case in point – E3 2010, which felt like a series of blunders culminating in one of the most surreal press conferences I’ve ever seen.

Last summer, I began rewatching all of the major E3 press conferences on my personal Twitch channel. I did this because I firmly believe that having a clear understanding of the past helps us make sense of the present, while also preparing us for what may lie ahead in the future. I also share a head injury with my lovely audience that leads us to enjoy replaying old games, watching ‘80s anime, and living through prior E3s one year at a time. Last year we made it through 2008, so this year in the lead up to Summer Game Fest, we picked back up in 2009. But 2010 is the one I want to focus on, because I wasn’t quite prepared for just how many unforced errors occurred between the small smattering of actually good demos and reveals.

In total, I watched six major conferences back-to-back this past Sunday afternoon, most of them on YouTube via the NoClip Game History Archive, which did a phenomenal job of preserving these bits of gaming history in an impressively high fidelity compared to some of the previous years, so shout out to them. Was watching them all in one sitting a mistake? Yes, absolutely. Did we learn a lot about the state of gaming in 2010? Also yes, absolutely.

Things kicked off with Microsoft’s conference, which started off pretty nicely. Within the first 30 minutes, they had small segments on Call of Duty: Black Ops, Metal Gear Solid Rising (its name at the time), Gears of War 3, and Halo: Reach. With an hour left in the show, surely they were poised to take this year’s E3 crown early.

But then they brought out the Kinect, and literally the entire last hour of the conference consisted of them desperately trying to make this thing happen in the monumental shadow of the Wii’s success. Sports games, fitness games, animal games, dancing games. The demos went on and on, some feeling clearly pre-baked and not indicative of the actual play experience, while others were sadly very indicative as the controls often simply stopped working. We got a terrible fake demo of the thing that would become Kinect Star Wars. And any hopes of a savior in form of an exciting “one last thing” were dashed when the final big reveal was just an Xbox 360 redesign, and news that everyone in the audience would be getting one for free.

From Microsoft we pressed on to EA, who kicked things off on a great note when their CEO John Riccitiello described the company by saying, “In many ways we’re more Sundance than the Academy Awards.” Because nothing says “plucky little indie auteurs who are truly in it for the love of the art” quite like EA.

While the demo of Dead Space 2 was an absolute highlight, EA spent a solid 30 minutes showing off Kinect games and various services of their own. Thankfully things got back on track for the final stretch, which included a reveal of The Sims 3 with a bizarrely serious and self-important intro, a neat demo of Crysis 2, and a closer in the form of a CG trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic that played out like a short film. Good stuff.

Next was Ubisoft, which I’m desperately trying to remove from my memory. Not because the games were terrible – I really enjoyed the demos of Child of Eden, Assassins’ Creed Brotherhood, Driver San Francisco, and Rayman Origins. But the conference was hosted by Joel McHale, who’s disdain for everything that was going on around him was palpable. And honestly, when 10 minutes of the showcase was devoted to an AR laser tag game called Battle Tag, complete with people running around the theater and hiding behind audience members as they pantomimed a gunfight, I was kind of there with him. The whole thing also wrapped up with the surprise reveal Michael Jackson: The Experience, which has aged about as gracefully as you might imagine.

This was followed with Nintendo’s conference, which would’ve easily been the best of the day had it not been for the final five minutes. It was great to see plenty of time given to Miyamoto, Reggie, and Iwata – there was a passion and personality to them that was lacking from a lot of the folks on stage at the other showcases.

I felt bad for Miyamoto during his Skyward Sword demo because the motion controls were constantly borking out – something that I’m sure a lot of us experienced first-hand the following year when the game was released. We got reveals and demos of Epic Mickey, Metroid: Other M, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Kirby Epic Yarn. Things began concluding with the reveal of the Nintendo 3DS and Kid Icarus: Uprising. If things had just ended here, it would’ve been an excellent show, but in a baffling move, Nintendo brought out hundreds of models in identical outfits, each with a 3DS tethered to their waist for attendees to be able to go hands-on with while standing uncomfortably close to them. This made me appreciate what we currently have with Nintendo Directs so much more.

After Nintendo came PlayStation, who got bogged down in the same motion-control quagmire as Microsoft, but with the added bonus of several minutes about how 3D TVs were going to revolutionize gaming (spoilers: they did not). On the games front, they brought out a lot of sequels, including Killzone 3, LittleBigPlanet 2, Infamous 2, Gran Turismo 5, and the Twisted Metal reboot. But the big surprise was the appearance of Gabe Newell showing off a quick glimpse of Portal 2, and honestly, seeing Valve on stage at one of these showcases feels like an impossibility in 2025, so this was nice. Not a terrible conference, but not one of their best either.

E3 2010 began rolling to its finish, but not before one last showcase from Konami. And am I glad I saved this one for last, because what unfolded was truly some avant garde art that felt more like a nearly two hour Tim and Eric sketch than a conference ostensibly built around showing off your upcoming video games.

Instead of being held in a theater like the other five showcases, this one was crammed into what felt like a conference room at a Ramada Inn. The lighting was low, the microphones were popping, and the production values were nonexistent. Presenters tried to engage with the audience, but the crowd simply wasn’t having it. Trailers wouldn’t play, several speakers couldn’t be heard, and some lower-third flubs led to my absolute favorite moment of the entire day, when Konami President Shinji Hirano was accidentally labeled as Russell Simmons, Founder of Def Jam. An awkward wrestling promo broke out between several lucha libre, and some video games were shown like Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Silent Hill: Downpour. If you like delving into complete and utter absurdity, I honestly recommend giving this one a whirl.

At the end of my E3 2010 marathon, I walked away with an even greater appreciation for the conferences, showcases, and directs we have in 2025. The increase in preparation and production value, better sense of pacing and flow, willingness to highlight indies, and spotlight given to the actual creatives all help make what we have now dramatically better than what came before, and I’m stoked to see what everyone has in store a few weeks from now at Summer Game Fest in June.