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E3 2008 came and went pretty quickly this year for me. I had no activities scheduled for the show, so there wasn’t much of a reason to hang around the improved, “it’s new to you” LACC-centered E3 for me. One of the only work-related commitments was attending the Sony press conference at the Shrine Auditorium (video of the full press conference here). This was my first E3 press conference ever — I was not able to attend the Microsoft ones back when I was working on their products — so it definitely had an air of excitement and anticipation for me. Color me impressed at the degree of production that was involved.

After the press conference I headed back to the LACC to do a spot of work and run into former colleagues, journalists and friends for a couple hours. At the appointed time, I made my way over to King Taco on West Pico Boulevard to the PlayStation.blog reader meet-up. It was nice to see Jeff again — the last time was at the Sierra Spring Event back when I was working at Vivendi Games — and I brought some fancy Naughty Dog items in tow with me: a signed copy of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a “>signed promotional poster for the game and a few of our new t-shirts. It was awesome to see all the folks that turned out, including regular gamers, some community press (including PS3 Fanboy’s Andrew Yoon and Platform Nation’s Steven Artlip and even a couple people from Wal-Mart’s Check Out blog, among others) and even a few people from other developers and publishers. Alas, I didn’t bring my PSP to participate in the Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 tournament.

I will echo the thanks that Jeff gave on the PlayStation.blog and thank everyone that made it out. It was great the see the turnout and kind words about the studio I now work for and it’s catalog of work.

After that, it was off to dinner and then meeting up with Howard from PopCultureShock and some other buddies for the Activision press conference. Looks like the soon to be Activision Blizzard has a nice line-up as well, based on what they showed. Afterwards, I spent some time socializing with some people I hadn’t run into earlier at the Convention Center and got a good-natured pop quiz from Forbes.com Scott Morris about how it feels like to go from publisher to developer, among a few other items, probably much to the amusement of his co-worker Mary Jane Irwin. I had to quickly make my escape (just kidding) and despite wanting to go to bed, went to the Bethesda party at the Saddle Ranch Chop House on Sunset. I’m kind of glad I did, as it seemed everybody and anybody I would want to see (since I wasn’t at E3 proper this week) was there. Fun times.

Although that was technically my only day at E3, the activities outside of it continue a little bit. I had dinner last night with Flynn and David from GayGamer.net (always a pleasure) and Honey from EA POGO at a nice little Japanese place in Little Tokyo — my first time there since coming to Los Angeles.

Tonight, I’ll be at the Joystiq reader meet-up at Mahalo in Santa Monica (with some more stuff from Naughty Dog). Feel free to drop by if you can!

Just came back from Microsoft’s Gears of War 2 event in downtown Los Angeles. Apart from seeing and playing the game, some of us were able to walk out with a pretty slick art book that promises to give you an inside look at the game. I took a couple quick snaps as soon as I got home…

Call me crazy, but on Thursday, July 12, I trekked down to Santa Monica solely to attend the C3@E3 event that Microsoft was hosting for bloggers, community sites and community members. There were some people I had worked with in various ways over the past two years that were planning on attending the event and I knew I wouldn’t have another chance to see them anytime soon. This was underscored by the point that I would not be attending E3 this year either, so it just turned out to be a mandatory thing for me to do. Despite first thing in the morning flights and an overall lack of sleep on either end of the trip, it was more than well worth it. I was happy to run into everybody I have ever interacted with and all the Microsoft folks too. Somehow everybody managed to look conscious through the night.

It was very important for me to meet Shigeo Tatsumi, who was attending E3 and was at the community event. I have talked to Tatsumi-san on several occasions over the past two years, which is partly what led to our intermingling of foreign piñatas in our respective Viva Piñata gardens. Obviously this was the opportunity I would have to talk to him, but not really talk to him because I don’t speak Japanese and he doesn’t really speak English. Thanks to our great translator Jennifer we were able to speak briefly and I’d seriously like to learn Japanese so I could have a bit more of a conversation than we ended up having. I definitely look forward to talking to and meeting Tatsumi-san again in the future. Be sure to check out a video recap of the “C3@E3″ event as captured by Tatsumi-san and his videographer for their Xbox Japan community site.

After meeting with Tatsumi-san is where the whirlwind of meeting people and talking about anything and everything started. Another guy from Japan I was looking forward to meeting was CheapyD from CheapAssGamer. I laughed at his retelling of funny behind the scenes tidbits when he was doing on-air interviews with the BBC and Bloomberg. However, he hadn’t imported a bottle of Pepsi Ice Cucumber for me, so he unfortunately loses quite a few points right there. Spencer from Siliconera (and from Greenwich, where I grew up, go figure), Ben from Opposable Thumbs and I went over our thoughts about the press conferences earlier in the week. Let’s see, my memory is a bit fuzzy a week later, but I also said hello to Chris (the other Chris) from ShackNews, Charles from GamingNexus, Howard from Popcultureshock and Ron from Destructoid. I also ran into Flynn (Fruit Brute) and David (Tiny Dancer) from GayGamer.net, which recently celebrated the site’s first anniversary — you can read the recap of their first ever E3 here. I also ran into Cameron, who is a game designer at Krome and is working on the recently announced Viva Piñata Party Animals, which I was not able to check out due to a lack of ESA pass. James, community manager at Insomniac Games — speaking of whom you check out Major Nelson’s podcast for a great head-to-head between these two. Robert, community manager at Infinity Ward, was demoing the super hot Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but I didn’t get a chance to even check that out. The night wound down and most folks headed over to the Gamecock party down the street while I joined Flynn and David for one more stop before essentially not sleeping the remainder of the night before my flight.

I know I missed about a million people, so apologies for anybody I may have missed, but it was an amazing trip that was well worth it. I hope to see all of these folks and more at the next E3, wherever they decide to hold it.

Images courtesy of the “E3 - C3@E3 Community Party” Flickr photoset by Gamerscore blog.

Last week was THE week. As in the week where all of the work I do more or less culminates in a one week-long event I wrote about last month which includes the actual show days of E3. Here is what happened. Finally.

Pre-show
The first two days of the week before E3 started revolved around press briefings/conferences, both Microsoft’s and those of their direct competitors. Monday was Sony’s press conference and, well, it was surprising. Otherwise, we were all just getting ready for our own press briefing over at Grauman’s Chinese Theater followed by a reception at the nearby Roosevelt Hotel to take place the next day. I also picked up my E3 Exhibitor badge on Monday. On Tuesday we were all at our places in a dome just next to Grauman’s Chinese Theater waiting for the onslaught of journalists to come check-in once the Nintendo briefing (video podcast) let out. Stephen (right) and Anthony (left) from Xbox Addict, Michael from Next Level Gaming (in white) and Cornelis from Xbox Users Group (in blue) were all already waiting in line. I was in charge of making sure the people I work with could get into the briefing, in the event that they weren’t on the master list or didn’t have their passes to get in. Although hundreds of people showed up, everybody did their best to get everyone inside as quickly as possible. And just like that, all of sudden nearly everybody had disappeared, because Microsoft’s E3 press briefing (video: high) was starting. The highlights (video: high | low) of the press briefing are also on Xbox.com. While everyone was waiting for the briefing to be over, we went to get ready for the reception at the Roosevelt Hotel across the street.

At the Roosevelt, the pool and the front lobby or reception area was converted for the reception and there were Xbox 360 consoles and LCD flat panels everywhere running just about every game coming out there is. From a whole bank of consoles showing upcoming Xbox Live Arcade titles like Contra, Galaga, Pac-Man and Lumines Live, to a mini-theater to watch Gears of War being demoed to small rooms around the pool where journalists could demo Too Human, Mass Effect, Blue Dragon, Viva Pinata and more. I didn’t quite expect what that was going to turn into once over a thousand people from the press briefing came in and filled the place — it was so empty and peaceful for an hour. It was quiet enough that I saw Tomonobu Itagaki come up to the entrance to the event with some of his staff and milled around for a while at our extremely imposing sign that said the pool was closed for a private event. Then just about an hour and a half after the briefing started, the floodgates opened and the hotel was packed in an instant. Although I had to run back and forth to Grauman’s Chinese Theater to help some of my contacts get into the Roosevelt, I managed to meet a couple more of the people I work with quite a bit but have never had the pleasure of meeting: Jonas from DailyGame.net and Howard from PopCultureShock. I also ran into Amadeo from Amped IGO right at the tail end of the reception. After that, it was time to to some normal work, head out to dinner with our team and then get to bed early for the mayhem that the three days of E3 were supposed to be.

E3 show days
When you work the show, your days start early — mine were 8 AM or 8:30 AM early. The show floor opens at 9 AM and therefore you can expect people to show up at the booth right around then. So you had to be there and be ready for the onslaught by then. At least on the first day, at 9 AM, the floor opened only to a select group of media that had early access instead of everyone with a badge, but that didn’t stop it from starting the week in the most hectic fashion as those of us handling the appointments and escorting media to their appointments had rushes of people to help every hour and half-hour every day of the show. In between those times, we were helping anybody who was running late, answering questions from anyone who walked up and networking with colleagues and journalists whom you’ve worked with. Every single day rushed by faster than I could have thought and every single hour was spent on my feet although by the end of the day and the show, my feet were nowhere near as bad as I thought it would have been.

What really impressed me about the show, not having been to a “real” trade show in my life, is the sheer enormity and production behind each company’s booth. Activision had a full half-pipe built in their booth space. The Microsoft booth (video: high | low) was huge and the meeting rooms were a full two floors. I can’t imagine that they could build that whole thing, so solidly and look and work so well, in the relatively short timespan that they did.

On Wednesday night, we held our C3@E3 party (video: high | low) where we invited a reasonably large number of bloggers, community, Xbox MVPs and some journalists. Over 400 people showed up around 7 PM that night waiting to get let into the show floor after hours. We had arranged to get the people who came to our party to get onto the floor and over to our booth when the South Hall was pretty much devoid of people. We were finally all set at 7:30 PM, after everybody had calmly waited for the booth to be ready and in one huge group, the security guys and I led them in. Peter Moore kicked things off and then, for just about everybody, it was down to socializing and playing games. I had a good long conversation with BuddyC, Vark, some of Vark’s programmer buddies at Bethesda and TekunoRobby for a good part of the party. Again I didn’t even get to see much of the games being played, but the conversations we were having were worth it. I also met Chris, who works at Wideload with a bunch of ex-Bungie guys in Chicago and who worked on the Stubbs the Zombie game. Nicole Hamlett and her staff were pretty easy to pick out with their yellow TenTonHammer jerseys, so mark yet another person I work with that I finally met. The event was over far too quick and I still didn’t get too see too many of the games in our booth in action but it was really great to hear everybody walk out and talk about how much they enjoyed our event. It was nice.

For the entire show, I never got the opportunity to visit the Community/Blogger Bus that was parked outside of the West Hall for all three days. Even the Washington Post wrote about the bus and bloggers at E³. Next time I’ll have to make sure to drop by so I don’t find myself writing about E³ over a week later still. I would have a had a better chance to really meet the writers from Joystiq and Kotaku rather than the minor contact I had when they showed up for their appointments.

During the week, I was also staffing a room where press were invited to see both Blue Dragon and Ninety-Nine Nights. This was the first I saw of Blue Dragon beyond the trailer that has been presented several times. I got to see the opening scene and sequence and a couple of in-game scenarios. I’m looking forward to see how this shapes up by the time it gets released, but it’s definitely very ambitious which is always a good sign. In the afternoon was Ninety-Nine Nights and I was treated to the fact that Tetsuya Mizuguchi was helping with the presentation of his title, Ninety-Nine Nights for the three sessions I staffed. Although I had met Mizuguchi-san before, it was really interesting to hear him talk about his new title, he was really into the story. On top of that, the Phantagram developer that was there demonstrating the game even said he is not as good as Mizuguchi-san!

By the end of the show, I was tired, sweaty and my feet did hurt. I got a quick chance to walk around the South and West Halls and see some of the games out from the various developers and publishers. E³ turned out to be not as bad and deafening as everyone I had talked to made it out to be. It was still hard work, it was still hectic, but I didn’t spend time wishing for it to end. By the time it did end, I was ready to crash.

Links to videos and photos courtesy of Nintendo, Microsoft, Xbox.com, TeamXbox, Gamespot, GamersReports, Derek Bauer Photography and the Gamerscore blog.

Something pretty cool happened as part of the work I do with Microsoft on Xbox 360 (and of course, Microsoft Games Studios). One of the pieces of what I do, but really run by someone else at my job, involves maintaining relationships with bloggers large and not so large. As my introduction on Xbox.com and in posts on some of the message boards I work on, I get to know a lot of regular gamers and, especially in the case of NeoGAF, a few developers and journalists. Obviously we invite them to things like the San Francisco event we had in March and we’re doing a few things at E3 this year as well. One of the things we recognized at these events is that it has always been logistically difficult to provide Internet access to everyone that needs it to complete some sort of online communication, from journalists to bloggers to people on the message boards. This was especially true back in October 2005 when I attended an event in New York where all sorts of journalists came to preview the launch window game titles for the first time and, at night, we had PMS Clan members and message board members coming by to play and hang out. It would have been nice to give all of them some ability to go online.

Going into our planning for E3, we recognized the need for these very same contacts and friends of ours to have ready access to the Internet. As John Porcaro over on the Microsoft side of things explains on the Gamerscore Blog, determining and getting approval on where we could put aside some physical space to let people hook up to the Internet. We couldn’t put it anywhere in or near the Microsoft booth, there just wasn’t room left, nor did we want to take some place that was out of the way — even if it was available. After much talking amongst ourselves and with the E3 staff, we got ourselves a nice big parking spot right out front of the Los Angeles Convention Center (Windows Live Local version and Google Maps version). Not only that, but the bus is this huge coach which will be conveniently wrapped in Xbox 360 branding. Of course, if you’ve been playing attention to the maps linked earlier, the bus just happens to be right in the route many people will take to head to the West Hall when going to check out Sony’s and Nintendo’s respective booths. Hopefully the bus will serve to distract them a just little.

My schedule has not been finalized yet, but I will be spending some time in and near the bus over the full three days of E3. Ask for me if you happen to drop by, I would be more than happy to meet you.

More details on who will be there, who is invited and how to find out if you can get invited to the bus at the aforementioned Gamerscore Blog.

I am now officially registered, booked and reserved for my first E³ ever, to start in just under a month. I will arrive in LA early on Monday morning, probably too early considering what the rest of the week is going to entail. I don’t know yet what I’m doing on Monday, I’m sure it involves set-up, planning and rehearsal. As many people know, Sony’s press briefing has been scheduled for Monday afternoon. I’m sure many of us will expectantly wait to see what announcements should must be made: price, further timing on the worldwide launch, HDD-inclusion, controller design, online features, etc. It is definitely going to be one heck of an evening afterwards.

Tuesday morning is Nintendo’s briefing, to be held at the famed Kodak Theater, where we can expect a lot more news about the Virtual Console, their big franchises and whatever creatively disruptive things they have cooking up Iwata-san and Miyamoto-san’s sleeves. As soon as the Nintendo briefing is over, most everyone will be headed over to Grauman’s Chinese Theater, which is just a stone’s throw away, for the Microsoft briefing. It took me a while to realize that this was THE Chinese Theater we see and hear about when some movies premiere in Los Angeles. Wow. I’m really not as free to speculate about what the Microsoft announcements will be (since I already pretty much know them) as I can about Sony and Nintendo, but I’m sure it will be all that everyone seems to expect and more.

Wednesday the show starts and so will the absolutely chaotic mayhem, judging from some show floor pictures of E³ 2005 and being told that the floor is pretty much constantly like that throughout the show. Commit me if you have to, but I think this is going to be a great time for a guy like me. I don’t remember what my schedule and responsibilities are for each day, obviously I will be busier than I will probably ever be in my life. There will be a couple of “parties” that I will attend (or at least try to) from the looks of it. I say “parties” because they aren’t really the type of party where you just go to have fun and let off steam. In one way or another they will be related to networking, getting to know other folks in various parts of the industry, getting to meet people I talk to often face to face and generally networking. I mean, it will be fun, but again, not entirely super party time.

I also hope that I can find enough time to walk the floor and adequately check everything out. Partly out of curiosity of course, but I’m really interested in being able to see what’s coming down the pipe for publishers across all platforms, including PC. It will be like being a kid in a candy store. Depending on the level of announcements, it will be interesting to see how far Sony and Nintendo are coming along on their first party titles — in the case of the latter company, there hasn’t been much being said or shown. I can’t even begin to think about what from multi-platform and 360 exclusive publishers I want to see. A lot of it is stuff Microsoft Game Studios is publishing anyway — the Japanese titles. The one thing I do know for certain, is that whatever I see, I know I’ll see enough that it’s going to mortally injure my pocketbook this year. And I can’t wait!

E³ 2005 show photos courtesy of the E3Expo.com Media Archive.