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!
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