E3 2001 Report Day 1 - PAGE 1

Day 1

So there I was, with Allan (who was along for the ride and acting as my photographer) at E3. Supposedly, this is where the best, the “l33t” folks of the gaming community go to hang out every year in order to show off their new products or to take a closer look at said products. Although the conference portion of E3 had started a day earlier, the exhibits opened that day on May 17. Being an E3 virgin, I didn’t really know what to expect other than the fact that there would be new games, assorted gaming paraphernalia, and booth babes on display. There is one thing that I have to say at this point, and that is no matter how much you’ve read about E3 in the past, or how many pictures you’ve seen, nothing prepares you for the sheer size of the event. Perhaps it was because I was a Canadian in America, where everything seems to be bigger (from freeways to waistlines) but as soon as I saw the size of the venue I was quite surprised. Picking up our media badges (after a bit of a delay thanks to me not knowing where the media registration booth was ^_^;;), Allan and I decided to visit South Hall first. Immediately we were assaulted from all directions by the sights and sounds of the gaming industry as the various companies tried their damnest to outdo each other in attracting your attention.

This year, Vivendi Universal Games (formerly Havas Interactive) and Electronic Arts stationed themselves at the entrance to South Hall and thus were in prime positions to snag conference-goers. EA appeared to be heavily pimping their upcoming FPS Medal of Honour: Allied Assault and had a large composite display that continually ran clips of an Allied beach landing that looked like it could have come straight out of Saving Private Ryan (is it my imagination or did military FPSs suddenly become a lot more popular after that movie came out?). In another nice touch, they also had a mini-theatre with an entrance that looked like the front of an amphibious landing craft complete with loading ramp and a middle aged GI ushering people into it. I guess this part of the exhibit was probably showing off some more gameplay footage from MoH:AA, but unfortunately I didn’t get to see anything as the lineup for this wound all the way around the EA area and I didn’t feel like lining up for what looked like a couple of hours when I had just got into E3 ^_^;;. Blizzard Entertainment is part of Vivendi and unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years you’d know that their games are amongst the most widely played in the world. Naturally then, Blizzard’s products were out in the forefront of Vivendi’s display and not surprisingly WarCraft III was getting a lot of attention. A large screen showed several FMV clips from both WCIII and the Diablo II expansion pack. Needless to say, I was suitably impressed by the quality of the CG in the sequences and judging by the large amount of people busily recording all of it on their camcorders, it would be a safe bet to say that many others were too. Taking a quick look at the actual WCIII game however, I could see that the interface appeared to be very similar to StarCraft, and that the 3D terrain, buildings, and units were all coming along quite nicely. Especially neat were some of the combat and spell effects that were available in the demo.

Because I was to meet my friend Tyler (“Uberjumper” from RelicNews.com) in the Microsoft games area, we made our way towards our designated rendezvous point. Moving along, we encountered Konami’s area of E3, where yet another large screen was displaying clips from their upcoming Silent Hill II and Halo being the centerpiece (not surprisingly). A large crowd had gathered around the consoles displaying it and appeared to be held in thrall by the apparently excellent graphics and gameplay it seemed to offer.

After watching this for a while we went on to find Tyler hanging out in the Relic Entertainment area of Microsoft’s exhibit where Sigma: The Adventures of Rex Chance was being shown for the first time to the gaming public in general. Alex Garden, CEO of Relic, could be seen mingling about in the crowd having fun and appeared to be quite pleased with the way Sigma turned out. At the moment, the E3 build of Sigma looks pretty good and enough of it is playable for people to get an idea of what it will be like when finished. However, it still needs a bit of polishing up as some interface and a couple of balance issues have to be resolved (the flight capable units in the game are much too powerful). Here, we also met “Crash,” a member of the Relic forums and who was doing some media work at E3 as well.