E3

» see e3expo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

e3 happened in june in los angeles and reached me as text. by the time the coverage arrived here the announcements were already a week old and somebody else had decided what mattered about them. watching a press conference while it was actually happening was not something i could do until streaming made it ordinary, which was late in this show's life.

it existed because the consumer electronics show treated video games as an annex. the trade press in january 1995 ran the news under the headline that e3 was replacing the summer ces, and the organizers had no idea whether anyone would come. by the end of that first weekend they had booked most of the los angeles convention center and counted more than forty thousand people through the doors.

that first show, 11 to 13 may 1995, is also the one everybody still tells stories about. sega's tom kalinske gave a keynote putting the saturn at three hundred and ninety-nine dollars, with the surprise that it was on sale that day. sony's steve race walked up to the podium afterward, said two ninety-nine, and sat back down. the room understood immediately what had happened.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

for the next decade e3 was the calendar. games were scheduled to be showable in june whether or not june was a sensible date for them, and the press conference stopped being a support act for the show floor and became the reason anyone tuned in. attendance topped out in 2005 at seventy thousand, a number the show never beat.

there was a wobble in 2007, when it shrank into an invitation-only media and business summit at santa monica airport, and the industry hated it enough that the big version came back. the last real growth came from the opposite direction: in 2017 the esa sold fifteen thousand tickets to the public for the first time, and 2018 drew sixty-nine thousand two hundred, the second-biggest year it ever had.

~ the fall ~

in november 2018 sony said it would not attend e3 2019, which was the first time the platform holder with the biggest install base simply declined. electronic arts had already moved to its own event down the road, and nintendo had stopped doing a stage show at all in favor of a recorded video it could publish on any day it liked. once the announcements stopped needing the building, the building was just rent.

august 2019 did not help. an unsecured list on the esa's own site exposed the contact details of more than two thousand attendees, most of them press, and a second look turned up six thousand more from earlier years. several of the journalists on it were harassed afterward. it is a small thing next to the economics, but it is the sort of small thing an organization gets forgiven for only while it is still indispensable.

~ the day it died ~

2020 was cancelled by the pandemic and 2021 ran online, where it drew nobody's attention. 2022 was cancelled outright, and on 30 march 2023 the esa cancelled that year's show too, saying there was not sustained interest. by september the organizing partner had walked away and the convention center was off the books. the washington post ran the last one on 12 december 2023 under a headline calling e3 officially dead, after the esa announced it would be permanently discontinued, citing the new opportunities the industry now had to reach its audience.

e3expo.com still answers today. what it serves is a single html file that somebody saved out of a browser, comment header and all, pointing at a folder of images from the old site. the biggest trade show the games industry ever had ends as a page somebody archived by right-clicking on it.

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