Now there’s a nifty headline, eh?

That’s a very old E3 image. Apparently the revolution was supposed to begin September of 2005. Oh well.

A few things on my mind today that I wanted to share before I hopped on a plane to L.A. to see mostly trailers that you guys will see within minutes after we do. We’ll talk about how we saw “Cool Game X” but in reality, we likely saw a trailer. Yeah technology! You know there used to be a time when you really needed the press to be on-hand at E3. Gamers would wait anxiously for updates from websites (or ..gasp..even a print mag!) to find out what was new, what looked good, etc. Most games were hands-on. I played the original Age of Empires for 45 minutes at E3 in 1996 or 1997 (I forget which year). But the Ensemble rep gave me a five minute speech on what they were trying to do with the game, he asked if I wanted to play and I said, “Oh hell yeah”, and I played.

And I LOVED IT. It represented everything that was awesome about going to E3. I played games. ALL DAY.

There are still plenty of games at E3 that remain hands-on. I play EA Sports games every year. Madden, NHL, NCAA, etc. As my desire to play the yearly sports game dance has waned, so has my joy in grabbing a gamepad and playing Ohio State vs. Michigan for an hour at the show. And for the first time in YEARS I can’t tell the EA Sports dev that Michigan is laughably overrated. (And they were. Every year.)

But most of my appointments will be like this:
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