11:45 p.m. - 2004-05-17
E3 04 Chapter 1: demo shirt of +1 importance
I am back, and I am still in one piece.
[The way Jason drives, I was worried for a while that we wouldn't make it. Small penis much?]
E3 was certainly far more than 2 days worth of experience packed into one teeny 50-hour excursion. By the end of Friday, I was so overstimulated that I had lost my ability to focus. People would try to hold conversations with me and my sensory systems would drift, looking for the next 80-foot flashing video screen.
The Journey
The worst part of the experience was hands down the lodging/driving experience. I guess we convinced ourselves [we being Hunt, Ray and I] that we couldn't get a hotel room back in March, so we needed to shack up with someone who did have one. That ended up being Jason from SimSequel and two of his friends that we had never met.
Jason was supposed to rent a van and pick everyone up, but he messed up the van reservations and the one he got wasn't big enough, so everything was delayed for 2 hours. When they finally got to us [the last stop], we wasted another 30 minutes looking for parking downtown because Jason and his friends didn't want to eat fast food. [We ended up eating Taco Bell anyway.]
The 6-hour drive was a bit painful, mostly because Jason's friend Jason2 [sigh] was obnoxiously loud and opinionated and droned on through most of the ride. Ugh. By the time we arrived at the hotel at nearly 1AM we were exhausted and cranky. But since we were fitting 7 people in the room, Jason felt we had to be covert and not let on that we were so overcrowded. Hunt, Ray and I therefore spent another 20 minutes in the overheating van, babbling incoherently.
The room wasn't as small as I had feared, but it was still quite a stretch to fit all of us and our luggage. The first night we actually had 7 people, since our friend from grad school Richard was also crashing with us. Jason2 insisted upon dragging out all of his alcohol and pointing out how very good it was to overcompensate, most likely for the fact that he is a waiter at Chili's trying to get an actual gaming job. [Same thing with Jason's other friend Janine. They both finagled E3 passes via sketchy means.] Jason2 kept trying to get the whole room to do shots of Patron with him, and I agreed to half a shot to shut him the hell up. After that, I mostly ignored everyone else for a while as I studied my demo scripts. Ray, Hunter, Richard and I then talked ourselves to sleep.
At 6AM Thursday I jumped out of bed for the first shower. [I'm not a morning person, but I'm more of a morning person than most other people in this industry.] I wanted to be there by 8 because I heard that the EXPRESS registration lines on Wednesday were streaming out of the convention center for TWO BLOCKS.
After a cab ride through an amazingly less-than-scenic part of LA, we arrived at the convention center, which was dripping in larger-than-life advertising, with the piece de resistance being the real Army helicopter and troops stationed right outside the front doors to the South Hall. We checked in quickly and grabbed an amazingly overpriced breakfast ($11 for a waffle, fruit, and a 4oz OJ) before making a beeline for the West Hall and the lines for entry.
The Nintendo Booth
Once the doors were open, we bolted to the Nintendo booth� to be greeted with an already-towering line for the "DS Theatre". Fricking exhibitors sneaking into line early. Cheaters. Within 5 minutes we had encountered the first of many "old" friends � Matt, an alumnus of our grad school program and a game designer for some Microsoft affiliated studio. The whole conference was both overwhelmingly large and seemingly a very small world like that.
Not to be deterred from my Pikachus and Nintendo hardware, we stood firm in line for about 40 minutes before making it all the way to the main event. We walked through a hallway adorned with various TV screens with Wario on them, who was yelling at us in a way only a real character could. Inside the theatre, a life-sized Mario on a large projection screen was having an animated [and obviously improved] conversation with the small audience. Once everyone had filed in, the curtain was pulled back to reveal the voice actor behind Mario, Wario, Luigi, Toad, etc. � he was puppeteer and was also there as the official presenter. It was quite a kick to hear all of those voices come out of one guy.
I'll spare you a hardware analysis � that much is in my LiveJournal where I rant about the gaming industry or work or the like. Trying to keep the two separate. But I played several hands-on demos, including The Pikachu Demo which was totally cute if a little too brief. [The "vip" tour came with a longer demo... *sob*] After playing with Pika, he brings you a scratchcard, and you reveal a picture of a stuffed Pokemon toy � and then you win that toy! It was thus that I acquired my first and best schwag, the Pikachu Twins. So cute.
Revenge of the Geeky Fan Girl
After the DS, I got a call from VA, who I needed to meet in order to pick up my Official SimParentCompany Corporate Demo Shirts. We all proceeded to the SimParentCompany booth, which was *right* smack dab in front of the doorway to the South Hall where you couldn't miss it. SimSequel had this massive mural where every conferencegoer would see it. My game, UrbanSimGame, was behind the mural. There was also a space for the sports game demos, and a movie-screen sized digital screen playing attract videos at deafening volumes. It was impressive.In the midst of the chaos, I found VA, and she took me upstairs to the SimParentCompany press suites on the secret second floor of the booth.
We ducked into the SimSequel press room, where it turns out Will W*right and our Marketing VP (um, "Bluejay"?) were just calmly lounging about. Will turned to us and cheerfully said "Hi VA! Hi Athena!"
[Internally, at this point, I have reverted to middle school, and the thought process reads like this: OMG Will W*right knows my name!! Well, duh, he's my Orkut friend! But still, he remembered and everything! And used it! OMG!]
As VA turned to go look for my shirts, she asked Will if he had played our GBA game, and he said that he hadn't had the chance yet. That was when VA suggested I play our multiplayer mode with Will. This is how I ended up playing an Excitebike clone against Will W*right at E3 and beating him a couple of times. (OMG! Teh awesome!) [I had more practice than him so it wasn't entirely fair.]
After the multiplayer game, I walked Will through a bit of the game, and then he got excited and asked me if I had seen this other handheld device, and it was really cool, and he started giving me a demo of the Zodiac he's been using as a gaming handheld. Pretty cool, actually, since I had never seen one hands on before.
Anyhow, eventually my shirts turned up and Will had to go give another interview soon and VA had to demo, so we ducked out and left Will and Bluejay in peace. Hunt seemed to be a little miffed I had taken so long, and my explanation of "But I was playing games with Will!" certainly didn't help things. But we moved on and went back to wandering around.
The Rest of Thursday
After that excitement, we just wandered the floor, running into a few other friends at the Square booth and the Konami booth. We grabbed lunch at some Italian diner a few blocks away. Our friend Ken gave us a demo of what he was working on, I found and caught up with Jeremy, one of our contractors from England, and then I went [nervously] to go do my time on the demo floor.
Putting on the demo shirt and walking onto the floor really felt surreal. People really look at you differently! Suddenly, I have gone from random attendee to Person who Might Be Able To Get Our Game Published. [ha! Yeah, right.] When I showed up on the floor, VA handed me the Tool Belt of GBA Demos � since we had to carry around 4 Game Boys, she bought a utility belt from Lowe's and packed it full of the units and the connector cables. This looked a little odd, and I think perplexed a few attendees who no doubt thought I was dealing drugs [our game title is unfortunately a homophone for a particular sort of recreational drug.] But VA wanted me to randomly walk up to people and demo � and that I did. [It's basically like a college Activities Fair, but you're offering games instead of lots of spam.]
Next Chapter: "Not So Standard" � How many drinks does it take to knock out an entire studio?
