This video is sponsored by Skillshare. The first 1000 people who use the link
in my description will receive a one month free trial to Skillshare Premium.
Talking to my friends about E3 2021, the general consensus seems to be that this
all-digital show was a rather tepid affair—coming back after last year’s conference was called off
(which, as much as organisers the ESA would likely tell you otherwise, was anticipated
long before social distancing had become part of our lexicon). Indeed, this supposed grand return
of the long-running centre point of the gaming calendar, as gamers all around the world celebrate
the concentrated beam of advertising being shot directly into their brains, saw the big hitters of
the show (your Microsofts, Ubisofts, etc.) merely checking in to say “we’re trying our best here!”
Back in my game of the year video I said that despite all the delays we saw last year as a
direct result of the current situation, it was unlikely that we’d seen the worst of the effects
on games quite yet, and if this year’s paltry offering of big reveals was anything to go by,
that’s almost certainly going to bear out. Let me put it this way—2022 is looking to be a pretty
stacked year right now, but don’t be surprised if some of that ends up extending, even into 2023.
That said, in amongst the sea of pre-rendered fare that I find pretty impossible to get excited about
given how these movies, essentially, tell us very little about what the actual game is going to be
(and lord knows we’ve all been burned enough by pre-release hype generated
with such cinematics over the years) there were some small tidbits to get excited about.
The long-awaited Elden Ring trailer more or less confirmed my suspicions that we
were basically getting another Souls game with the names shimmied about (ya know,
you’re definitely not the chosen undead this time, you’re tarnished) and there’s perhaps a certain
level of fatigue that’s starting to form around that tried and tested mechanical framework, but…
it’s a Miyazaki Souls game—it’s gonna be really good. Forza Horizon 4 was a total warm blanket
of a racing game that I got completely lost in, and so the news of its sequel was probably the
most visibly excited I became during the entire show. And, while I’m not a Smash guy by any means,
I am certainly someone who cares about the daft Tekken lore for some reason, and so seeing
Kazuya chuck a bunch of long-running Nintendo mascots into a volcano certainly brought a smile
to my face. Oh, and I guess the little snippet we got of Breath of the Wild 2 looked neat.
But the thing is, I’ve long maintained that it’s not just the game reveals that draw us to E3—it’s
the theatre, the spectacle of it all and, at a glance, it would seem that this side
of proceedings was sorely lacking in the hours of pre-recorded talking heads we were subjected
to. And while it’s definitely hard to pick out those standalone cringy, meme-able moments that
can only result from the chaos of live event production when here everything was so curated,
there was a more general vibe this year, a sense that things were off slightly.
Despite feeling pretty tired by the show overall, I couldn’t quite bring myself to turn away
completely—with many decisions on the part of many different companies that left me confused
and ultimately insatiably curious to know more. And at no point in the weekend was this confusion
more pronounced than in the fact that we had a full blown, ESA-sanctioned press conference
held by none other than Intellivision. Hosted by Tommy Tallarico—video game music extraordinaire,
unwitting voice of Roblox and, as of 2018, owner of this brand that was once competing with Atari
before the 80s game industry crash—this ten minute video saw our host attempting to prove this now
niche name was ready to stand on its own two feet, to quote “complement” the current gaming landscape
rather than compete directly. Our nostalgia for days gone by was very much the ammunition for
Tommy’s barrage, attempting to remind us of a time when patches and microtransactions didn’t get in
the way of a tactile, shared, in-person game experience—with their new console, the Amico,
aiming to transport you right back to those fuzzy feelings all over again.
And you might be thinking, looking at this footage, sure these updated versions of old
Intellivision and other titles might look pretty simple by modern standards, but the Amico doesn’t
seem to be operating on modern standards—these games were built on simplicity and so is the
console. Hell, I could see this being the kind of neat little thing you break out at parties and
gatherings and the like (even if such a push seems pretty wild given the current climate). I mean,
at the right price I might consider picking this weird thing up for the novelty alone.
And then you realise that while keeping up with modern gaming sensibilities isn’t
Intellivision’s goal here, they are very much asking modern prices for this thing. £250 quid,
the price of an Xbox series S, to play a new game from the guys who made Ecco the Dolphin?
$350 converted to play a version of… charades?! Half the price of a PS5
for a console where a big selling point, a chunk of this video is dedicated to… online
leaderboards where they’ll e-mail you a certificate to print out for your wall?!
Truly, watching this conference was like swimming through a sea of anachronisms.
And to be clear, I would love nothing more than to see this thing succeed in whatever
way it’s setting out to—it’s just that it felt like at every second I was catching some new,
weird snippet or screenshot that got my puzzle solving mind going, trying to make sense of all
of this. It was strange, and honestly… I was transfixed the whole way through.
It was the same deal with Capcom suddenly deciding to take to the stage, spending a good deal of
time and money to film this presentation of… a bunch of games that had already released;
or Bandai Namco carving out a chunk of E3’s conference time, getting everyone to tune in
to show off one game (and not even the game of theirs people wanted to see more of),
or the utterly baffling decision on Take Two’s part to market their own conference only to
present us with what felt like a Zoom meeting. And I think most of it comes down to the
fact that, the relevance of E3 as a conference where publishers pay the ESA
vast sums of money in order to hawk their wares to the press has long been questioned
in an age where marketing directly to consumers is seemingly a prudent business strategy. And
with 2020 bringing such a shock to the system in how companies could or crucially couldn’t
get in front of people like they were used to, it seems as if a scramble was on for everyone
and their dog to attempt their own version of a Nintendo Direct, seemingly with no eye for
the character or personality that makes those presentations so distinctly their own entity.
The thing is, I also don’t think a lot of these companies were planning on being so front and
centre within the show. These quote-unquote “press conferences” in a normal year would likely have
taken the form of actual, physical booth space at the LA Convention Centre; these sales pitches and
discussions would be presented to press, retail or other publishers and developers behind closed
doors. But because there weren’t any booths to speak of this year, and perhaps in an attempt
to keep on the ESA’s good side for when booths at in-person events do become a thing again,
these weird videos became the show; what thousands and thousands of people excitedly tuned in for,
in hopes of celebrating the announcements of new games, and, well, the medium as a whole.
Because, look, when it comes to E3, I saw as much rejoicing about the show’s demise last
year as I did mourning, and I get that—the ESA has seemingly gone to agonising lengths
to erode trust as well as the very identity of the show in recent years in order to entice as
much of the public as it can, without realising that that identity is what draws people to the
show in the first place. It’s just that, with the current situation going on for as long as it has,
I think there’s a renewed hunger for this kind of event to break up the crushing monotony of
life in 2021. E3 might not be perfect, it might not even be good, but it represents normality,
regularity, a thing you can depend on at the halfway point of the year and that’s the kind of
thing I think people are grasping for right now. It’s already over a week past E3 by the time you
watch this. And with the already dizzying speed of the current news cycle exacerbated
by a distinct lack of much coming out of the show that was newsworthy to actually talk about, 2021’s
event is likely a distant memory to you at this stage. So why then have I taken time out of my
already pretty hectic writing schedule to make an entire video about it? Well, first and foremost,
I’ve made a lot of videos covering the show in the past and I like the idea of these videos
acting as a time capsule of sorts—readily available should people want to look back on
where the industry was at at any given time. Second of all, though, I just think it’s
interesting that after all of this, the show itself being such a damp squib,
what it represented had less to do with the games themselves and more a defiant turn to
the cavalcade of people questioning whether or not such and such particular year will be the dreaded
“final E3” (as they have done for years at this point, myself included), pointing to the sizeable
audience hoping that next year’s conference will be the one that brings it all back, and says “this
means that at least there will be a next year for this show,” proving that, even when E3 actually
dies like it did in 2020… it can never truly die. But while you might think E3 as a show is getting
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to checking it out for yourself, and you’ll really be helping out the channel in the process. Thank
you to Skillshare for sponsoring the video, and I hope you all enjoyed this piece on E3 2021!
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