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- Day 1: Sony 2013
- Day 2: Nintendo 2008
- Day 3: Ubisoft 2010
- Day 4: EA 2011
- Day 5: Sony 2006
- Day 6: Nintendo 2004
- Day 7: Microsoft 2010
- Day 8: Ubisoft 2012
- Day 9 & Day 10: EA 2014 & Microsoft 2006
Because I can't count, I thought that starting a 13 day series on a Sunday would result in it ending on Saturday. Of course, that's not how it works, so I skipped a day to get back on track. Anyway, at this point we have looked at a good and bad conference for every major publisher that presents at E3,
yes okay you've guessed day 13 already
In the late 80s and early 90s, you were likely one of two things, a Nintendo guy, or a Sega guy. That was until a new challenger reared it's head in 1994, with Sony launching the PS1 in Japan. Neither the PS1 nor the Sega Saturn were launched in the west by the first E3 in 1995, and we were to believe we would get the dates then. Sony is another story for another time, but Sega's appearance at E3 1995 was infamous. It wasn't so much what they did on stage, it was more to do with what happened immediately after.
Most people assumed the Sega Saturn would be announced to launch in the west in around September. Instead, Sega tried to beat Sony and instead launched the Saturn just after E3, surprising consumers, retailers and developers. Retailers were pissed off because they weren't expecting Sega's announcement and developers had no idea, meaning their games weren't even closed to finished. With this, the Saturn had only a few games, even less targeted to western players. Their situation wasn't helped by what Sony did later that E3, but we'll talk about that tomorrow.
Activision 2007 was probably the most awkward (in a bad way) E3 conference I've ever seen. Jamie Kennedy's seemingly drunk and high hosting rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, especially with his random jokes at the expense of people he was actually hired to entertain. While the content of the show wasn't much to write home about either, the hosting of the show is what most people will remember.
From the random push-ups segment to interrupting the people he was hired to interview, I think it's telling that Activision haven't had a live E3 conference since is telling. As one of the big three publishers alongside Ubisoft and EA, it did seem strange to me for a while why Activision never did their own conferences, especially with the big franchises they own. However, after seeing 2007, I know why. It seems fitting I couldn't find a full version anywhere, just the Jamie Kennedy hell-light reel. (sorry)
It's kind of admirable that Disney tried to get a load of grown game journalists to get up and join them dancing along the High School Musical. I feel that this moment is fairly underrated as infamous E3 moments go, but it probably didn't help that the clip appeared to disappear off the face of the Earth. In another embarrassing 2007 moment, Disney hired a load of cheerleaders to dance in front of some journalists to promote the High School Musical karaoke game.
While E3 is no stranger to music and dance performances (see: Ubisoft), I don't think any other has tried to encourage a bunch of grown people to dance and sing along to a franchise they resent because their 4-year old daughter won't shut the fuck up about it. That may be an exaggeration. Anyway, I think being labelled a shit bit is what this segment thoroughly deserves, even if they tried to erase it from memory.
Even though Nintendo has had a couple of huge stinkers over the years, Nintendo 2010 wasn't one of them, that is until one of the biggest parts of the conference went horribly, horribly wrong. In a rarity for this list, the Skyward Sword demo wasn't really a bad moment to laugh at, and in retrospect it's quite depressing. With a live demo of the game, which in itself is always brave, we saw the game refuse to work properly even with Miyamoto's encouragement.
The reason this shit bit is sad instead of laughable is because the game never worked this badly other than at this one, very vital time. You could almost tell how annoyed Miyamoto was just by looking at the way he was handling to controllers. While in the end Skyward Sword still ended being another fine entry into the series, this moment nearly cost Nintendo dearly, and it was thankful that they eventually got some demonstrations out that worked better.
While Microsoft 2010 featured a hell of a lot of boring Kinect nonsense, 2009 was the year we saw it all begin with Project Natal. While it had it's flashing pretend demos and the like, it was almost all for naught after Kudo decided to demonstrate the Natal by manipulating an avatar. While the absolute failure of the technology was bad enough on it's own, Kudo proclaiming "Well BAM! There it is" absolutely did not help things, and in fact made things considerably worse. Kinect kind of got back on track after 2009, but in the end it was a failed experiment, at least in my opinion. A small moment, but undoubtedly memorable.
It's rare that one thing on it's own kickstarted such a despicable practice, but I'm pretty sure Killzone 2's appearance at Sony 2005 was the beginning of the infamous fake gameplay demos we started seeing in numbers. Killzone 1 was kinda well received, so a second game should fix the major issues people had and in the end result in a better product. When the E3 gameplay demo came out, this was almost a confirmed reality, if not for what happened soon after.
Turns out, the demo we saw was completely CG, and not at all actual gameplay running on an actual PS3. While in retrospect we can look at it and see it's blatantly obvious, we were caught up in the new generation hype and took Sony's word for it. In the end, Killzone 2 did end up being significantly better and is still considered by most to be the high point of the series, but this moment left a sour taste in everybody's mouths.
Ubisoft's 2011 conference wasn't actually bad. The content was actually alright, although certainly not the best they've done. However, nobody remembers the actual content of the conference, they remember one thing and one thing only, Aaron Priceman. You probably know him as Mr. Caffeine. To this day I don't know if he actually worked for Ubisoft (I don't think he did), but if he did, he certainly wasn't after this.
With his nonsensical time travel noises and jokes that immediately fell flat, Mr. Caffeine did nothing for Ubisoft except make them look bad for booking this lunatic as their press guy. This was the last presenter we saw from Ubisoft before Aisha Tyler took a role she has confirmed to be doing again this year, and I feel that Ubisoft are just happy to have someone that not everybody hates and want to keep her for as long as possible. Also she pronounces Tom Clancy properly.
To top this off, let's end by looking at somehow one of the least embarrassing moments in Konami's E3 history. At E3 2008, Konami were to present their Guitar Hero and Rock Band rip-off Rock Revolution. The plastic instrument genre was still really popular around 2008 as Activision hasn't ruined it for everyone by that time, so it's no surprise other developers tried to get involved. It would've helped if they actually got people that were good at the game to actually play it on stage.
While drum person didn't do too badly, guitar person did badly to the point where they actually failed the song, stopping the presentation dead in it's tracks, foreshadowing Rock Revolution's fate when it actually came out. It was a sign of things to come for Konami, and eventually we got to see nearly two hours of a trainwreck even greater than this, but we'll get to that in time.
If there are any other shit moments from conferences we haven't looked at in detail, make sure to remind me of them because I'm sure I've missed at least a couple. Tomorrow, as I said up top, we'll be looking at the miscellaneous magic moments of conferences we haven't gone in-depth on, and I'm sure there is a couple of big ones you don't remember. After that, it's time.
