The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, was the biggest event in game development for over two decades. A key battleground in the console wars, it was the show that turned video game launches into global cultural events, setting the rhythm for how games were revealed and marketed.
Things fizzled out at the start of the current decade when big names like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo opted to run their own events instead. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) didn’t find a way to reinvent the expo after the pandemic.
But trawling through the videos, flyers and other material from the events of the ’90s and ’00s is a reminder of how important and influential the event was. The Video Game History Foundation’s newly released archives are also goldmine of inspiration – and nostalgia, including rarely seen gems like long lost high-quality footage from the infamous Conker’s Quest, which was never released in its original form.
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The Video Game History Foundation has assembled and preserved a mass of material from E3 thanks to a series of donations from both organisers and guests over the past year. The collection, available to view online for free, is a treat for retro gaming enthusiasts, developers and academics alike.
As the foundation notes, before E3, the video games industry in the US had to make do with the Consumer Electronics Show, it had to compete for attention alongside all kinds of hardware. The creation of E3 in 1995 showed that gaming had become a major cultural force of its own.
The event didn’t just shape the marketing of gaming, but other kinds of festivals too through the extravagant booth designs, dramatic press conferences and attention-grabbing gimmicks.
Highlights include the Carolyn Rauch Collection donated by one of the founding members of the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA, which later became the ESA). This includes over 1,000 pages of ephemera from the Electronic Entertainment Expo, E for All, and the Game Marketing Summit.
The collection of flyers, brochures, press kits, guest passes, photographs, panel transcripts and industry reports reveals some interesting insights into the challenges involved in balancing public and professional interests, and interesting details like how much advertisers would be charged (it cost $25,000 to put a logo on the badge lanyards in 1999).
Another major part of the E3 archives is the collection of Anthony Parisi’s videos, with nearly 12 hours of redigitised footage from early events. This means we get to see people experiencing classic games like Super Mario 64 or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the first time.
There’s also footage from Subspace Publishers and Tronix Multimedia including direct-feed game capture. There’s an Atari Explorer Online video covering Atari Jaguar games at E3 1995, and a Nintendo B-roll tape from E3 1997 that includes an entire 1.5 minutes of footage from Rareware’s unreleased Conker’s Quest (below).
This game never saw the light of day. It was renamed as Twelve Tales: Conker 64 only to be dropped completely amid Nintendo’s saturated slate of platformers. It later evolved into the much more adult Conker’s Bad Fur Day.
Aside from E3, the Video Game History Foundation has lots of other gems that capture the evolution of video game development and marketing over the decades. It’s interesting to see some of our own parent company’s contributions, including GirlGamer, a magazine produced with Nintendo. The year 2007 doesn’t actually feel like that long ago. The magazine didn’t last.
Thinking about starting out in game development yourself? See our feature on getting started in game design and our pick of the best laptops for game development.
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