For some reason, the Jr. High school I attended kept current subscriptions of GamePro and Electronic Gaming Monthly on their magazine rack. I suppose this was to entice nerds to enter the library and start reading something, but that is clearly stupid, because, and I am generalizing here, nerds 1) are already in the library 2) reading something. Whenever I'd check out the new issues, the librarian would attempt to turn me on to Nerd Literature. I couldn't stand The Hobbit, and to this day I am unclear as to why anybody can, but I sure did read a lot of GamePro and EGM. Anyway, this is just barely before the internet exploded onto the American consciousness (I'm 22), so those magazines (and others) were a young gamer's only sources of information about upcoming games and systems. In 1995, the hundreds of companies that make up the game industry got tired of being treated like the developmentally-challenged bastard cousin of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and so they collectively took their ball and went to a different playground to be known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). 1995's E3 was exciting, because it heralded a new generation of game hardware, and (this may make you feel kinda old) Sega was involved. It was crazy, and I wished more than anything I could be there.

It took ten years, but eventually I made it there. (I was there last year, actually, but I was 14 minutes late for, um, everything. And that's another story entirely.) How did I get in, considering my relative lack of credentials? Do not ask, even rhetorically by me. Let's just say that my girlfriend Laurie has a "blog" and "is a girl," if you catch my meaning and can read between the lines heh heh heh ahem.



I am going to refrain from making any mention of how photogenic we are (hint: about as photogenic as corn dogs are alcoholic) and simply note that on this 10th E3, built around new system launches, we chose to represent the Sega Dreamcast. Partially because the Dreamcast is (in fact) awesome, partially because orange shirts would help us stand out in the thick nerdjungle of the show floor, but mostly because we both happened to have them. We got some odd responses, such as "Which particular booth did you get those shirts?!" (answer: thrift stores) and "Oh man, old-school!" Which really goes to show you how fast-moving and exciting the world of interactive entertainment is, wherein a system that was released domestically in 1999 can be mentioned in connection with the word "old." This is the only picture that was taken with the assistance of a third person, and so (unfortunately for Laurie, who dislikes appearing in photographs even more than I do) I am not seen in the majority of the other pictures. BUT I WAS THERE, I SWEAR IT, AND IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE ME JUST ASK JEREMY "TOASTYFROG" PARISH



Everybody's E3 wrapups include a picture of the Batmobile (from the upcoming Batman Begins), and by golly, mine is no exception! But mine is the only picture that includes a cute girl AND a Power Glove, so mine is the best.



I am starting to realize that Laurie is going to hate this page and me for uploading it because it includes a lot of photographs of her, but HEY LOOK IT'S SPACE DUEL!, a rare 1982 two-player vector game that is a lot (read: almost exactly) like Asteroids. Atari's booth had a lot of "retro" items, none of which were working. For instance, that Centipede machine to the left rendered the player's score as random letters of the alphabet, and the playfield's mushrooms were made up of the main character sprite. This made for a rather interesting game of "I'm a little shooty thing in a garden and I hate myself so much that I have populated the garden with mes and am shooting many myselves," but made for a somewhat confusing game of Centipede. In this picture Laurie is indicating with her fingers the number of people who were us that attempted to play Space Duel and failed because it was also broken (two).



Here we have one of those mega-nifty, super-unlikely chairs from The Matrix; this one is serving as the most badass way to try out Atari's upcoming The Matrix: Path of Neo. They were not letting people actually sit in it, at least not when I was there, because they were busy slowly and carefully explaining with simple words the complicated concept of the game to somebody from G4TV. I cannot confirm or deny rumors that they had to plug a big nasty spike into your neck before you could play the demo har har har.



Anyone who got to sit in the badass chair got to play Path of Neo on these screens, set up to resemble something mega-nifty and super-unlikely from the movies. They thoughtfully included a screen in the upper left with an EKG to make you think you were really excited about the game, and also a screen in the lower right with scrolling lines of computer code, which would have been way cooler had it been the actual code that the game was running at the time, but probably I am the only nerd nerdy enough to even expect that to have been the case. As for the game, remember how Enter the Matrix came out and nobody liked it? Atari thinks nobody liked it because you didn't get to play as Neo; I guess they didn't get any memos indicating that nobody liked it because it was kinda crappy. So they handed the license to the same developer and they set out to make a game about Neo. I didn't get to play it, but it looks like an improvement over Enter the Matrix, and the demo also included a "training stage" (ala the "programs" that the characters would load into their brains to gain experience and level up before Entering the Matrix) that resembled a samurai movie. It was pretty, and I actually liked Enter the Matrix for an hour or two, so who knows?