The best E3 moments from the event's 29-year history, from "$299" to Keanu Reeves
Dec. 14, 2023E3 has given us a lot of memories - both good and bad - over the years
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
E3 is officially, permanently dead. After 26 events spread across nearly 29 years, the Entertainment Software Association has confirmed that it’s no longer going to run what was once the biggest show in gaming. For decades, E3 was the nexus of gaming news, the place where publishers and developers big and small would gather to announce their games and demonstrate them to the media, the industry, and the world.
The annual show gathered attention like nothing else in gaming, from the early days where fans had to read about the news in magazines to the era of low-quality trailer downloads and finally into the age where every press conference was broadcast in its full high definition glory for everyone to see. With the world watching, E3 hosted some of the most famous – and infamous – moments in the history of the gaming industry, and there’s no better time to look back than right now, as we mourn the convention’s passing.
These are the top moments from each and every one of the 26 E3s – though admittedly I’m using a pretty broad definition of “moment” for the show’s early years, when we generally got our news from the show days, weeks, or even months after the fact. In the ’90s, it had become clear that the limited space at the annual Consumer Electronics Show was no longer sufficient to host the gaming industry, so the Interactive Digital Software Association (later to become the ESA) started its own trade show exclusively for the game industry. Over the years, the show would morph from an industry event we read about in magazines to one where the biggest publishers put on massive gala showcases intended for the general audience. Even in those early days, however, some executives had an eye for showmanship.
E3 1995 – “$299”
It would take several years for E3 to become the media extravaganza we’d eventually know it to be, but there’s a legendary tale to be told from this first show.Segaused the nascent conference to announce that its Saturn console would be priced at $399 in the US. Hours later,Sonyheld a keynote to detail its upcoming entry into the video game market with the PlayStation. Sony executive Steve Race took the stage, uttered “$299,” and walked away to raucous applause. This pricing strategy might not be the only reason PlayStation became a runaway success, but Sony’s confidence in its new platform certainly aided its appeal for a new generation of gamers.
The second E3 would also be the site of a war over price announcements. Early in the show, Nintendo revealed the details of the US release for the N64, which was set to launch for $249. Once again, Sony came in with the undercut, this time to $199. It didn’t take long for Sega and Nintendo both to follow suit. The Saturn was cut to $199 and the N64 eventually launched at that same price.
After failing to secure the Los Angeles Convention Center, the show’s organizers moved the whole event to the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. E3 1997 didn’t have much in the way of bombastic, singularmoments, but it did have one of the greatest lineups in gaming history. Various publishers were at the show with soon-to-be legendary titles like Half-Life, GoldenEye 007, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy 7, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Starcraft, and most importantly of all, John Romero’s Daikatana. (OK, so maybe that last one didn’t really work out.)
Judged purely on the titles that launched in the year, 1998 was one of the best times in gaming history, and E3 1998 had an incredible lineup – but it’s also the time the show started getting a bitextra. Nintendo brought on the B-52s to play at its E3 party. Sony similarly brought in the Foo Fighters for its shindig. Byone account, during that show Dave Grohl told a bunch of Sony executives to “take off those damn suits and ties and shake your booty!” That moment is maybe not going down in the annals of gaming history, but it’s pretty representative of just how big E3 had already gotten by this point.
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
E3 had gone Hollywood, so it’s only appropriate that it would return to the LA Convention Center in 1999, the venue that would continue to host it for pretty much the entire rest of its existence. There was a shadow over this show, since it took place less than a month after theColumbine High School massacre, which had prompted renewed criticism of violence in video games – criticism that was pretty directly addressed at events like Nintendo’s press conference, where marketing EVP Peter Main noted the industry’s responsibility to effectively communicate age ratings on game packages. The big products on display were the Dreamcast, the PlayStation 2 (then simply known as the Next Generation PlayStation), and the GameCube (then the Dolphin), which would all help mark a new era in gaming.
It certainly wasn’t impossible to get ahold of game trailers back in 2000, but the limited internet capabilities of the era meant that most publishers didn’t necessarily have a whole lot of incentive to create flashy preview videos. Then along cameHideo Kojima. The Metal Gear director’s proclivity for hyper-dramatic, extensive trailers started here, with a nearly 10-minute long video previewing the story, gameplay systems, and visual effects of MGS2, all of which were downright mind-blowing in 2000.Konamiplayed the trailer every hour on a giant screen outside its E3 booth.
Sony had successfully broken into the console market with the PlayStation a half-decade earlier, but many were skeptical that another contender – in this case,Microsoft’s Xbox – would be able to do the same. Microsoft did not make a strong case for Xbox up front. After a press conference where the console itself wouldn’t even turn on, on the show floor the company demoed Halo with a dismal frame rate that effectively buried all the qualities that would eventually make the game an FPS classic. Xbox and Halo eventually turned out all right, but that’s no thanks to the first impressions.
It had been eight years since the release of Doom 2. id Software was already known for pushing the state of gaming technology forward in a major way, and the next entry in the Doom series was sure to be a visual showpiece. Doom 3 did not disappoint – at least, not as an E3 demo. Here was a new Doom game that took the series into grim horror territory, featuring moody lightning unlike anything anyone had seen before. Ironically, that’s pretty much the reason the release version of Doom 3 ended up being the biggest also-ran of the series, but for a shining moment here at E3 it looked like the future of gaming.
With rare exceptions, E3 press conferences were up to this point dry affairs. Primarily intended as business recaps for media and investors, these presentations didn’t have the bombast and showmanship that we’d eventually come to associate with E3. Then, a new Nintendo of America president took the stage to say “My name is Reggie. I’m about kicking ass, I’m about taking names, and we’re about making games.” The show that followed was one for the ages, with highlights of major GameCube releases like Metroid Prime 2 and Resident Evil 4, the reveal of the Nintendo DS, and the famous, hyper-dramatic “blades will bleed” trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which culminated with Shigeru Miyamoto appearing on stage armed with sword and shield. The stakes for E3 press conferences had officially been raised.
Halo 2 might’ve seen an egregious downgrade from E3 video to release, but at least that initial demo showcased what the developers were working on for the original console. When Sony first started talking up the PlayStation 3, the most impressive piece was a trailer for Killzone 2. The video looked far too good to be true, and that’s because it was. While Sony presented the footage on stage as if it were an accurate indicator of PS3 graphics, years later developer Guerrillawould explainthat this video was actually made to imagine “what a first-person shooter game could look like for the next generation. It was meant for internal use only, to be a visionary piece.”
By 2006, broadband internet was starting to become more widely available,YouTubehad taken its first baby steps into the world, and it was getting easier for hardcore gaming fans to download press conference footage and bring the E3 experience home. It was the worst possible time for Sony to put on a show as bad as their E3 2006 press conference. Sure, pricing the PlayStation 3 at “five-hundred ninety-nine US dollars” was a bad idea no matter how many people saw the initial announcement, but the internet’s unending mockery of moments throughout this presentation would haunt Sony for years. Heck, we’re still making “giant enemy crab” and “Riiiiiiiiiiidge Racer!” jokes to this day. If you want to fully relive the magic, an HD 1080p archive of the full press conference wasuploaded onlineearlier this year.
“Is E3 dying?” has been a pretty common question in the last decade, but the question really started to be asked in 2007, when the event was dramatically downsized to become the ‘E3 Media and Business Summit.’ The show floor moved to a hangar in the Santa Monica Airport, attendance was limited, and many of the most notable demos happened behind closed doors at area hotels. A few moments out of various press conferences became legendary – this is when Reggie uttered the words “my body is ready” and Jamie Kennedy gave theworst comedy routine in human historyonActivision’s behalf – but maybe the most telling moment was theE3 funeralhosted by the short-lived publisher Gamecock. Ironically, Gamecock and itsedgelord waysdied just a year later while E3 would live for more than a decade to come, but the seed of doubt for the event’s future had been planted.
This was the year that Final Fantasy went multiplatform, withFF13 making a shock debut at the Xbox press conferencethat would feel like a betrayal to numerous PlayStation loyalists. But nobody remembers that today because console wars are dumb and have never mattered. No, the real moment of E3 2008 was the Wii Music performance at Nintendo’s press conference. Motion controls had never looked less fun than they did here, and in front of an audience of hardcore gamers who were already afraid Nintendo had gone too far in capturing the casual market, the performance fell completely flat. At least it was an opportunity for us all to get to know DJ Ravidrums.
If you thought the era when motion-controlled gaming dominated E3 would end as we hit the midpoint of the Wii’s life, don’t worry – Microsoft was still here to horrifically misjudge the E3 audience, even as the show returned to its original, big-scale format. By 2009, it seemed pretty clear that most of the people watching E3 press conferences were hardcore gaming fans who would feel alienated by lengthy demos for new motion control accessories. Yet Kinect still ended up being the show-closing main event for the Microsoft press conference. It certainly didn’t help that the onstage demo didn’t even work right, with the motion-mirroring tech leaving an onscreen avatar twisted into a pretzel. And look, I’m sorry, but nobody has ever wanted to see the bottom of an avatar’s shoe.
For years, Final Fantasy 7 fans had been desperate for a remake. With how much gaming tech had progressed, a new version of the game could surely bring Cloud, Sephiroth, and the whole story to life in a way that far exceeded the original’s low-poly models and charmingly goofy dialog. But the idea ofFinal Fantasy 7 Remakeseemed like it’d be forever relegated to the realm of a “wouldn’t it be cool if.” Until, suddenly, it was made real on the Sony stage. This conference also hosted other games that at times seemed impossible, like Shenmue 3 and The Last Guardian, but there was no announcement bigger than the new FF7.
E3 helped us learn about some of thebest games of all time. Rest in peace, old friend.
Get hundreds of hours of RPG goodness for $30 with this bundle of 8 games that includes the first two Baldur’s Gate games, which are absolutely worth playing
