After the initial excitement, complaints soon began to emerge.
"That's it?" The boy in the baseball cap flipped the flyer over; there were only a few ads on the back. "What does Final Fantasy VII even look like? There isn't even a postage stamp-sized picture on this!"
"Exactly. How scary is Resident Evil? How does Tekken perform on the console? What are these editors doing? They wrote for ages and all they gave us were one-sentence summaries without a single detailed gameplay review."
"They're too lazy. They went to the venue in person, and all they gave us was a list of release dates? My grandma could have copied the display boards better than they wrote this."
A few young people stood at the storefront, grumbling and expressing their strong dissatisfaction with the media's perfunctory coverage.
In their eyes, the reporters had received free admission tickets and enjoyed the best front-row views, yet all they delivered was a withered, perfunctory account.
The shop door was pushed open, and the retail store owner walked out carrying a cup of coffee.
He was a man in his thirties with a bit of a belly, with the green distributor badge from yesterday's event still hanging on his chest.
This was the pass he used to tag along with his uncle, a California distributor, to get in for a day.
It was just that today was mostly about industry networking and business talks, which didn't interest him much, and besides, he still had his shop to run, so he didn't go.
"Stop complaining, boys." The boss took a sip of coffee, pulled a folded A4 sheet of paper from his apron pocket, and slapped it onto the display case beside him. "Take a look at this."
A few boys crowded around. It was a photocopy, with the IDSA logo printed at the very top.
"What's this?"
"The schedule for yesterday's press conference at the E3 Central Plaza Exhibition Hall." The boss pointed with his stubby finger at the paper.
The boy in the baseball cap followed the direction of his finger.
From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., the press conferences were packed tightly according to this schedule, with times precise to the minute, leaving only a short lunch break of just over an hour in between.
The boys fell silent.
"From nine in the morning until five in the evening, they barely have time to squeeze in a bathroom break." The boss took the paper back and refolded it. "Over eighty games, all new stuff. The reporters in the audience almost wrote their hands off just jotting down the names. You expect them to write detailed reviews for all these games in a single night? They're people, not typewriters."
The boy in the baseball cap swallowed hard, looking at the quick-report flyer he had just been complaining about, suddenly feeling that the thin slip of paper had become much heavier.
"Over eighty games..." one of the boys muttered to himself, "how much would it even cost to buy them all?"
"You can't buy them all, and there's no need to," the boss smiled. "But this is E3. This is what the gaming industry is now. Sitting in the audience yesterday, I felt just one thing—there are truly more and more games for us to play."
He turned and walked back into the shop, leaving a final remark: "Start saving up, guys. The shelves at the end of the year are going to be crowded."
It wasn't just this little shop; the entire North American gaming community was experiencing a similar shift in emotions.
From initial complaints to the shock of seeing the schedule, and then to boundless anticipation for the future.
Video games were no longer a pastime hacked together by a few programmers in a garage.
They had become a massive, precise machine, driven by hundreds of brilliant minds and billions of dollars in capital.
And the first day of E3 was the moment this machine truly roared to the world for the first time.
June 10th, Los Angeles Convention Center.
The second day of E3 Media Day.
The logic of the exhibition had shifted.
The previous day's press conferences were responsible for creating headlines; today's task was to monetize them.
Distributors wearing green badges and purchasing representatives from retail giants wove through the various booths, their order books in hand, which would determine the shelf layout for major retailers across the U.S. in the second half of the year.
Exhibitors revealed their trump cards, pulling out all the stops at their respective booths to convert the buzz from yesterday into concrete contracts.
The negotiation area at the Sega booth had been running at full capacity since 8:30 in the morning.
Paolo Maldini did not appear.
After completing his walk-on yesterday, the AC Milan star had already taken an early morning flight back to Europe. Press releases had been sent to major sports and gaming media outlets worldwide; Sega had achieved its promotional goal and there was no need to keep him there as a mascot. European and South American distributors crowded around Sega's business representatives, haggling over the initial shipment volume for "Pro Soccer World" (PSW).
In contrast to the bustle at Sega, Sony's exhibition area presented a more pragmatic style.
In a medium-sized conference room behind the PlayStation booth, a slide projector hummed.
Ken Kutaragi stood in front of the screen, holding a red marker in his hand.
Because PlayStation's overall performance at the time had not met the initial optimistic expectations of Sony's top management, Nobuyuki Idei and the finance department kept a tight grip on the budget.
The marketing team had originally submitted a proposal to spend a large sum of money inviting Michael Jackson to the E3 venue to support Sony.
This proposal was directly rejected by senior management.
Ken Kutaragi had no complaints about this.
He himself did not like that kind of flashy, showbiz style.
In his view, spending millions of dollars on a pop singer was not as good as using it to subsidize third-party development kits.
He took the lead in organizing this small technical seminar.
Sitting in the audience were dozens of North American game developers, technology-oriented media reporters, and the heads of several third-party studios who were waiting on the sidelines.
He drew a simple system architecture diagram on the whiteboard.
"PlayStation's GTE, or Geometry Transformation Engine, is specifically responsible for handling polygon coordinate transformation and lighting calculations." Kutaragi tapped the whiteboard with his marker, speaking quickly without any polite opening remarks. "You used to be accustomed to stacking sprite layers when making games on 16-bit consoles. Now, throw all of that away. The underlying logic of 3D games is vertices and matrices."
A programmer in the audience raised a hand to ask about limitations on memory usage.
"Two megabytes of main memory isn't enough?" Ken Kutaragi countered, writing a number on the whiteboard. "Increase the texture compression rate. We've provided specialized VRAM management tools. Don't shove all your assets into memory at once; learn to utilize the read speed of the optical drive for streaming. That's how Namco's Ridge Racer runs."
His answer hit the nail on the head.
No PR jargon, just a direct conversation between engineers.
"Regarding the development environment, I know what you're worried about," Kutaragi said, putting down the marker and looking at the audience. "Sony provides full support for C language libraries. You don't need to get bogged down in assembly language. As long as you have good 3D concepts, Sony's development kits will allow you to run a playable demo within three months. Efficiency is always a good thing."
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