Meanwhile, a reviewer from GamePro secured the first batch of playtest slots at the Capcom booth.
On the CRT screen, a dark corridor of a mansion was displayed.
He gripped the controller, maneuvering the character on the screen to move slowly.
A zombie turned its head.
His hand shook, and the controller dropped onto the carpet.
"The controls feel so stiff, I can only turn in place." He bent down to pick up the controller, complaining, but his eyes remained glued to the screen. "Damn it, this is genuinely scary. It scared me so bad my controls went haywire."
Another group, especially columnists inclined towards hardware and technical analysis, dove headfirst into the small technical forums hosted by various companies.
Outside Ken Kutaragi's conference room, a few reporters who hadn't received invitations pressed against the wall, trying to overhear the discussion inside about the GTE (Geometry Transformation Engine).
"Sony is teaching these Americans how to squeeze every bit of reading speed out of CD-ROMs," the reporter from NetGeneration scribbled rapidly in his notebook.
Nintendo's moves didn't escape the media's eyes, either.
Shigeru Miyamoto's seminar on gameplay prohibited recording, but the developers walking out were all clutching thick notebooks.
Two diametrically opposed development philosophies have become the core conflict in today's tech coverage.
Compared to the gaming geeks obsessed with code and polygons, reporters from financial media and major general-interest newspapers have turned their attention to the business meeting area in the central hall.
This is where real money flows.
A business reporter from the Los Angeles Times leaned against the second-floor railing, looking down at the scene below.
Purchasing representatives from major retail giants, clutching their briefcases, were seen moving in and out of the business rooms of Sega and Sony.
"See that bald, chubby guy?" a colleague nearby said, pointing below. "He's a senior purchasing manager for Walmart North America. He's been in the Sega room for a full forty minutes."
"What can you talk about in forty minutes?"
"Enough to double the Christmas stock for Toy Story and King of Fighters III."
The reporter pressed the camera shutter, capturing a long shot of the distributors shaking hands.
The focus of today's news is no longer about which console has a higher color palette, but just how massive a capital vortex this industry can whip up.
From the opening of the exhibition until now, the value of the preliminary contracts reached in the central hall alone is a staggering figure.
The gaming industry is no longer just about small-time electronic toys.
On its second day, the E3 Exhibition showcased its massive commercial throughput and mature industrial chain to the outside world.
Media personnel wove their way through these numbers and codes, piecing together the full picture of this ten-billion-dollar empire.
E3 entered its second day.
The air in the Los Angeles Convention Center remained sweltering, and the noise decibel level inside the venue stayed high.
Takuya Nakayama's schedule for today had no public appearances; he had saved his energy for closed-door meetings.
Earlier, he had already met with Jensen Huang.
The head of NVIDIA had been invited to Los Angeles.
Takuya Nakayama had confirmed John Carmack's schedule with id Software through Mark Cerny in advance.
Carmack himself cared nothing for the social obligations of the exhibition, but he had still come to the E3 site.
Takuya Nakayama pulled Mark Cerny, Yuji Naka, and Jensen Huang along, and the four of them waded through the crowded aisles, heading straight for the id Software booth.
The design of the booth was rugged.
Several high-spec PCs were surrounded by people, their screens running Doom, which had been released in 1993.
In one corner of the exhibit area stood a sign, teasing the upcoming release of Doom 95, based on the Windows 95 platform.
This is a project between id and Microsoft, utilizing early DirectX technology at its core.
As for the rumors circulating about the development of "Quake" and the brand-new id Tech 2 engine, they didn't even show a single concept image at the booth.
Carmack was wearing an old T-shirt printed with code, staring blankly at the flow of people in the distance, looking bored.
Seeing Mark Cerny approach, he pulled himself back to reality.
After the group exchanged greetings, they moved to a simple meeting room behind the booth.
Once the door was closed, most of the noise from outside was shut out.
Without any unnecessary pleasantries, Carmack went straight to the technical topics.
He was very interested in several 3D games Sega had demonstrated at the press conference.
"Your efficiency in processing polygon vertex transformations on the Jupiter platform is very high," Carmack said, looking at Cerny and Yuji Naka. "The texture perspective correction in your rasterization stage is cleaner than I expected. What kind of low-level calling logic did you use?"
Yuji Naka took a marker from the table and drew a simple rendering pipeline diagram on the whiteboard.
"We built an extremely thin wrapper layer over the graphics interface. The system performs hybrid rendering by combining 2D sprite layers for static backgrounds with 3D polygons for dynamic characters. By pre-calculating depth information, we minimize the load on the Z-buffer."
Carmack stared at the diagram on the whiteboard, quickly grasping the logic behind it.
"Using mature 2D technology to offload 3D computation costs is an incredibly clever approach, given the current hardware limitations. However, this kind of custom optimization requires an extremely high level of low-level understanding from the developers."
"That brings us to what we wanted to talk about today."
Takuya Nakayama pulled out a chair, sat down, and took over the conversation.
Carmack looked at Nakayama.
He had heard of this Sega Managing Director before, knowing him to be shrewd in business strategy, but rarely one to personally get involved in discussions about pure code.
"Actually, I've been thinking about something," Carmack said, crossing his hands on the table. "I intend to fully release the source code for Wolfenstein 3D. Anyone will be able to take it, study it, and modify it."
"Sega has always held an open attitude toward the dissemination of underlying game technology."
Takuya Nakayama responded, "Back in the days of the System16 arcade board and the MD console, we began investing heavily in developing tools. From the optimization of assembly instruction sets to the construction of visual editors, the costs involved exceeded what outsiders expected. It is precisely because of these easy-to-use tools that third-party manufacturers were able to quickly produce high-quality games."
Takuya Nakayama paused for a moment, then put forward a further idea.
"Releasing the source code of old games is a good thing. Sega has also accumulated a large number of retired engines and middleware internally. We can organize the code of these old engines and make it public."
Carmack showed keen interest in this proposal.
Letting code circulate freely, letting more people see the underlying operating mechanisms—this was a philosophy he had always insisted on.
The democratization of technology could drive the progress of the entire industry.
"But that's not enough," Takuya Nakayama looked at Carmack and raised the core contradiction of the current stage.
"In this era, the speed of evolution for various computer technologies, including graphics display, is too fast. From pseudo-3D ray casting to true polygonal rendering, the span is immense."
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