It’s a sad fact of life that many things that are “in style” one minute will eventually become out of style after a while. Sometimes, it’s because things surpass that original item, event, or even person, and thus, people move on to them. Sometimes, it’s just that a series of things happen to make the thing obsolete, and thus it’s simply not needed anymore. In the case of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, aka E3, it was something that brought the entire industry together for decades and had numerous epic gaming moments. That includes moments that Katsuhiro Harada enjoyed and now misses.
The legendary game developer behind Tekken went to Twitter to lament the loss of E3. He no doubt did this because of the huge set of gaming days that just happened between the Summer Game Fest, the Xbox Showcase, and the Ubisoft Forward. In the post, he specifically stated why he missed it and how it made him feel as a developer:
“I’ve always loved the E3 Show. Now I miss that kind of industry gathering and exciting announcements and conferences. I know that in this day and age where you can select and get only the information you want online, such a massive conference or show may not be necessary for many people, but it’s still nice to be surprised by an announcement of a title that you didn’t expect or know about, or to see something that you weren’t originally interested in.”
You can definitely feel his pain as he wrote this post, and you can understand where he’s coming from. E3 was something unique compared to all the digital conferences we have now. While some, like certain events within Summer Game Fest, do have stations where you can play games, it’s just not the same:
“I liked the E3 Show of the past, which was like taking a random stroll through a huge shopping mall. So I guess I am already an old man pushing old-fashioned lol”
No, Katsuhiro Harada, you’re not old-fashioned; you just know what you like and want to experience that again. To be fair, the people behind E3 were key to their own demise. They didn’t advance with the times, and when it became clear to other developers like Nintendo that they didn’t really benefit from the E3 presentations anymore, they started to leave in droves.
Could something to the scale of E3 ever be made again? It’s hard to say, but you never know!
