E3 - Los Angeles, CA - Part 1

This week, my friends, I'm in sunny Los Angeles, CA.  After the consecutive days of 100-degree heat in Texas, this California weather is delightful.  The reason that I'm here for the week, is to attend one of the biggest trade shows of the year for digital entertainment - E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo).  This is where the entire videogame industry comes together and shows all of the latest games, as well as games that will be shipping in time for Christmas this year.

The show is attended by over 70,000 people - but these are folks that actually work in the industry.  This includes game developers, game publishers, retail buyers and the media.  That's a lot of people connected to an industry that generates over 14 billion dollars in revenue each year ; )

The show itself is a spectacle.   It's an assault on the senses ; )  To begin with, here is the outside of the LA Convention Center - the building is covered with ads for games that are 40-50 ft. high:

Inside the convention center, each of the major game publishers have a "booth".  These range from 2,000 square feet - up to 35,000 square feet!  This year, my company decided to actually have a booth at the show.  I was really proud of how well it looked.  Here are some pictures before the show actually opened (no crowds):

One of the games that we wanted to feature in our booth is called "Dirt 3".  This is a racing game that looks fantastic on AMD equipment.  We had a specially-painted PC for the game, along with special driving "seats" that allow the player to feel all the twists and turns in driving a race car:

We also created a special "theater" that allowed people to play the game on an "Eyefinity" system - this is where a PC can send images to at least 3 screens at the same time.  We used projectors instead of screens, and blended them, so that it felt like a single super-wide screen.  Needless to say, people went nuts to be able to play the game on this set-up (picture and video):

Once the show actually opened, I decided to shoot a couple of videos of the insanity.  Here are a couple of videos that show what goes on across the show floor:

This is an interesting shot of the crowd gathered to watch a demo of an upcoming game called "Assassin's Creed"

I had a chance to spend some time with the id folks - these are the developers that created some of the most famous PC games of all-time, like "Doom" and "Quake".  I spent about 15 minutes talking to one of the legendary programmers in videogame industry, John Carmack (pictured here in the middle).  None of my employees was kind enough to take MY picture ; )

This next video is for those of my friends that are fans of the "Just Dance" series of games:

That's it for now...time to get some rest for Day 2 of the E3 show.