E3 Powers Up
Video game tradeshow a smash hit despite power loss on the first day
By Rachelle Crum -- Tradeshow Week, 5/30/2005
Los Angeles—It's a minute before the E3/Electronic Entertainment Expo showfloor opens, and the lights are out at the Los Angeles Convention Center. But that doesn't stop thousands of mostly 20-something gamers from swarming the hallways, and staring trance-like at the exhibit hall doors, waiting to sneak a peek at the 1,000 new products being launched at the world's largest interactive and entertainment software show.
Although a blown transformer in downtown Los Angeles kept the facility's corridors dark for four hours on opening day, the 547,000 net square foot floor featuring more than 400 exhibitors was intensely illuminated — along with the faces of participants, including its primed show managers.
At one point, Mary Dolaher, vice president of tradeshows and events for show owner Entertainment Software Assn., joked: "I'm going to be in the witness protection program if the power doesn't come up soon."
However, Dolaher soon realized that her plan to alleviate on-site congestion for the show's 70,000 attendees by staging satellite registration booths at five area hotels helped her avoid having to change her name.
"Thank God we did it. It was just phenomenal," she said, adding that the association would likely extend the endeavor to include 10 hotels next year. The May 18–20 show also attracted the most hotel sponsorships yet because of the effort.
"I'd say this is a successful event," said Jim Bracken, chairman of E3 show management firm VNU Expositions, from a second-floor balcony peering down at the thousands of attendees waiting to enter the West Hall entrance. The show, an 11-year-old offspring of Intl. CES, could be even bigger, he added, if organizers didn't limit the amount of space exhibitors bought to 44,000 sq. ft. for hardware companies and 12,000 sq. ft. for software firms. "If we didn't (set limits) they'd try to take the entire showfloor," Bracken joked.
Although the opening-day outage kept the press center dark and forced media registration into an outside tent, the show received wall-to-wall media attention, mostly due to journalists' portable electronics and the show's 2,000 sq. ft. wireless zone. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo got the most press attention by raising the curtain on new game consoles days before the show.
And E3Insider.com — the show's 3-year-old Web site for global gamers and media who can't attend the show — supplied news via a newly introduced blog, along with its streaming video show Floored and FanCam (dubbed its "helmet-cam-equipped gamer on the loose").
The 2004 show's site had more than 100 million users and was the world's fifth fastest-growing site, according to Alexa.com.
For the first time, curators from Los Angeles' Getty Research Institute and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art served as jurors for the show's second annual Into the Pixel art exhibition. The show included 10 non-endemic sponsors, including Pepsi-Cola North America, maker of Mountain Dew. Microsoft and Pepsi announced at the show that for nine weeks this fall, codes featured under Moutain Dew caps will give U.S. consumers a chance to win a new Microsoft Xbox 360 console.
E3 registration is trade-only, although some hardcore game fans inevitably find their way inside. As he waited in a long line to play Nintendo's new Legend of Zelda game, attendee Isaac Yost admitted that he has attended every E3, but "this is the first time I'm actually supposed to be here."
Attendee Jason Lust, a flash programmer, also enjoyed spending most of his show-floor visit in a queue. "So far it's been a wait-in-line day," he said while doing just that inside the Ziff Davis Media Game Group booth.
The LACC's largest show, E3 generated $13 million in economic impact, including 29,000 hotel room-nights, which filled many area hotels, according to LA Inc., the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau. The show, currently No. 29 on the Tradeshow Week 200 (with 540,000 net sq. ft. in 2004), is scheduled through 2012 at the LACC, where it has been for nine years. It spent two years in Atlanta.
The City of Angels and E3 have a strong synergy, said Mark Liberman, president and CEO of LA Inc. "L.A. is the laboratory for the future of pop culture. E3 Expo brings together two of L.A.'s most creative communities."
And thousands of newly converted gamers might be banging down the LACC doors for next year's May 10–12 show, as ESA plots to grow the $28 billion industry, said association president Doug Lowenstein.
"Broaden the market, create more complete games, make games that are easier to play, evolve new financing models, exploit emerging platforms and solidify cultural credibility — six easy steps for world dominance," Lowenstein said in an opening-day address, adding that the average age of gamers is 30 years old.
"It just continues to grow and grow as a monster," said Marc Feuerstein, a spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment America.
And as E3 and its industry expands, so does the technology — literally. Feuerstein called Sony's massive video screen "the biggest movie screen ever created." More than 5,700 monitors, screens and plasmas were displayed on the showfloor and in LACC public areas.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, a new London gaming tradeshow, Games Market Europe, has been launched at the city's Business Design Centre Aug. 31–Sept. 1, following the recent demise of London's ECTS (European computer tradeshow) and Game Stars Live.
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