LOS ANGELES -- The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the biggest trade show in the videogame business, doesn't officially start until Thursday. But there was plenty of action before the convention hall doors opened.
On Wednesday, Nintendo and Sega each rented out swanky downtown venues to hype their upcoming videogame consoles. Nintendo took over the LA Theater, a beautiful Gothic hall in the middle of the bustling Jewelry District. Meanwhile, Sega occupied the Soho Club, a nightclub owned by the Artist Everyone Still Calls Prince.
Once comfortably settled in, company execs wasted no time in belittling their competition and tantalizing their audiences with game demos and technical specs. Here are some of the highlights.
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Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars: Everybody's hitching their products to Star Wars.
Nintendo demonstrated "Pod Racer" for the N64, a racing game expected later this month, by running a mind-blowing three-minute clip from the game. The graphics, the camera angles, and the characters were pretty good duplications of the drag-racing scene in the movie. Players race through the canyon setting of the movie, as well as ice planet and jungle world environments.
Just to make sure the demo wound up on the local 6 o'clock news, Nintendo trotted out Jake Lloyd, the kid who plays Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace. The ploy worked. At least 20 photographers and camera crews literally dashed to the foot of the stage. The flying elbows and camera-flash lightning storm surprised even Lloyd, who must be getting used to media mobs by now.
Good luck, kid. It's going to be a long summer.
A few hours later, Sega announced that it, too, will muscle in on the Star Wars madness. To pitch its upcoming Dreamcast console, Sega will be one of the few companies to advertise in the trailers before Phantom Menace screenings.
For the sake of the US$10 billion videogame industry, let's hope Phantom Menace isn't this year's Godzilla.
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Dream on: After the Saturn debacle, Sega badly needs a hit machine, and it may have one in the Dreamcast.
Anyone who's picked up a gaming magazine can reel off the console's impressive specs: a built-in modem, optional ZIP drive, and a 128-bit graphics engine that the company promises will handle graphics three times better than the Pentium III does.
Wednesday night, Sega showed off what all that horsepower can achieve. The garden-variety sports game is suddenly transformed by little details that mean a lot: The breath of a football player is visible. Limbs of basketball players in mid-flight swivel eerily like video. A car racing game, typically the most boring genre, looks like a video feed coming straight from a NASCAR track.
But designing a kickass game machine is a piece of cake compared to what Sega has to do next: Get consumers to buy it.
"We're not in denial," said Peter Moore, Sega's vice president of marketing. The company's wares are way out of fashion, he said. So Sega is planning a massive marketing blitz that will last all year, including a sponsorship of the MTV Music Awards in late summer.
Dreamcast is already on sale in Japan. The machine will ship overseas on 9 September. For Europeans, a bonus: Free Internet access from British Telecom.
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Violence begets fear: The fear of a backlash against violence is very much on the minds of videogame executives at this year's E3.
"As our industry has become so large, we have become fair game for criticism," said Peter Main, Nintendo's executive vice president of sales and marketing. "We are mass market. We are part of pop culture. This is no longer a niche product."
Nintendo will try to do a better job of communicating what a game is about, so parents will know their kids are playing games appropriate to their age levels, Main said.
So what does he demonstrate 20 minutes later? "Jet Force Gemini," an exploration game in the same vein as Mario World -- but with a big difference. In this game, the itsy-bitsy characters carry machine guns.
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Garbage time: A videogame trade show wouldn't be any fun without trash talking. And Nintendo and Sega didn't disappoint.
To dis Sega, Main mentioned that his company will sell more Gameboys -- those ancient 8-bit handhelds -- this year than Sega will Dreamcasts. Nintendo 1, Sega 0.
To dis Nintendo and Sony, Sega honcho Bernie Stolar had this to say: "We're not a toy company. We're not a conglomerate selling TVs, stereos, and VCRs. We are a gaming company."
Sega 1, Nintendo 1. The tiebreaker goes to Sega for substance and not resorting to cheap shots.
