Image via Complex Original
You don't need to have ever stepped foot inside the Los Angeles Convention Center to know that the Electronic Entertainment Expo has long been about excess.
Over its lifetime, E3 has housed an excess of new games, an excess of new tech, an excess of hype, and an excess of people attending. Because of its size, it has spawned its own self-contained excess of media coverage.
An event so large, it's one of the few times a year the whole world looks to gaming culture for what's to come.
If you need a reminder why E3 is such a special event, you need only revisit the launches linked to the event. You can tell the entire story of post-1995 video games just by pointing to debuts unveiled in LA.
As E3 2013 is running 24 hours a day on espresso and Kingdom Hearts III envy, now is a perfect time to look back on what has made E3 so special over the years.
These titans changed the game of gaming. Keep in mind that this is a hindsight-heavy list—everything spotlit here is even more monumental in retrospect than at the time—and a small handful of major announcements just missed the cut.
Read on for 10 E3 Reveals That Changed Gaming History Forever.
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10. E3 2007: Nintendo and Sega team up for Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games.
And now, a vision no kid in 1995 could have ever predicted coming to fruition: Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog will share an entire game series together.
It all started with the 2007 Wii game Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Let's be honest here: How the game played or looked will always be irrelevant in the grand scheme of history. All that matters is that somehow the Coke and Pepsi of video games finally ended up in a game together—not in a piece of fan art or a doctored screenshot in a magazine or a modified ROM but a real game.
9. E3 2005: Nintendo announces the Wii Virtual Console.
Nostalgia is a deep, rich vein to mine.
Nintendo's Virtual Console was bound to exist sooner or later. But finding a single platform that shared content from the NES, the SNES, the N64, the Genesis and the TurboGrafx 16—plus, of course, the GameCube and the Wii—was a masterstroke on Nintendo's part. The application's launch titles included Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, F-Zero, Super Mario 64, Ecco the Dolphin, Sonic the Hedgehog and Bonk's Adventure.
What makes the VC such an exceptional creation compared to, say, the PS1 games you can find on PSN is that it collapses an entire brand's family of consoles—and more—into one place with ease. Even though the Virtual Console's library ultimately leaves room for improvement in terms of what titles it pulls in, Nintendo made a very smart move by emphasizing that the future of gaming consoles as all-purpose hubs has a lot to do with their compatibility with titles of the past.
8. E3 2005: Nintendo unveils the Wii.
Don't get it twisted: the Super Nintendo, the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube were all fine systems with fine libraries.
But every now and again a console hits and creates a pop-culture phenomenon that makes it feel truly special, as if it's a legitimate big step forward for games rather than just the requisite new console. The Wii was one of these moments.
Really, not since the heyday of the original NES had there been such a surge of mainstream interest in a gaming console, especially one by Nintendo. The Wii looked and felt fresh, pitching itself across demographics. (All kinds of folks bit, too; a quick search turns up multiple stories of older, non-gamer sorts using it.)
The console, and its best-selling Wii Sports, arrived in 2006, but E3 2005 was where it found its footing as revolutionary. On top of that, the motion-sensing capabilities and newly incorporated physical aspect added a fresh sense of novelty to the console that led to the launch of the Kinect and the PlayStation Move.
7. E3 2005: Activision debuts Guitar Hero.
You have to feel for those poor dudes at Konami behind GuitarFreaks.
Just imagine it: you've made a perfectly competent guitar-focused rhythm game in the late 1990s, and it's sitting in American arcades just waiting to take off. But lo and behold, the arcade was quickly becoming obsolete, and home versions of GuitarFreaks would never work. RedOctane and Activision took that blueprint and killed with Guitar Hero.
Guitar Hero soon stood toe-to-toe with Dance Dance Revolution as the most culturally important rhythm game for its positive effects on the fortunes of the video game and music businesses alike, especially as it temporarily created a new revenue source for the downtrodden recording industry. Stylistic clones such as Rock Band and Rock Revolution began cluttering homes with plastic instruments.
Over-saturation of the nascent genre meant the Guitar Hero dream dwindled quickly.
6. E3 2002: Microsoft launches Xbox Live.
Online gaming on consoles was one of those features waiting to be done right.
That element was what strengthened the market for PC games throughout the 1990s, adding a proto-social-media angle and greater sense of interactivity to titles. Those games that didn't require players to visit arcades if they wanted to take on strangers.
As a result, there was a lot of jockeying for making online gaming a viable reality. Going back to the early 1990s and the days of dial-up, a device called XBAND allowed online play on the SNES and Genesis, but the clunky concept failed to catch on. Later, Sega launched SegaNet for Dreamcast, but the waning popularity of the DC and Sega's disinterest in pursuing the hardware market relegated that service to a two-year window.
Finally, Microsoft's intuitive Xbox Live hit in late 2002, soon allowing middle schoolers across the planet to talk the kinds of smack about people's mothers they only fantasized of. This service launched a good three years before equivalents by Sony and Nintendo. Like climbing Mount Everest, completing this task was an inevitability, but Microsoft still deserves a nod for getting there first.
5. E3 2001: Rockstar Games lifts the curtain on Grand Theft Auto III.
The story behind Grand Theft Auto III would be nearly impossible to replicate.
Rockstar Games started out with a middling, cult-status-friendly series on the original PlayStation. The GTA brand seemed to be going nowhere. Then, the third one came along and completely revamped the franchise, going from a clunky top-down perspective to a third-person, three-dimensional masterpiece that sent shock waves through the gaming biz.
First, there was the sandbox game play, with its density of features and innovative freedom, and then the story and atmosphere which did wonders in building that world. Then, there were the controversies for its violence and sexual content, making GTAIII one of those ubiquitous Mortal Kombat-like public enemies.
The PlayStation 2 version of GTAIII ended 2001 as its best-selling game and the reason why this franchise has become such a sensation. There have been a few other examples of great sequels towering over humdrum beginnings—compare Metal Gear to Metal Gear Solid—but those doesn't make the trajectory of GTAIII any less astonishing.
4. E3 2000: Microsoft shows off Halo: Combat Evolved.
Attempting to launch a successful new home console by a company that has zero home console experience to their credit must really suck.
So many big names have stepped up to the challenge and quickly crash landed. Feel free to visit the graveyard that contains the Apple Pippin, the Philips CD-i, the Atari Jaguar, the Casio PV-1000, and Panasonic/Sanyo/GoldStar's 3DO.
But like Sony and those ties to Nintendo, the Microsoft Xbox had more momentum on its side because of MS connection to the Dreamcast. (The gaming goodwill from PC players had to help, too.)
The release that really, really worked in the Xbox's favor and helped establish its own console culture was Halo: Combat Evolved.
Originally conceived as a third-person shooter and previewed to journalists in this different form at E3 1999, Halo would become the most historically important console-original first-person shooter and the kind of billion-dollar franchise a new console maker could only dream of.
3. E3 1998: Sega breaks out the Dreamcast
Being a Sega die-hard was never that great.
Excluding the Genesis, things kind of sucked. The Master System was no world-beater, the Game Gear never attained the cultural reputation nor library of the Game Boy, and the Sega CD and 32X were both flops.
After encountering one more failure with its miscalculated Saturn launch following E3 1995 and finding itself a distant third in the console wars, Sega took another shot on a new system.
The Dreamcast, which would present a much bigger showing at E3 1999 before its September launch that year, had everything going for it. Where the Saturn faltered, the Dreamcast stood tall.
Gorgeous games (such as the widely worshiped Soulcalibur), juicier tech (it was the first 128-bit system), and a revitalized Sega that was intent on making things work. The Saturn never delivered a definitive Sonic platformer like its predecessors, so Sega made good on its property by making Sonic Adventure available out of the gate. Throw in Microsoft pledging its support, the 2K sports games, arcade-perfect ports back when that was a novel concept, and the early online gaming service SegaNet and the Dreamcast looked like to be in the peachiest of positions.
The Dreamcast sold better than the Saturn (especially with its big launch), but neither numbers nor status could touch the Genesis. This would be Sega's last console and a move into Sega as a software-only company. The landscape of the console wars re-calibrated, setting up room for the Xbox to become dominant.
2. E3 1996: Capcom debuts Resident Evil.
The concept of survival horror existed before Capcom's juggernaut came around, what with the 1989 Famicom game Sweet House and the 1992 MS-DOS-born Alone in the Dark as predecessors.
Resident Evil proved to be a new beast thanks to its perfect convergence of elements: its graphics, its ambiance, its game play, its characters, and its association with the very hot PlayStation. Resident Evil would go on to make Capcom a whole hell of a lot of bank, becoming a franchise as iconic and vital as Street Fighter.
Further proof of RE's success comes not just from officially branded spinoffs and sequels but rather the stylistic copycats that appeared in its wake: Parasite Eve, Silent Hill, Dino Crisis, Blue Stinger, and Galerians.
1. E3 1995: Sony unveils the PlayStation One.
One of the most tantalizing what-ifs in video game history goes back to the late 1980s when Sony and Nintendo were in collusion to launch to a Sony-built CD-ROM add-on to the Super Nintendo.
Things soon went sour between the corporations and Nintendo moved onto a partnership with Philips to collaborate with games for the Philips CD-i, but a jilted Sony would not be deterred from its efforts to get into the gaming hardware business.
At the very first edition of E3, Sony showed off its 32-bit PlayStation—the system that would soon yield the most thrilling and innovative games of the remaining half-decade.
The Sony PlayStation would cost $299. That absolutely critical maneuver paired with Sony's cutting-edge library of games set the stage for the company's impending domination through its inaugural console.