 E3 is over, and it's not something I wanted to say. I don't even know exactly how this video is going to go because E3 was special to me for a number of reasons, and I guess we'll probably recap why E3 was so special to me both as a gamer and as a content creator and what I think the future of the industry holds. After all, we haven't had E3 since 2019, so it's not like this is a new thing. It's been four years. I mean, technically they had E3 in 2020, an all-digital one, but look, E3 hasn't been E3 since 2019. And there are some other events out there that sort of replaced what E3 was, but there's not really anything that's ever gonna be what E3 used to be, and that means that this is the end of an era officially. Obviously, we kinda saw the official ending coming once the pandemic hit and we did the all-digital E3 in 2020, but truly, they are no longer even going to attempt to do it as they announced on Twitter. So before I dive into this, I just wanna let you know that while this is a deeply personal thing that we're gonna be talking about when it comes to my feelings on E3, I would appreciate if you were subscribed to the channel. We're not gonna do any fancy cookie drops or eggplant drops or anything right now. I don't really feel like joking around much because E3 was very, very impactful for me, both for my career here on YouTube and just as a gamer. Look, we all know, at least if you're around my age in your 30s and 40s, that growing up for us for a couple of decades, E3 was like gamer Christmas. It's when every major company would come and show their best, show us the future of gaming. But before you leave, I'd like you to step inside one more world for Nintendo Gaming. Thank you. In fact, you can argue my entire channel is almost built around the premise of what E3 is. What do I always say is my favorite thing to do, talk about possibilities and talk about upcoming releases and upcoming technological things happening in the video game industry. And so since I love talking so much about what's to come, E3 was literally the perfect amalgamation of what this channel is and what I was like growing up. In many ways, I can argue my channel is built off of the legacy of E3. E3 was gamer Christmas. It's where Nintendo, Sony, Xbox, Dreamcast, and all the other big companies, whether it was Ubisoft or EA or WB or 2K, it didn't really matter. All the companies would come together, all the big names and yes, even some smaller studios and not only give us a bunch of showcases, right? The infinite amount of in-person and eventual digital showcases that, hey, we still technically get some of those showcases to this day, just more spread out throughout the year where they would show us what was next. We also got to play them. And if you were obviously in the media, you got to go hands-on with demos for these games. For the rest of us, we got to watch gameplay of those demos, whether it was online, whether we got to hear about it in magazines back in the 90s and early 2000s. Either way, it was really nice to see. Sometimes you would even get to turn on something like Spike TV or G4 and get a nice look inside back in the day to E3. They would have a live camera feed of E3 and it was just a really cool thing to watch. And then obviously, as we got older or as I got older and I've been in this industry for a while doing journalism stuff and all that at like Zelda Informer and a few other websites, I was afforded the opportunity in 2016 before I really did this whole YouTube thing to attend E3 as a journalist. I got to go in 2016, which considering I was editor-in-chief of Zelda Informer, it was really the perfect year to go since Nintendo only brought one game and that was Breath of the Wild. And at the time, there was a lot of criticism online that Nintendo was only doing this one game. And it turns out, hey, can Nintendo really carry an E3 with one title? And it turns out, yes, yes, they absolutely could carry E3 with one title. And they did it in 2016. They built Hyrule inside of the LA Convention Center. And it's still today one of the coolest booths I've ever experienced. And I've been to E3 three times, seen a number of booths. It was very interactive. Yes, you had your statues and your Hyrule built all around you, but like you would stand in certain spots and it would begin thunderstorms inside the entire booth and everyone in the booth would be affected by it. And there was just so much coolness going on with that booth. And obviously, Breath of the Wild being as special as it was, I played the demo over a dozen times while there. Yes, both when I got to get my little media tour and go up to the media section, I didn't stop playing it. I kept going back and standing in the line for two to three hours for one demo session. I would try to get three or four demo sessions in a day. So I tried to get in early with my media access so I could get in line right away. And then as soon as I got done playing, I would turn right around and get right back in line and just do that on repeat for three, four days in a row. I really, really enjoyed that. But when we talk about E3 and it being Gamer Christmas, it was really just about the promise of tomorrow. And again, as I said, my YouTube channel here has really been about that. But E3 became more special to me when I got to go in 2018. And look, we were entering the era of Sony leaving E3 and it was never really gonna feel quite the same without one of the major console players there. We still had Microsoft and Nintendo supporting the event even if Microsoft was moving into their own building. The interesting part here in 2018 was that I was now a YouTuber, officially at this point, a YouTuber wasn't doing it full time or anything crazy like that, had other jobs and stuff. But I was actually making as close to daily content as I could. It was pretty simplistic content. A lot of voice over still images because we couldn't use trailers back then. Thanks Nintendo, all these whitelistic games. It was really dumb. And Nintendo would take part of your revenue, so that was fun. But we also did live streams and stuff and that's really probably where my community thrived was in those live streams. Since, you know, I was making more content than live streams, but the content was kind of simple. I kind of blame Nintendo, they really limited us. But here's the thing. Back then, I got to go to E3 2018 and I was able to go because of you guys, the people watching this channel. We had fan donations come in that basically supported the entire trip. Now one particular person, Be Righteous, supported a vast majority of the trip with some mega donations. But the point is we got to go to E3 as Nintendo Prime. And when I say we, it was me and Eric, the co-host of the Nintendo Prime podcast. We went to E3 2018 and that was special because for the first time, we weren't going representing someone else's company. We weren't going representing anyone but ourselves. We were there as Nintendo Prime. And 2018 was the Smash Bros. E3, right? They had the Smash Bros. tournaments there. Smash was a really big theme for Nintendo. I think Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee were there. I remember sneaking some footage of things we weren't supposed to record because you weren't allowed to record the demo at all. I remember sneaking some footage in while I was standing in lines, getting scolded a few times, just like I bring you guys a little extra coverage of that. I remember when I played Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee, I went into the dev menu. I didn't realize that's what I was about to do. And I think we caught a glimpse of that on camera. They weren't really happy. I'm like, what, all I did was hit the plus button. I hit the pause button. I was like, hey, I wanted to see my inventory and turns out that just opened the dev menu and they quickly ran at me. But that was sort of the antithesis of E3 demos is they were unfinished. They were raw cuts. There wasn't barriers in place. This wasn't like going to GameStop, Walmart, Target, playing game demos there. You were playing literal unfinished products where these demos were cobbled together in a way it was very easy to break the demos and very easy to gain access to things that you're not supposed to. And I got to experience that firsthand with the Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu, Let's Go Eevee demo. But it was really cool. Nintendo had a lot of merch all over the place. You know, you had a lot of, Nintendo had a lot of, you know, statues and stuff behind glass cases and really just cool things to look at. You can probably see a lot of this stuff now at Nintendo World and a lot of the stuff, obviously, at the Nintendo Museum that's opening next year. So yeah, Nintendo's obviously given us other ways to take in this stuff. But to me, it wasn't just Nintendo. You had all the other companies, you know, DOOM and stuff like that to play at E3. Look, it was just a very magical time. And while I spent all this time talking about my experience, obviously with the demos and all that stuff and we have all the showcases, it also brought the community together. A lot of YouTubers that I converse with to this day, I met Addy3, Super Metal Dave64 as an example. Met him at E3. I know you guys might go, what about Andres Restart or something? Technically, we met Pax East of this year. Didn't know him at all as a content creator back in those days. But there's just been a lot of, like I met Bob Wolfe back then, from Wolfe then, before he was like a mega deal. I met him at, I think it was the E3 2018. And you'd be around people from like IGN and Kotaku and you'd see Reggie walking literally into the crowd conversing with fans or even Doug Bowser, you know, while he wasn't obviously the top dog, you would see him there. You'd see Bill Trinnin, Miyamoto just walking on the show floor, like being, you know, a few feet from the creator of Mario in Zelda. And it's just a casual thing. He's just walking by doing his job. Just incredible feeling that you are in the same building. You are in the presence of all these great minds. Kojima, I was really close to Kojima at one point. Tim Schaefer, I practically was breathing on top of the guy. We were right next to each other. It was insane the amount of people that you would just bump into at E3, whether it was content creators, game developers, producers. It was a unique thing because it brought everyone together. Media, it was awesome. And it was an experience I'll never forget because E3 2018, I tried my best to do the very best coverage I could. I think that's the year I did the infamous just dance thing where I went up on the stage. It was always a bucket list item for me to go to E3 and do the just dance thing up on the stage. I did it. No, I wasn't skinny back then. I was the big man on stage. I went for it. I gave it my all and I had a lot of fun. Don't know how well I did because it wasn't like they were really keeping track. It was fun. And I got to go again obviously for the final year of E3 and I'm glad I went the final year. The final year wasn't a for sure thing that we were going to go, but it came together at the end and we ended up going to E3 2019. And it was really special there as well. That's where we got to play Luigi's match in three. And the funny thing is Link's Awakening. That was at E3. What's also interesting is the final demo I played at that E3 was Hollow Knight Silk Song. And that game's still not out. So it's kind of fun that the final game I played at E3 is still a game that hasn't come out. So I still got to play something that pretty much none of you got an opportunity to play. So I still have that on you guys from E3. I still have one game I played. You guys haven't played from E3 yet, sadly, but hopefully it'll be coming out in 2024. Of course we said that last year coming into 2023 when it was at the Xbox event and everything was supposed to drop in the next six months and then Hollow Knight Silk Song not only didn't drop in the next six months it didn't even drop in the next year or year and a half. So we're still waiting on that one. But I'm gonna miss E3. And I actually have missed E3 this entire time if I'm being completely honest. Look, Jeff Keely does his thing with the Summer Game Fest and he has his Summer Days of Play event as well where he does have game demos and some of the big companies do come out to that but it's not, you know, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. They're not, I don't think ever gonna come together for a single event. Gamescom is still a thing out in Germany and that's probably the closest thing to E3 now but Gamescom isn't treated the same. E3 was all about let's announce things for the future. Gamescom is more about these are things already announced and coming soon, typically. So I am a little sad today. Obviously Nintendo has their directs. Sony has their, what are they called? State of Plays, right? Xbox has their, not only directs, they have Xbox directs. They also have their other, I forget what their other digital event is. Nintendo did move on and do a Nintendo Live this year. There's one for Japan but they canceled and gonna move it around. We'll see what happens with that next year. Maybe we'll have another Nintendo Live next year. There's, you know, going to be other events. Obviously Jeff Keely's Summer Game Fest and the days of play, the summer days of play has are the closest thing to what E3 used to be but it's still very grassroots. It's still like not there. As an example, Nintendo hasn't even shown a big game at Summer Game Fest ever. Like they'd just never really been part of it. They've had some ads at Summer Game Fest but they've never given them a big game reveal. Maybe that'll change moving forward. Maybe Nintendo always thought E3 was gonna come back. They, after all, Nintendo was committed to E3 when it was supposedly gonna happen in 2021. They were committed to an in-person event that didn't happen. So maybe that's why Nintendo didn't wanna put all their eggs in the Jeff Keely basket. Now it kinda seems that between that and the game awards, I mean the game awards might even be the closest thing to what the E3 showcases used to be in that we get shown a bunch of games like OD and Monster Hunter and games coming out in 2025. And that might be the closest thing we get and that obviously doesn't feel like the same thing when it was always just bat to bat to bat to bat, game showcases. I'm gonna miss that. And again, Summer Game Fest is the closest we have but it's not going to ever truly be what E3 is. I don't think it's going to become that. E3 is sort of a relic of the past but I also think it's a relic that could have still served a purpose if it was handled correctly. The ESA really dropped the ball on that. I'm gonna miss it, guys. Like I'm getting emotional thinking about it. The trips Eric and I did, you know, going out to LA, you know, the hotel stays, the people, the food, the fun, the games, the announcements. Man, nothing's gonna ever replace it. So rest in PC3. I know I already dearly miss you after four years and I always just kept that faint hope that maybe just maybe they'll try it one more time. Anyways, thank you guys so much for tuning in. I'm Nathanne Rovell-Janice from Nintendo Prime. Catch you in the next video.