Introduction

While E3 may be getting a makeover to a smaller and more intimate affair for 2007 I decided to look back at the 10 previous E3 I attended to remember how the video-PC game show used to be like; huge, loud and filled with tons of people. On Tuesday I looked back from 1997 to 2001 and today we look back at the last five E3 shows.

E3 2002

It was all about Doom 3 at this edition of E3. id Software's next game in their premiere first person shooter series blow folks away who saw it behind a theater set up and it won a ton of E3 awards. While the E3 demo blew people away the final product was considered to be a disappointment when it was finally released in 2004. LucasArts showed off a number of games at their appointment only suite but two of them, Sam and Max and Full Throttle 2, got canceled a few months later as the company decided to get out of making adventure games that was a huge part of the publisher's success in the mid 1990s.

The three main console makers showed off their second generation games for their respective consoles and two of them, Microsoft and Sony, revealed their plans for online gameplay. Microsoft officially announced Xbox Live at E3, which gave users a $49.99 per year fee to play multiplayer games like Mechassault. Sony's pre-E3 press conference has Sony execs proudly proclaiming that "the console war is over" with over 30 million PS2 shipped worldwide after two years. It also revealed its plans for online which was free to play but required buying a $50 network adapter. SOCOM was demoed again at the pre-E3 press conference along with other games. Nintendo charged back with the impressive first person action-adventure game Metroid Prime and showed off for the first time the unusual cell shaded Zelda game that had even the Nintendo faithful scratching their heads.

Looking back at E3 2002 its amazing to think about the number of games shown that turned out to be major hits. Battlefield 1942 was off in one corner of the EA booth. The free America's Army game was officially revealed at E3, complete with real US Army personnel demoing the title. Microsoft announced Ninja Gaiden as an Xbox exclusive. In short E3 2002 was all about the games and the game services and less about the hardware.

E3 2003

While Doom 3 got the lions share of attention at the previous show, E3 2003 was all about Half-Life 2. The game, revealed publicly just a few months beforehand, was shown in a closed theater and it was spectacular to see the impressive animation and the attention to detail that at the time were miles away from what other games were looking like. Developer Valve Software proudly proclaimed at the show that the game was on track to be released in September of 2003; it was a declaration that would haunt them as both delays and a theft of their engine code by a hacker would cause the game to miss that release date by over a year. However the demo at E3 was enough for Half-Life 2 to get the game tons of E3 awards.

The other major surprise of E3 2003 was the announcement of the Playstation Portable, or PSP, at Sony's pre-E3 press conference, The announcement of Sony's entry into the arena where Nintendo was supreme caught even the most experienced game journalists off guard with its advanced graphical technology. The PSP wouldn't debut in the US for almost two years after the E3 announcement but back then Sony was king of the console hill and could do no wrong.

Not all the announcements went over well. Nokia decided to hold a big press conference to reveal the pricing of their N-Gage mobile phone gaming device. The design of the device looked awful and the graphics for the games were sub-par. A $299 price tag for the N-Gage also failed to generate excitement even though it was revealed by a model pulling off her top to reveal the price written on her abs. Nintendo didn't have a spectacular pre-E3 press conference either. Their big reveal was a 3D Pac-Man game where people could also control the ghosts. Nintendo tried to make the case that hooking the GBA up to their Gamecube to get extra content was better than online multiplayer but folks were not buying it.

Other notable games shown at E3 2003 was the impressive first person shooter Far Cry, and the UbiSoft re-imagined Prince of Persia title. Capcom got people's attention with the Gamecube exclusive Resident Evil 4 and Konami impressed folks with the Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. A few journalists, myself included, got to go to the Playboy Mansion to see an early build of the Sims like game Playboy: The Mansion, a game that wouldn't get released for nearly two years. One game that didn't get a ton of attention at E3 was Call of Duty, an Activision WWII shooter that many saw as a copy of EA's Medal of Honor series. It turned out to be one of the best games of the year.