|
E3
Madness 2004! The Jason Schachat Floor Report
A strange
e-mail showed up in my box this afternoon. We didn't recognize
the name "Steve Sprinkles," but upon closer examination,
we've managed to piece together that this is Jason Schachat's
first dispatch from E3, laboriously crafted on a cell phone
and text messaged to us. He would have reported in earlier,
but he was too busy votiing for Rupert.
I was late, but the day began way too early. Whoever came
up with the crazy idea to start a gamer’s con at nine
in the morning should be strung up by their thumbs.
Not
that this is a gamer’s con. This is business, dammit.
Business with mountains of swag and even more deliciously
mountainous booth bunnies.
My dreaded
associate Mr. Sprinkles accompanied me through the gates
as we dove into the swollen rivers of gamers like excited
wildebeest. It doesn’t take long to go deaf from all
the rumbling sub-woofers and chortling machine gun fire,
but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. Your eyes
take a bit longer, but they eventually start vibrating from
the rapid successions of spotlights followed by the dim
illumination of glowing Hi-Def screens followed by yet more
flashing lights.
Thank
god epileptics are culled from the gaming scene during childhood
encounters with flickering Japanese sidescrollers. Why,
they could ruin the fun for the rest of us.
However,
rather than simply enjoy ourselves in this mayhem, Mr. Sprinkles
forces us along to the Nokia N-Gage
booth.
Booth,
my ass.
I’ve
seen booths before and this was no booth. Massive domes
risings out of the earth are not booths. Giant metal structures
bristling with laserlights and video projectors are not
booths. Fog filled temples housing raised altars to electronic
warfare are not booths. This was a shrine. A shrine to all
things shiny.
Sprinkles
recorded the glorious and terrible sight with his arsenal
of digicams, knowing full well that no mere machine could
hope to hold such a spectacle. At least I think he did.
Maybe he just likes cameras. Maybe he needed backups to
ensure he filled up his latest booth bunny scrapbook.
And,
lord, were there a lot of booth bunnies. As in any social
situation, they were grossly outnumbered by the endless
ranks of shaved apes that comprise the gaming world, some
not so shaved as others. Still, there were enough bunnies
in and out of costume to create confusion over who was a
model and who was someone’s girlfriend. If she was
holding a battleaxe, the matter became slightly less puzzling.
Now,
it’s a well known fact that the success of a booth/crazy
doom fortress lacking any early buzz depends on two things:
the size of your big screen and the abilities of your booth
bunnies. If you fail in one arena, you MUST excel in another.
After
Mr. Sprinkles recorded the supreme badness (which is goodness)
of the spinning, sliding, rotating N-Gage videos, we split
up to cover more territory and I came upon a perfect illustration
of cunning strategic use of bunnies.
The
Namco console game “booth” took up a good amount
of floorspace. They had a decent game demo setup, but most
of the area was taken up by a large, thrusting stage they
had erected and an equally sizable space in front of the
theater. Their demo games were doing modestly well, but
bigger things were going on across the aisle. Half-Life 2,
probably the most buzzed game of the exhibition, was being
shown in a tiny little theater just across the aisle. A
human maze wrapped itself around the booth, standing giving
way to leaning, leaning giving way to sitting. They looked
like an army of Buddha statues on bulk sale, all waiting
for a glorious new game that wasn’t even finished
yet.
So what
does Namco do?
A piercing
voice breaks through the thrumming in everyone’s ears.
An entire legion of bouncing booth bunnies take the stage
and begin gyrating to pulsing music. Music stops. The voice
of the head bunny calls out once more. T-shirts fly out
into the growing audience. The dance begins anew, luscious
hair tosses left and right.
The
outer ranks of the Half-Life 2 line break off like that
little tab that keeps your batteries from falling out of
your remote control. The once empty audience area floods
with manflesh as the bunnies bump and grind. Something primal
is in the air. It’s disguised by the ditzy pop music
and cheap t-shirts, but you can feel it. The bunnies strut
and prance with the unmeaning but unavoidable air of a fertility
rite. On the one hand, it’s a Laker Girls routine.
On the other... I can’t say.
But
for fifteen minutes, Namco owns the hall.
As with
all things, the dance comes to an end and the bunnies rush
off. The gamers scan the area for their vanished sirens,
lips trembling like lost children until boredom starts to
set in. Half-Life 2’s line swells once more and the
day continues as it was before.
But,
man, what a fifteen minutes.
For
more of Jason's fifteen minutes, go here...
|
