THE E3 DEMO: WORTHWHILE?

Believe it or not, the E3 Expo is less than two weeks away – press appointments have been booked, the booths have been shipped to Atlanta, and most importantly, there are a lot of game developers who are burning the midnight oil trying to finish off their demos for the show. Since most of the games shown won’t ship until the end of the year, development teams have to spend weeks putting together a special demo for E3 that is polished and looks finished. Whereas other industries can get away with showing a certain element of a product at trade shows (i.e. most consumer goods can just be shown as a mock-up), the nature of game development dictates that many different elements need to come together to create an E3 demo. 

In many cases, games that have only been under development for a few weeks are shown at E3. The demo looks nice on the show floor, but the information we aren’t conscious of is often the fact that a group of programmers and artists spent 20-hours-a-day for the past few weeks cranking out a demo which is useless once the show closes. Why is it useless? Well, most teams work so hard to just get the demo working perfectly, they often forget about the real game by instead concentrating on optimizing one level for demonstration. Programmers will take shortcuts just to make the demo work, but after the show they have to go back and fix up their hacks into the code.

In many cases, the deadline for getting an E3 demo together comes right down to the wire, with companies flying developers in the night before the show with a gold CD-ROM in hand. In many cases, this can backfire, as those demonstrating the product don’t even know what they’re showing. For example, at the first E3 four years ago, Sega was starting to hype the Saturn and they had just flown in the AM2 developers from Japan the night before, with the first working demo of Daytona. In this case, what the press saw the first day of the show was truly hot off the CD-burner and even Sega employees were seeing it for the first time on day one of E3.

Nevertheless, creating an E3 demo has become a necessary evil – If a big game for 1998 isn’t playable on the show floor, buyers and the press start to wonder if the game has been delayed. This trend was really started back at the first E3 show when a number of developers such as Crystal Dynamics and Interplay would just run videotapes of SGI cinematic sequences for a game that is "coming soon." Whenever the press sees a videotape game demo, we know it’s in trouble – The same thing happened last year when Sony only showed videotaped gameplay of their Spawn fighting game on the PlayStation. When Spawn eventually came out last fall and bombed, it wasn't very surprising to those of us who remembered Sony was too embarrassed to show gameplay at E3. Westwood Studios also had trouble creating buzz for their Blade Runner game after E3 last year because it was only shown on a video wall.

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