Some years I see E3 coming from a mile away. This is not one of those years. I’m coming to you from Friday night, the night before my E3 2016 journey gets underway, and I haven’t started packing yet. Don’t worry about me, throwing T-shirts into a bag and throwing said bag into a car is not especially difficult. But I’ve had a lot going on lately, so splitting focus between E3 and everything else has made this year’s run up to the show a little strange. For example: I was on a call today to discuss our PAX West panel plans today. On one hand, it’s insane that I’m spending time on PAX stuff when E3 is right around the corner. On the other, this is officially the most planned our PAX panel has ever been, by default.
I’m looking forward to this year’s show. I mean, I look forward to every E3, big or small. When the show’s huge, I want to see how big it can get. When it seems like it might be shrinking, I want to go see that first-hand and figure out why. We’ve got our appointments booked, we’ve got a long list of nightshow guests, and a hotel meeting room will likely have high-speed internet and low-quality food for us to use during the show. Really, that’s all I need. I’m relatively low maintenance that way. Some years, I just subsist on awful meal replacement protein bars and energy drinks. It’s a bad way to go, but at some point you just don’t have time to think about getting anything else.
We’re doing some things during the next six days that you might want to be aware of. Much of it is already loaded into our handy Coming Soon module on the homepage, but here’s a list of events. I’m just going to list these in Pacific Daylight Time because I’m not here to do your fancy time math. The Coming Soon box, however, is here to automatically do your fancy time math.
Saturday
9AM-ish – I’ll start broadcasting audio over on my Mixlr page. I’m going to drive from here to Los Angeles with one Alex Navarro and the Beef O’Brady of video games, Danny O’Dwyer. This will pretty much go all day, but since it’s a broadcast running out of an iPad that is housed inside a speeding automobile, it isn’t the most stable show in the land. This will probably live in the Giant Bomb chat at some point, but due to lame circumstances beyond my control, I can’t launch that from here. So head over to http://mixlr.com/jeff-gerstmann/ if you want to listen.
Sunday
12:30PM – Our rough hope is to start the live shows about 30 minutes before the press conferences. EA starts at 1, we’ll be up at 12:30. Hopefully that Titanfall stuff ends up looking good.
6:30PM – We’ll be back up for Bethesda. We probably won’t cover their pre-show and I don’t think they’re going to stream the blink-182 portion of the conference, but I could be wrong. Part of me wouldn’t mind seeing a few minutes of blink-182 without Tom DeLonge fronting the band, but that dude’s dumb voice is such a key part of that band that I can’t imagine what they’d be like without it. Wouldn’t it just start to sound like (+44) or something? But I digress. They’ll probably announce a remastered Skyrim, which… sure. Why not?
After they’re done, we’re running off to see games at three separate events, which we’ll talk about at some point.
Monday
This is the big day. The day that Actually Matters. It’s the big press conference day. We’ll sit with you and take in the news.
9AM – Microsoft starts the day. They gave their staff Gears of War 4 shoes to wear during the show. I can’t imagine being expected to wear new shoes that haven’t been broken in during a multi-day convention, but now I’m going to look at the feet of every Microsoft person I see at the show, so mission accomplished, I guess. They’ll probably announce a slim Xbox One, that seems to be what the rumors are pointing to. With Sony more or less confirming that the new PS4 Neo won’t be in their conference, Microsoft could go hard here and make some pretty big, somewhat unopposed waves on the hardware side. We’ll see. I could be wrong.
12:30PM – Ubisoft has some things to say about its upcoming video games. Expect Aisha Tyler to come out wearing a T-shirt that says “#FuckVivendi.” OK, don’t actually expect that. They’ll probably talk about that Assassin’s Creed movie a bit, touch on upcoming DLC for The Division, and give you a bunch of Watch Dogs 2 stuff to watch.
5:00PM – We’ll be up for the final press conference of the show, Sony. Andrew House just got out and simultaneously confirmed that the PS4 Neo is happening and stated that it won’t play a major role in its E3 press conference. That’s probably smart, since they’ve got a lot of PlayStation VR stuff to cover, right? That thing’s out in October. Think they’ll have found a better way to show off VR games in the context of a press conference? There’ll probably be a chunk of Call of Duty campaign gameplay in here, too.
I should note that a lot of people ask us about “The PC press conference” and “why we aren’t covering that.” That’s because it’s not a press conference, it’s a sponsored event put on by PC Gamer. I heard last year’s show was heading in the right direction, hopefully they’ve got some interesting announcements lined up over there.
Tuesday
9AM – Nintendo will be up and running at 9, but it’s not a press conference. The company said it was just going to stream some of the new Zelda game, which we thought might make for a fun watch. Then I got an email that implied that they were going to start with Pokemon Sun//Moon, which is somewhat less interesting. Either way, we’ve got the hotel room, we might as well use it. Come watch the early parts of Nintendo’s Treehouse stream with us before the show floor opens for reals.
6PM – Our night of discussions opens. For the next several hours, we’ll talk amongst ourselves about the games we saw during the day and shoot the shit with a wild array of guests from around the world.
Wednesday
5PM – We’re starting the night show at 5PM on Wednesday, OK?
Thursday
6PM – E3 is officially over at this point, and we’ve got one more night of guests. How will our coverage of E3 2016 come to a close? Messily. After that, we’ll pack up as quickly as possible, get a night of sleep, and get out of Los Angeles as quickly as possible.
And… there you have it? As always, check the Coming Soon box on the right side of the homepage, as these times are somewhat subject to change. If you want to have a bad E3, trying to keep everything on a rigid schedule is the quickest way to get there.
Good luck out there and we’ll see you on the other side.
XOXO,
The Jerks from Nuke.com
