"I'll write the Square's Final Fantasy VII piece. Remember to put that summon beast screenshot on the front page."
"Who's going to type in the Nintendo press release? They didn't even give us a floppy disk!"
"Find someone fast at typing. I need to re-watch the Ghost in the Shell trailer from Sega. How do you spell that Bulgarian chorus part again?"
Everyone grabbed a stack of documents and settled in front of their computers.
The rhythmic clatter of keyboards filled the rooms.
In Los Angeles, where some media outlets had local offices, the situation was slightly better, but not by much.
The NetGeneration editorial office was brightly lit.
The Editor-in-Chief stood in the middle of the office, holding a freshly printed E3 Exhibition schedule covered in red circles.
"Listen up, team." The Editor-in-Chief clapped his hands. "There's too much information to process in one night. We need to change our strategy."
The staff paused their typing and looked up at him.
"First, put out a preliminary report. Compile a table listing all the games announced today, their platforms, and release dates. Include the most impactful screenshots—like that Toy Story CGI and the live photo of Maldini."
"What about the detailed reviews?" someone asked.
"Save the detailed reviews for next week's special issue. Tonight's priority is speed. Readers need to know what happened in Los Angeles right away. We can discuss how scary that zombie's headturner is after they've digested this list."
While the media in Los Angeles were scrambling, the Editor-in-Chiefs in New York and Tokyo were also facing their own challenges.
At the Famitsu editorial office in Tokyo, where it was daytime due to the time difference, the Editor-in-Chief sat at his desk, listening to a long-distance call from across the ocean.
"Yes, Sega unveiled Yakuza, a gangster-themed game. There was also ProSoccerWorld, with Maldini himself attending the event. Square showed a live demo of Final Fantasy VII running on the Jupiter platform. Yes, all the footage is on these two optical discs."
The Editor-in-Chief rubbed his temples.
He had anticipated a flood of news on the first day of the E3 Exhibition when the official guidebook was released at E3. After withholding announcements for over half a year, the companies were bound to flex their muscles at this dedicated showcase.
But he hadn't anticipated the sheer volume would be this overwhelming.
"Can we transfer the materials from the optical disc?" he asked.
"It's too big. The transatlantic bandwidth can't handle it. We can only send a few key screenshots compressed," the voice on the other end of the line sounded weary. "We'll fax the text as soon as possible."
The Editor-in-Chief hung up and looked at the editors idling in the office.
These editors had been on standby to support the coverage, but now they were left with nothing to do.
Without the materials from Los Angeles, they couldn't do anything.
"Don't just sit around," the Editor-in-Chief stood up. "Go gather the past year's financial reports and hardware sales data for Sega, Sony, and Nintendo. Once the briefing from Los Angeles comes in, we'll immediately compile a quick report with this background data. After that, start planning the special issue we'd discussed earlier."
The first night of E3 belonged to caffeine, the rhythmic tapping of keyboards, and the buzzing of fax machines.
This wasn't just the first dedicated carnival for the video game industry; it was also the most information-dense night game journalists had ever experienced.
Whether at makeshift desks in Los Angeles hotels or in editorial offices in New York and Tokyo, everyone was burning the midnight oil for the same goal.
The major publishers had laid their cards on the table.
Now it was up to the media to translate these cards into language players could understand, to be printed in tomorrow's magazines and newspapers.
Early on the morning of June 10th, as a hint of gray-blue still lingered in the Los Angeles sky, the first customers arrived at the street-side newspaper kiosk.
Old Joe untied bundles of the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, stacking them prominently.
The front page was dominated by political and economic news, but in the lower right corner of the business section, a sizable chunk of space was dedicated to an industry that rarely appeared in such a prominent position.
The headline was bold and eye-catching: "Video Games Step Out of the Shadows: A Ten-Billion-Dollar Industry Gets Its Own Carnival."
A businessman in a trench coat dropped a coin and picked up a newspaper.
He glanced at the business section out of habit, then stopped walking.
"These companies that make those pixelated characters—can they really host their own trade shows now?" He pointed to the newspaper photo: a giant E3 poster fluttering outside the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Old Joe, who was counting change, didn't even look up. "The paper says the industry's total revenue surpassed movie box office receipts last year. They're rolling in cash now."
The businessman shook his head, folded the newspaper, and stuffed it into his briefcase. To traditional adults like him, video games had always been either freebies tucked away in the corner of the electronics department at department stores, or toys children nagged their parents to buy for Christmas.
Today's article officially stamped the industry with the label of mainstream business.
Mainstream media journalists slept soundly last night.
They didn't need to understand the difference between polygons and pre-rendered computer graphics, nor care about the distinctions between the Super Famicom and the Jupiter.
All they needed to report was the scale of the exhibition, the market capitalization of the participating companies, and a few quotes about the future of entertainment, and a standard industry news article was complete.
In contrast, the night had been hellish for the staff of gaming media outlets.
At 8 a.m., urgent bulletins from several leading gaming magazines arrived at major retail stores and newsstands.
GamePro and Electronic Gaming Monthly broke tradition by printing single-page, fast-track summaries to be inserted into their regular issues.
Meanwhile, on Silicon Valley Online BBS and blogs, users had already uploaded fragmented text reports from the event, transmitted over dial-up connections, to forums and personal homepages.
Outside an electronics game store in downtown, a group of high school students huddled together, craning their necks to stare at a freshly purchased summary flyer.
"Square is putting Final Fantasy VII on Jupiter? This says it's real 3D gameplay!" A boy in a baseball cap pointed at the line, his voice pitching up an octave.
"Look here—Capcom has a zombie game called Resident Evil, rated Mature. And Sony's WipEout! Namco is porting Tekken straight to PlayStation!"
The flyer was packed with dense, essential information.
Sega's Toy Story was developed in collaboration with Pixar. Hideo Kojima's MGS2 showcased cinematic-level stealth gameplay. Nintendo's Yoshi's Island debuted a completely new art style.
The youths' eyes shone with an alarming intensity.
They were accustomed to seeing three or four major game announcements in magazines each year, but now a single day's news contained as much information as two years' worth of past releases.
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