E3 2007: The E3 Eulogy B-Side

When the Gamecock boys announced they would be holding a eulogy for E3, many scoffed, many scratched their heads in bewilderment, and a few even coughed uncomfortably and shifted in their seats. After all, what did an indie publisher know about an event that vanished from existence before they were formed? Proving exactly how prescient the Gamecock boys are though, they had the foresight to get other people to make asses of themselves on their behalf, and with that in mind, they tapped our very own Boss Bot Niero to eulogize the mo’f***er.

You’ve already seen how it actually went down, but The Boss also thought you should have a special behind-the-scenes look at what the eulogy was originally planned to be. Once Niero realized exactly what he had signed up for he panicked and was unfit for anything other than drinking heavily and crying into the lonely night, and I was called upon to exhume the corpse of Oscar Wilde and see just how much wit I could shake out of his desiccated bones. From that decrepit corpse flowed the original draft of the eulogy, which you can find after the jump.

For the first time this year, we’ll be spending the summer months without the warm embrace of the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Certainly, the warmer months will not seem the same without thousands of sweaty people bordering on exhaustion rubbing up against each other in an orgy of poor hygiene and sexual repression, but I’d like to think E3 would want us to carry on. It would advise us to live each day to the fullest, and not mourn its passing; nay, instead it would want us to proudly carry on, bags of cheap merchandise in hand, and remember the good times we once had.

My relationship with E3 was, at times, a tumultuous one. From the first time we met, we knew there was a special connection, but like Romeo and Juliet, or Ike and Tina, we found ourselves constantly starcrossed and destined to break one another’s hearts. I recall one particularly hot summer in the City of Angels — 1994, I believe — I was a young Robot with dreams of making it big in a city covered in bountiful teats on which to suckle, and E3 took me under her wing. We spent the days enraptured with developer news, booth babes with more interest in Eddie Vedder than the Sony PlayStation and the scent of fermenting nerd, but the nights … well, the nights were ours. I can’t count how many evenings I spent lying in the fake grass of Los Angeles, whispering to her of my forbidden desires to fill her cavernous convention hall  with myself, and my friends (often at the same time).

Sadly, though, ’twas not to be. Her parents would never have approved of her robosexual tendencies, and I found love in the steely embrace of a cargo ship bound for Cuba. We remained in close contact, but things were never quite the same. While I would still visit her every year, the spark was gone, and she had changed. The last time we spoke, she had become pregnant with the child of an abusive games industry. She had changed from the majestic, strong woman I once knew to a harlot whose existence consisted of cooking dinner and catching drunken beatings from an uncaring Peter Molyneux. It pained me to see her so, and I was forced to cut off contact.

When I heard of her passing last year, I was stunned. She always seemed like the kind who wouldn’t roll over and die so easily, but after years of abuse, the games industry had finally crossed a line. When the coroner asked me to come in and identify the body, I found her lying on a cold slab; her body was bloated from years of neglect, her hair a mess, and all traces of the beauty I once knew had been wiped clean by the continual physical assault she had been subject to. I cried that day, long and hard, and I swore from then on that I would keep her memory alive, not the memory of her final, hobbled days, but the memory of the caring woman who, was, in fact, a video game exposition.

With that in mind, ladies and gentlemen I ask you to keep her memory alive. Whenever you see the glimmer of hope in a child’s eyes or you unwrap the latest copy of John Madden Presents Watership Down 2009, remember that without E3, none of us would have crabs.

Thank you.