This Is Where I Came In

A news item crossed my desk in recent days that took me back to my early days with TWICE and my first Consumer Electronics Show years ago.

I was surprised to hear that the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3Expo) has decided to change its format and move it away from a traditional trade show to something like RetailVision, which is being held this week: one-on-one meetings with some press conferences.

E3Expo, which had been held in recent years in Los Angeles during the spring, was announced in 1993 and began in 1994. At the time video game makers felt they needed their own show, i.e. they thought the Consumer Electronics Association and CES took them for granted. I remember the impromptu TWICE staff meeting at an Acclaim hospitality suite during Summer CES in 1993, my first show with the publication, when former senior editor Jim Willcox came over and told myself, founding editor Bob Gerson, and others the news.

We thought the news was pretty bleak for CES, especially the Summer event, where plenty of video game software and hardware manufacturers exhibited. While E3Expo wasn't the key reason for the demise of Summer CES, it didn't help either.

Fast forward over the next dozen years, E3Expo survived and thrived. And International CES grew dramatically, especially the last couple of years, and has had a fair share of game exhibitors too, with Sony and Microsoft making their presence felt.

Now E3Expo is going in another direction and CEA, seeing an opportunity, is exploring the possibility of running a game show, next spring on the West Coast. (See story, right.)

After covering trade shows in a couple of other industries I first attended Winter CES in 1982 as reporter for a toy trade magazine to cover the relatively new video game market. (The 2007 event marks 25 years since I attended my first CES!) While it may seem like false praise since TWICE and CEA have worked closely over the years as partners on the Official CES Daily and other projects, I can honestly say that year after year CES is the best run show I have ever attended in my career.

If enough companies in the game industry still want a traditional trade show they could do no better than to go back to its roots and have CEA run a show for them.

Maybe I'm in a nostalgic mood because as we were preparing this issue we were also putting final touches on our 20th anniversary issue, to be published Aug. 28. This is not a regular issue of TWICE, but a special edition that will look back at the last two decades of this industry and try to take a look forward at what may happen in the near future. We hope it will be informative as well as entertaining.

We will be back with a regular edition of TWICE on Sept. 4. As always, check www.TWICE.com and subscribe to our weekly e-newsletter for late breaking news.