E3 2005: Hardware Preview

Hardware - Sam looks over new hardware on offer at the conference

It is that time of year again when the whole gaming community goes a little bit nuts. Yes, it's the middle of May and that means it's E3 time. E3 has been the centre of the gaming world's year since the very first show grabbed a joystick and wiggled like fury back in 1995. Apart from the Christmas sales period there’s no more important a time in the games industry's calendar than right now. It's at E3 that all the games and hardware that will be entertaining punters in the months and years ahead are revealed. Eager gaming fans are often kept in the dark until E3 rolls around before they learn anything concrete about the latest instalment of their favourite franchise or the plans of the console manufacturers. E3 is without a doubt the single most important event for the marketing of computer and video games, but it hasn't always been this way.

E3 was born out of the need for a separate gaming show that would give games the amount of attention that the rapidly ballooning industry deserved. Before E3 came along there was the Consumer Electronic Show, an event which, as the name implies, encompassed just about every aspect of consumer electronics. Games were initially a relatively small part of the show, but as the market increased in size a consortium of companies realised the need for an event dedicated to the marketing and selling of computer and video games. The first E3 was held ten years ago between May 11th and 13th at the Los Angeles Convention Center, a venue which, apart from a two-year interval in Atlanta, has remained the home of the expo ever since. The LACC is one of the most expansive exhibition halls in the US, containing as it does 870,000 square feet of floor space, 64 meeting rooms and a plethora of lobbies, restaurants and bars. Over the years, E3 has expanded to fill up practically every nook and cranny of the convention centre. Split into five main halls - Concourse, Kentia, Petree, South, and West, the LACC gets stuffed with a bewildering array of exhibitors, all vying to grab the notice of passing attendees from the various industries that attend. Publishers to developers through hardware manufactuers and the media, everyone and anyone that is involved in the gaming trade does their best to trek over to LA each and every May. Every trick known to man is used to entice visitors. From the famous booth babes to a cacophony of light and sound, attendees at the show are bombarded from the moment they pick up their passes to the time they eventually slope off in search of somewhere a little closer to home and a lot more peaceful. The general consensus is that E3 is a necessary event but one that now distorts the rest of the gaming calendar, not least because of the deleterious effect all the visual and aural stimulation has on those attending the show.

It was at that earliest E3 in 1995 that Sony originally revealed to the world its first foray into the console market, the Playstation. Nintendo were showing off their doomed Virtual Boy curiosity and Sega were showing off their equally ill-fated Saturn console. Ten years on and Sony will be revealing to the world for the first time their highly anticipated PS3, while Nintendo have promised to break their silence over the nature of their next home console, code-named the Revolution. A small company called Microsoft will be showing off its next entrant into this highly contested market, the Xbox 360, while a number of other firms will also have new hardware with which they hope to impress the tens of thousands of attendees at this year's expo.

With so much attention focused on the upcoming revelations of the big three console makers, the humble PC is struggling to get itself noticed in the run-up to this year's show. While consoles are both more glamorous and widespread as gaming machines than their beige brethren, the PC is still the most powerful gaming platform that money can buy. While it can be said that the next-generation consoles will be able to match the power of all but the very best of current gaming PCs, the static nature of a console’s internal architecture ensures that it will not take long for PCs to regain their place at the top of the heap. Many of the innovations in gaming come originate on the PC platform, especially when one is talking about raw computational power. While the graphics of the next-gen consoles will initially wow, they will soon pale in comparison to what a PC is able to achieve.