I met a kid in high school who ran a Nintendo review/fansite and pestered him into letting me write for it. We tried getting passes for E3 but 18 was the minimum age for press at the time so we settled for covering the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas for a couple years since their minimum was only 16.
Eventually we made it to E3 just in time for the last original show in 2006. Honestly, looking back CES ended up being the more interesting show just because of the greater amount and wider range of stuff on display, but E3 was still a bucket-list item for me. From the first time I read about the show in an issue of PSM in elementary school it was a goal of mine to attend.
I saw the newly-unveiled PS3 on display, I played Tabula Rasa and Hellgate: London, but most stuff like the Nintendo booth had hours-long lines and I was more interested in collecting swag and seeing as much of the floor as possible.
I met the Penny Arcade guys, the VGcats guy, Stan Lee was signing issues of GameInformer for some reason. They were supposedly cracking down on booth babes but I still found some to stare at at the R6: Vegas booth and the Bandai-Namco booth(where I answered some trivia and won some Naruto action figure that I immediately turned around and sold to somebody in the crowd for lunch money, which helped with the $12 pretzels they sold at the LACC since they didn’t offer free lunch to the press like they did at CES.)
I ended up getting thrown out by my dad because he had forbidden me from going since I had to skip a week of school for it, but it was still worth it. It had been a dream of mine since I was a kid and considering they downsized it the next year I made it just in time, and even when it “came back” it was less of a trade show and more just a convention open to the public.
The show’s been more and more irrelevant each year for more than a decade and it lost a lot of the prestige or mystique when it opened to the public, and I haven’t even really followed the show since G4 went off the air and all coverage went online, but it’s still sad to see it go.
RIP F in the chat for E3.