Chris Kohler runs the Wired Game|Life blog, which views the videogame industry from a technological and social point of view. Chris has been to dozens of these industry events, so we stopped him for a few questions about the experiment that was this year’s E for All.

Q: What do you think of E for All?
A: I feel like they had a lot of really big plans for this show. I think their reach exceeded their grasp in that they wanted to have it in the old E3 building, it looks very much as if you’re at an E3, they have all the things you’d have at an E3, but nobody’s actually signed on to show any games.

It’s kind of weird, because this year I feel there were so many videogame events, one after the other, that it hit a saturation point. And we get to E for All, and it’s October, and everybody’s kind of already shown their games, everyone’s gotten their marketing out of the way.

“… everybody’s kind of already shown their games, everyone’s gotten their marketing out of the way.”

And now it’s just a matter of releasing the stuff, so there’s not much besides Nintendo, who never shows anything until two seconds before it’s ready to go. But E for All is really lucky that Nintendo showed up and that Konami brought Metal Gear Solid, because otherwise it’s tough to find something to do here.

Q: Are Konami and Nintendo the big winners of the show?
A: Yeah, they came in first and second in a two person fight.

Q: So is there anyone else here besides Konami and Nintendo?
A: There are. I really want to get down to THQ’s booth to play the new Destroy All Humans game, which is for the Wii. Obviously there’s Rock Band, which they’ve done a really nice job with. They set up a whole trailer, and of course they’re videotaping people for MTV, so if your band is the best band in the world you’ll go to Total Request Live and see Carson Daly or whatever.

Obviously Rock Band is wonderful and it’s the perfect game for this kind of thing. But even then, there’s so few people here that to see these games like Rock Band. At Penny Arcade Expo the line for Rock Band was like 45 minutes. Here the line for Rock Band is however long it takes the people on stage to finish their song.

Q: Have you spent a lot of time in the Nintendo booth?
A: Well, Nintendo had a media summit last week, and so I’ve already played all those games. So I wanted to go down and play some more Smash Brothers, because you know everyone loves playing Smash Brothers. But I’ve already played the whole Mario Galaxy demo, and all that kind of stuff, so there’s no reason for me to go back there. And they said they were going to have Professor Layton in but they pulled it, so they don’t even have that down there.

But I mean obviously the Nintendo booth is the destination of the show for anyone who comes here, because that’s where Smash brothers and Mario Galaxy and Link’s Crossbow Training and Ghost Squad are. Ghost Squad is really good too, that was my surprise of the show.

Q: What did you think of Konami’s booth?
A: Konami’s booth is great. They’ve got a really nice lineup of stuff for this holiday, well, not Metal Gear Solid this holiday, but that’s just a great demo. And the fact that Contra 4 is really, really difficult, but it feels just like you’re playing the NES game.

Q: Did you notice the Bionic Commando grapple hook in Contra 4?
A: Yes. I don’t know if it really needed it, the grapple just seems like something they put in there to let you travel to the top screen. Otherwise they’d have to put in a whole bunch of platforms for you to jump too, and that’s a little silly. It doesn’t really come in to affect the gameplay. But they do make pretty good use of it in the first boss battle, which has a part in the top screen and a part in the bottom screen, so you’ve got to grapple up to a helicopter and drop down.

Q: Did you see anything non-gaming that was interesting?
A: Yeah, there’s a woman out in the lobby making this huge charcoal painting of a bunch of Greek gods, and one of them’s holding a Playstation controller. So that’s cool.

Obviously they are really trying hard to kind of make up for the fact that there are like two or three videogame companies here, and get as much interesting content as they possibly can in here. And I should probably really couch this by saying it’s only Friday 3pm, people have been working, Saturday might be huge with lines out the door.

“… a lot of people might want to come in but get turned away by the high price.”

And it’s very expensive, so we’ll see. We had somebody asking us yesterday, a guy came up to us on the street and asked if there was a cover charge to get into E for All. And after laughing a little bit at the word cover charge, we said, “Yes sir, it costs $75 if you want to go on Saturday”. So a lot of people might want to come in but get turned away by the high price.

Q: Do you think there will be an E for All next year?
A: Next year apparently they’ve booked the show for the same weekend as Penny Arcade Expo. So I have no idea how that’s going to work out. If they seriously are going to do that, do they think that Nintendo’s going to send two booths, one to PAX and one down here? I mean, are they going to split their resources up like that? That’s got to be really difficult.

When it was E3 and CES one year, in 1995, eventually everyone just went to one show. They followed the leader. Nintendo said, we’re going to E3, not CES, and like dominoes every company followed in their wake. So we could see a very similar situation with Penny Arcade and E for All next year. We’re wondering which side the dominoes are going to fall on.

Q: Which conferences that you’ve been to this year have been the most interesting?
A: I got horribly sick during GDC, but I think that would have been interesting, had I made it to more than a third of the show. GDC starting out was pretty amazing with Miyamoto keynoting, even though that whole stock trade thing was happening and he couldn’t really say anything, any forward looking statements. But Koji Kondo performing at Video Games Live, that was really cool for me, I got to go to the rehearsal and see that.

So yeah, other than the violent throwing up episode that kept me in my apartment for literally two thirds of GDC… I don’t want to mention the company, but there was a party we went to that was just wall-to-wall bodies, and I think a lot of stuff got transmitted there. It was pretty nasty.

Tags: Chris-Kohler, Wired-Game-Life

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