Summer Games Fest: The Definitive Review
Keighley, is it too late to say I’m sorry?
How did it come to this bitter end? Well, probably greed and selfish commercial interests if I’m being perfectly honest. Watching Geoff Keighley’s1 Summer Game Fest 2024 has the bittersweet, grandiose tinge of a Marillion ballad2, and suffers perhaps from very much the same kind of unaware baseline of naffness, although Geoff strikes a very different figure to that of Fish, whom I remember most fondly for being able to construct a joint with remarkable precision when under duress, beating not only member of parliament Tony Banks but also the Shamen’s own Mr C which, if you know his particular background, may come as some surprise. Yet I can never imagine Geoff ever constructing a joint, let alone smoking one - and that’s despite his prior willingness to be sponsored by both Mountain Dew and Doritos3, both of which would presumably be most welcome after consuming such an item in volume. You see, Geoff has ably managed to rise above the savage backlash from his egregious selling-out to raw commercialism by manoeuvring himself into the position of being Mr Entire Commercial Videogames Industry and embracing capitalist greed via the time-honoured traditions of parasitical events; an oddly self-congratulatory games showcase and an unnecessary and questionable awards ceremony. What’s perhaps most impressive is how Keighley has simply imposed himself as the authority here, by sheer force of will. I guess I can admire him for that, even if I think the end results of both are less than positive contributions to the culture. There’s more than a touch of the Bernie Ecclestone with this, in the sense that Bernie realised there was colossal untapped wealth in Formula One teams’ image rights and as a team owner, Bernie made a packet by exploiting broadcasters by getting them to pay for said rights, thereby building the financial and political might to eventually take control - and ownership - of Formula One itself. It is perhaps somewhat of a relief that Geoff hasn’t yet got the inclination, the cash, or the supine acquiescence from company owners to make such a grab for the US videogames media sector.
Keighley wasn’t the only one to see a fertile possibility when E3 collapsed under its own weight, and the blizzard of concordant showcases over the last two weeks shows there is a need for some collective assemblage to package them all. In the UK, some of the loudest voices for a return to the E3 model come from, unsurprisingly, people who were actually trying to resurrect the literal E3 last year4. It’s clear there’s a kind of tribal memory about gathering in Los Angeles in June which the industry cannot shake, despite the fact that we still have Gamescom in Cologne. Perhaps August just doesn’t work, or (more likely), US execs cannot remotely handle the idea that Germany might be a better locale for a global industry to meet at than LA. Gamescom, being sensibly European, has managed to amble along very nicely for fourteen years, but then few see the opportunity to make fuckloads of money when an established event is being run well and seemingly without overstepping the profit motive boundary into exploitative greed and poisoning its own well. And yet just before Keighley’s showcase was due to air, details leaked of just how expensive the slots were in the Summer Games Fest lineup. Commercial publishers were paying six-figure sums for 60 seconds of video, with free slots apparently offered to indies who endear themselves sufficiently to Mr Keighley. If you want a deeper dive into Keighley’s business, this Esquire article is simply great in covering both sides, emerging with a fairly neutral view. As you can probably guess, I fall on one side of opinion here. In any event, the degree of influence he has over the wider videogame publicity space echoes the kind of less-than-ideal influence we see over social media platforms, commercial brands and so forth from singular male figureheads that seem to really like money.
Sadly I was never able to reach an E3 visit in my professional career, though it sounds like a horrible place to work and perhaps even worse to party5. There are many legendary tales from within the media and the publishing and development sides of the videogames industry about sports bars and afterparties, which essentially boil down to being crushed under the weight of whatever E3 tasks were assigned to you and then exploiting the wild profligacy of marketing budgets being blown on that year’s nexus for retail and media attention. Of course I have fond memories of peak E3 presentations - Phil Harrison’s PlayStation 3 tech showcase and the arrival of ‘target render’ b-roll. The still bewildering meme farms that were Nintendo’s various presentations, the stupefying dullness of Ubisoft or Electronic Arts big-stage endeavours. My increasing sense of ludicrous waste as video streaming matured. All this showbusiness, razzle-dazzle, shallow-affect glitz seemed so very apt, such arch Americana. I suppose the greatest value culturally was the sense of the shared event, particularly when I was in the industry. The hubbub pre-show and post-show email and IM flurries certainly lent plenty of excitement and entertainment to the shared experience of seeing that guy doing weird air drumming to announce Wii Music, but I can’t say as a grumpy civvy bystander that I could give that much of a toss these days. In fact, I was far happier watching recaps from YouTubers of what they liked or, naturally, the Hit Points take from Nathan. As I write, I’ve queued up The Back Page episode on this year’s flurry. All this makes for a much nicer experience when second-hand and at my leisure. But then I no longer have to maintain a professional social function within the videogames industry, so therefore do not need to be immediately informed to the full. Given the truly wild number of games shown over the last fortnight, achieving that would have been exhausting, hence I am very glad to have no opinion whatsoever on Horizon Dawn: The Lego or the seventeen or so zombie-themed survival games that were on display6.
The thing that strikes me as most tragic about Keighley’s game fest and the dissociative quality these showcases all have is the sense of distance from the consumer. Sure, you get auditorium audiences but that’s a select few. Really, these online events enforce the gap and seem to be trying to carve some niche that elevates them above any grubby real-world interface with gaming’s hoi polloi. A failure to adequately facilitate this may have killed E3 but it seems to work at Gamescom, with its public halls rammed with F2P MMOs on my last attendance. Despite the thin spread of piecemeal AAA shit to see, It was still a mecca for Germany’s colossal gamer population. Perhaps likewise EGX has a Gamescom-like role for the British public, as do the gaming corrals at the big MCM events or city-based festivals, but they will always seem small somehow. The lack of unity here seems anomalous, and certainly far less than optimal for an industry that we assume has become fairly skilled at joined-up marketing. Of course, this lack of some huge, focal public event in the UK arose because of too many parties with desperately fractured commercial interests, but it makes me pine for the big expos of my youth. I still have vivid memories of attending the PCW Show in 1987 and upon entering the consumer hall, seeing a giant Ocean stand with all its upcoming games playable in demo form. All the big publishers were there with towering stands7 but critically perhaps, they were all selling as much as they were showing. And they were selling at wholesale prices. I picked up a bunch of £9.95 games for £3.00 each. It was brilliant! On top of that we were showered with posters and badges and paper caps and the like. The sense of communion was visceral. We were here, with these brands that we’d been following and buying from and with those knock-down prices, they were being nice to us. Having been to a few MCM events and EGX shows, I can’t say I felt the same sense of meeting the makers or a feeling of being rewarded for coming. I’m not sure if today’s publishers are even able to sell games over-the-counter at modern events and I’d guess that even if they did, they wouldn’t be at amazingly low prices8. Also at the big 80s and early-90s shows, there were all the indie retailers that advertised in the gaming magazines. The whole point of the show, it seemed, was to combine pre-release publicity with a grand marketplace-bazaar in a kind of joyous harmony as a wondrous offering for the public. I remember leaving another show in Islington with an armful of cheap C64 disk games and a brand new, boxed(!) Atari CX40 joystick, which Silica Shop was selling for £4.99, when I’d gone in with just £20. I barely cared about the previews I saw, which was maybe the reason why the publishers eventually distanced themselves from the retail side.
Back in the late noughties I had a very unhealthy obsession with Gundam model kits and upon learning that Gundammad and Koei were going to have stands at one of the first MCM expos at the Excel centre, I went to my first big public show for many, many years. It was the first time I’d seen cosplay en-masse and I felt genuinely out of place in my late 20s when having to wade through mobs of deranged teens in Naruto and Harry Potter outfits. But the sense of pure joy for these youngsters was palpable. I don’t know if I would have cosplayed as a teen, but I was certainly glad that these late millennials had the chance to indulge such passions and meet like-minded souls. That MCM expo was a wild mishmash of gaming, anime/manga and other general geekdom cultures and felt remarkably unfocused as a result, yet this didn’t seem to hamper its success9. It really wasn’t like the big computer shows of my teens but in a way, it felt like the best we could probably hope for in the post-Internet age. The shows I so fondly remember only worked because of how UK-specific the gaming industry was back then. Ocean or Gremlin didn’t have to answer to the big boys at the US office or the Japanese founders, and the big boys never cared enough to come here to play. And as such, it was all a bit more committed to some sense of joint effort to make those shows really worth attending. I was able to go to a few ECTS trade shows in the 90s (by hook and by crook) and those were wonderful events that the public really should have been allowed to see. One in ‘94 saw me physically bump into the fucking Utah Saints on Mirage’s stand, where they were watching giddy ringmasters deliriously over-hyping the shit out of Rise of the Robots. Much later in the day I saw a solitary Stuart Campbell wandering the corridors, presumably less impressed by the number of Silicon Graphics machines on various stands than I was. Three years later I’d be playing Tekken 3 arcade machines and marvelling at the now-mature 32bit era and once again feeling that the industry was unfairly keeping one of the best days out for videogamers all to itself. I’m left feeling a slight sense of apathy. If Keighley’s bold vision of exploitation and parasitical events is the new mainstream, then it’s very likely I’ll just have to put up with it. I have to say, I was glad that many of the trailers had finally abandoned the self-aggrandising puffery of insisting they show twenty logos and a screen of laurel-laden award noms. All of which take up a least a minute before a gruff or fey voiceover gives three further minutes of worldbuilding exposition set to cutscene (or even worse, live action) trivia before you get to find out what kind of fucking game it is. Perhaps Geoff’s pricing has put paid to such tiresome wastes of viewer time, so we can be thankful for that. But for me, I think that shit is old hat and should be left to the dinosaurs. I don’t want to sit and watch two hours of anyone mugging on stage as filler between trailers that need no filler. I’d much prefer the GDQ method of marathon livestreams with chunks clipped out for independent viewing. Isn’t that a far more modern way than this quaint, hackneyed idea of presenting shit on stage as if that’s the best way to do it, without questioning a single fucking thing? Or perhaps like the awards ceremonies based on maximising charges per table10, doing it in a way that benefits the viewers most just doesn’t make the same amount of money.
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Not to be confused with the English polymath Geoffrey Keighley. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Keighley
I would like the record to show that I do in fact love both Kayleigh and Lavender, and can be heard singing them at full volume while driving my car.
While I am keenly aware that Doritosgate was brutally hammered and rinsed into transparency in period, it nonetheless should remain an indelible stain on the character of man who seems to have learnt little about indulging in shameless capitalist greed other than being slightly better at hiding it in public-facing events.
Given the frequency of articles he writes about E3 and his role in promoting its attempted resurrection, I do harbour worries that a certain British writer may be somewhat unhealthily fixated on it and should seek help immediately, or simply resurrect it privately and marry it.
Not just E3, but a general trend I noticed of execs of a certain age relishing the affordance of attractive women at publisher-funded afterparties gave me the ick way before it was ever a meme. I distinctly remember one telling me how he would always leave his wedding ring in his hotel room before attending, and others insisting I must go to the CCP party because they have “the hottest women”. I was once chided for not attending such a party with a senior and a client’s representative, as it was part of the duty in entertaining the client. Personally, after a day on the floor I just wanted eat burgers, masturbate and fall asleep slumped under a running shower.
This is, in fact, a lie. I have extremely strong opinions on zombie-themed survival games, which is that they should fuck off. I don't want to see another fucking zombie in a game for as long as I live. Dead Rising had more than enough for all of us. I would rather have another fucking Batman film than another games with zombies in it and I fucking hate Batman.
Having been an avid magazine reader for some time, I'd become familiar with the publisher luminaries and upon spotting Geoff Brown at the US Gold stand, excitedly told my friends who were left baffled, despite reading the same magazines as me. It was a key point in my realisation that perhaps my interest in videogames went a bit deeper than my peers.
I am entirely happy to be corrected if this is wrong.
And yet, there are few sights more compelling than watching two 6ft+ cybergoths in full terror costumes battling each other on a DDR machine as expertly-recreated Harajuku and Ganguro wannabes look on.
Of all the things that shocked me about the finances of the games industry once I’d crossed into PR, it was the incredible greed and eagerness that surrounded awards ceremonies. The was never one that wasn’t run as a kind of vampiric profit machine, draining blood from discretionary budgets to line pockets of people who rarely gave a shit about games as anything other than a source of money. In one infamous example, an industry company bought two tables at a ceremony, only for all their attendees to indulge in booze and cheap cocaine to such an extent that their disruptions merited an outcry in the trade paper and a public statement of the company being banned from all future events. That was until the next year, when they bought two tables.