The Game Trust at E3

It was supposed to be a simple change-planes layover in Atlanta in my trip from Florida to Los Angeles. 50 minutes, no more. It ended up being three-plus hours on the taxiway when the airport gets shutdown because of thunderstorms that came up quicker than bad sushi.

It was almost as if the gaming gods wanted me to remember Atlanta’s connection to E3. In the early days of the show, E3 used to change venues each year between Atlanta and Los Angeles until it finally settled on LA in 2000. Although I never attended the Atlanta shows, word was that they were pretty interesting. I also had some fond memories of Atlanta from the “Fantasy Faires” at the Omni (anyone remember those?) held there some 30 odd years ago.

I finally did make it, but had to hop a cab, drop stuff at the hotel and hightail it to the 47 PR party. Met up with Jones, Gus, Billy Berghammer, Evan Narcisse and a few of the other journos from the industry, all chatting, drinking and noshing. Even met some of the PR folks we would be chatting games with later in the show. It was a good start to what will be a busy week.

Gus, Billy and I decided to head to dinner, but not before we had our cab commandeered by Abby Heppe of Xplay. She was meeting fellow Crispyite Harold Goldberg and we all ended up at a Hawaiian restaurant on Figueroa. Abby is an entertaining, outspoken woman who is passionate about videogames. Turns out she has traditional journalism roots, which makes us kindred spirits with ideals on how the gamies journalism side of things should be handled. Don’t be surprised if you see some of her rants appearing on Crispy. A fortuitous cab comandeering indeed.

Heading to the Microsoft press conference this morning. More later …

Tags: Abby Heppe, E3, E3 08, E3 2008, Evan Narcisse, Harold Goldberg, Los Angeles