This is a developer diary for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind's E3 2001 Showcase. The original diary can be found here.
E3 WrapupEdit
Pete Hines,
Director of Marketing and Public Relations
For most people, E3 (the Electronic Entertaiment Expo) is a three or four-day event that includes a lot of loud music, flashing lights, the occasional scantily-clad female, and lots and lots of games. For me, it's a couple months of stress, followed by several days of very, very high stress. For Bethesda Softworks, it was our first chance to show off Morrowind to the media at large. Of course we had other games (i.e., Sea Dogs 2, Art of Magic, etc) to talk about, but the one everybody wanted to know about was Morrowind.
Pretty much everyone attending E3 had to have at least some knowledge of Morrowind's existence, because every single door of the West and South Hall entrances (the only way into the front of the building), as well as both sets of courtyard doors and the doors in and out of the café, had 2' x 2' posters of Morrowind. We used the same images from the Argonian and Dark Elf Wallpapers with the Morrowind and Bethesda logos. They looked sweet. So sweet, in fact, that E3 attendees took down almost every single one of them after the show. The only ones that didn't get taken were on sliding glass doors that you couldn't get to because the doors slid away when you got close. Some were even taken down during the show and had to be replaced. So for 95% of the people there, the first thing they saw when they arrived, and the last thing they saw on the way home, was Morrowind. It was hard to miss.
Having covered E3 as a journalist for several years, I'm of the mindset that booths are Ok for appeasing the masses, but they don't do much for getting the attention of the media and letting them focus on your games without 10,000 distractions. So, we provide a much calmer, quieter, and cooler (as in, air conditioned) setting in a meeting room that addresses that problem. We had a couple of huge (4' x 5') Morrowind posters of the Argonian and Dark Elf as you headed towards the back of the room, which was separated from the front (it created a nice, slightly dramatic effect by having you wait until you got to the back and turned around before you could see the game). For Morrowind, we had a nice setup that included a couch, a couple of "comfy chairs", lots of additional chairs, and one big 6' x 8' projector screen showing Morrowind in all its glory.
We were pretty well socked with appointments from open to close every day, with short breaks around lunch. I also tried, whenever possible, to work in members of the media who didn't have an appointment, because we really did want to get the word out to everyone in every corner of the globe. Unfortunately, a lot of non-media attendees who went away disappointed or downright peeved (After one attendee was told Morrowind was being shown to media and by appointment only, he grumbled, "why don't you put up more [expletive] posters then?" Great comeback.). Given how crowded we were with media, retail buyers, etc, we didn't have much of a choice in turning people away.
Seeing the game running on a GeForce3 on a wide screen had the desired effect (we only brought the PC version, not the Xbox version), even though the build we brought was actually two months old (we were still in the process of upgrading the engine to a new version, so we didn't want to risk it). It's one thing to look at a game on a monitor, it's another to look up and watch it like a movie. By the way, I'm such a doofus that I took a picture of virtually every part of our booth EXCEPT the setup for showing off Morrowind. Don't ask, 'cause I can't explain why.
Todd and Ken did a great job of showing off the game. For the most part, Todd drove and did the play-by-play, while Ken chimed in with color commentary. Basically they were simply on a never-ending loop, because people were coming in and out constantly, and some could only stay for 20 minutes while others stayed for over an hour. We've had enough people come to our offices to see the game to know that discussing all of the elements of gameplay could go on for hours and hours. What most folks got was a feel for the fantastic graphics, an overview of the various gameplay elements, and a hint at how powerful and easy the ES Construction Set is to use.
If you think condensing all that down in to 20 minutes is tough, imagine doing it in three minutes. Todd was interviewed live on Friday on TechTV and did a great job in showing off Morrowind in a very short amount of time. After Todd was done, we had a chance to chat briefly with Lord British himself, Richard Garriott, before we left the TechTV lot. He was quite cool and since he's a main reason why Todd got into making games, I got the sense that even though he'd met and talked to him before, he was pretty psyched. We got finished so early with TechTV (7:30am) that we went to wander around the exhibit halls before they opened. Since I never really leave the booth during the show, it was my one chance to see some stuff. It also reminded me how glad I was that we have a private suite and not a booth.
We're anxious to see all of the E3 coverage to find out what people thought of Morrowind (and our other games), since as of the writing of this piece there's only been a trickle so far. I'm happy with our approach and the impact that we had on the people that saw the game. We're going to use this event as a springboard for Morrowind to gain greater visibility and mindshare as we move towards our launch date, and beyond. Our hope is that as we continue to reveal gameplay elements, and show people the depth and breadth of Morrowind, the snowball effect will be almost unstoppable.
As Todd said, Morrowind is about living another life in another world. That's our message, and it's spreading…and we're just getting warmed up.