I was in Manhattan a few years back to attend New York Comic-Con at the consistently underwhelming convention center out on the Hudson River. (Does NYC deserve a better convention center than Javits? It does.) I was there to work a gauntlet of red carpets. My cameraman and I would interview all the SyFy Channel bottom-feeders, cut-rate VOD horror movie “stars,” and without fail, Kevin Smith. The director of Clerks is positively ubiquitous at New York Comic-Con. He’s on every red carpet, even if he has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever it is that’s being promoted. He simply shows up and starts talking…
1. This is an older post that I dusted off this morning because a friend of mine mentioned it to me recently. I’d forgotten about it. 2. A couple things before we get started. Game writers have two fundamental fantasies when they get into this business. One is to go to E3 in L.A. The second, somewhat more far fetched fantasy is to one day travel to Japan for the Tokyo Game Show. I’ve been fortunate enough to go to Tokyo—pre-devastation—three times in the last few years. Each time, without fail, I returned to North America wondering if I actually went to Japan…
>The plug was finally pulled on E3 2011 late in the day last Thursday afternoon. As thousands of attendees either sped to the airport to catch early evening flights or else retired to hotel lounges for much deserved drinks at the bar, the overproduced, overheated booths–including that daunting dragon looming above the Bethesda booth–was all being dismantled. Digression: Where do all the trappings of the booths go? Is there a landfill that gets stuffed with these things? Does the 50-foot TV in the Sony booth get shipped to Jack Tretton’s house? Can the dragon be recycled?E3 always has a mirage…
>I’m staying at the Wilshire Grand this year, which is only a few long blocks–all the blocks are long in L.A.; you might describe this as a long-blocked city–from the Los Angeles Convention Center. It’s pretty great here. My room is quiet, and small, and fairly clean, and only smells slightly of the hundreds, if not thousands, of bodies who slept here prior to my arrival on Sunday afternoon.Yesterday when I was out convention-ing, someone came in and made up my room. In addition to performing the expected duties of collecting towels and sorting the bed, the house keeper also…
>I went to the nearby Carl’s Jr. yesterday morning to quietly enjoy a Breakfast Burger, which is one of my favorite things about E3. (The Breakfast Burger is a regular hamburger, but with an egg and some hash browns thrown on top. It’s more enjoyable than it sounds. Better still, eating the B. B. is akin to a python eating goat; once you eat one, you don’t need to eat again for several days, which is useful while at E3, where food is expensive, terrible, and extremely scarce.)Unfortunately, Carl’s Jr. didn’t open until 6:30, so I headed for the nearby…
>It’s early here in downtown Los Angeles. Pre-dawn still. No one wakes up earlier during E3 week than I do. No, not even Reggie Fils-Amie, who may or may not be a kind of robot.I’m up early because I always get up early. Man, do I ever enjoy that hour or two of quiet and peace–before the phone can ring, before the deluge of texts and emails and tweets and random, pointless information starts spraying all over the place–that only really happens in the early mornings. And that hour or two is especially important this week, during E3, when things…
>[Late to the party? Get caught up by starting with Part 1.]The L.A. Convention Center is a confusing, poorly designed space, especially for a first-time E3 goer. The place is chopped up into several cavernous halls: West Hall, South Hall, and Kentia Hall. The only “hall” I’d ever heard of previous to this was the “mead hall” that Grendel lays waste to in the Old English poem, Beowulf. Ah, 9th grade English class.To make matters worse, each of these halls is approximately 4.3 miles from the other halls. So, if you get confused and head to the South Hall for…
>[Get caught up: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.]I woke up early the next morning and went downstairs in search of a cup of coffee. The Santa Monica streets were damp and filled with early morning fog.I found a place a couple blocks west of Maryanne’s building called The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. I bought a coffee in the largest size they sold. Then I stepped back out onto the street and realized that the huge gray wall of mist and fog at the end of the street was actually the Pacific Ocean. I couldn’t see the ocean…
>[Missed earlier chapters? Read one and two.]According to my MapQuest map, Maryanne’s apartment was only a block off Santa Monica Boulevard, not far from the Jack In The Box.Santa Monica Boulevard was lousy with lumbering buses–buses which I would come to know intimately soon enough–and a fleet of sports cars with their tops down being driven by beautiful women wearing sunglasses that made them resemble prehistoric bugs. But a mere half block off of Santa Monica Boulevard, things abruptly got far more peaceful. Birds were chirping. I could smell the salt in the air blowing in from the Pacific. After…
>[Missed Part 1? Click here.]I got off the plane at LAX and retrieved my crappy suitcase from baggage claim. Then I headed for the cab line outside the terminal.My cab driver was gifted with a terrific amount of neck hair. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror, waiting for me to tell him where to take me to.I had Maryanne’s address (my friend’s mom who I would be staying with) written down on a piece of scrap paper. I was about to hand him the address, when I realized that giving a cab driver an address on a piece…
