E3

The industry rallied to deliver some kind of E3 2021. But was it too much?

Forza Horizon 5 brought the Xbox showcase to a close, though Microsoft was far less dependent on its traditional big hitters than it has been in recent years. Predictably, it looks great

The 2021 incarnation of the greatest show on gaming Earth – the place where technical envelopes are traditionally pushed, where we expect the bleeding edge of interactive entertainment to be annually redefined – began with 1bit graphics on a 400x240 display. Yet the notion of Playdate opening the festivities at what we will charitably call E3 2021 was not as inappropriate as it first appeared. This was never going to be your dad’s E3, of course; COVID-19 saw to that. But so did the avalanche of publishers, media organisations and event companies that saw an opportunity to muscle in on a disrupted timetable, and hog a little of the biggest spotlight in games. The result was the busiest public schedule E3 has ever seen – and, at times, one of the dullest.

Indeed, Playdate’s 15-minute broadcast was one of the week’s highlights, snappily paced and bringing only good news to those eagerly awaiting Panic’s charming – and charmingly silly – handheld. The first ‘season’ of games has doubled in size, from 12 titles to 24; among those now developing games for the system are Papers, Please and Obra Dinn creator Lucas Pope. The breezy, browser-based development platform was shown off for the first time, and there is a dock with a pen holder, because of course there is. There are those who find Playdate, and the Portland-based Panic, just a little too hipsterish, and indeed, the broadcast had a ‘we can pickle that’ sort of energy to it. Mileage naturally varies with this sort of thing, but the innovation, creativity and simple joy on show here was a fine way to set the tone, even if what followed would struggle to match it.

The newly unveiled Playdate Stereo dock acts as charger, Bluetooth speaker and pen holder, and like the handheld itself has been designed by Sweden’s Teenage Engineering. Naturally, it’s bright, sunny yellow

That is not quite to say it was all downhill from there, but E3 2021 certainly ended up closer to sea level than it was at the start. It’s almost always like this, admittedly: reality is rarely a match for fanboy fever dreams. But at least in normal circumstances a bad E3 is over quickly, a tight three-day schedule of press conferences ripping off the Band-Aid. This time, with every company and its dog carving its half-hour or hour out of the schedule over the course of a whole week, it seemed to go on forever.