In May 1995, a Sony executive walked to a microphone, said $299, and walked off, undercutting Sega’s $399 Saturn and cementing a brand-new trade show as the industry’s kingmaker. This episode tells the biography of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, beginning with the indignity of CES in 1991, when gaming booths were shoved behind adult film vendors in an overflow tent whose leaking roof dripped rainwater onto Sega Genesis consoles and infuriated Tom Kalinske.

We connect E3’s birth to the 1993 and 1994 congressional hearings on game violence, the formation of the ESA and a voluntary ratings system, and the first show’s 40,000 attendees. Then we follow the failed Tokyo expansion, the costly Atlanta years, the mid-2000s boom when attendance topped 70,000 and booths cost $5 to $10 million, the 2007 and 2008 downsizing into a sterile Santa Monica hangar, and Activision’s 2008 exit. From Nintendo’s 2013 pivot to pre-recorded Directs and EA’s 2016 departure to public ticket sales, Sony’s 2019 withdrawal, the ESA data leak that exposed over 2,000 journalists and creators, the Q-tainment plan, the pandemic cancellation, the panned 2021 online event and the 2023 collapse, we chart how an industry outgrew its own showcase before the ESA discontinued E3 in December 2023.

• Why a business-to-business show broke when bloggers crowded out retail buyers
• The economics that made a direct-to-consumer stream beat a $10 million booth
• How live-service games made a single June marketing week obsolete
• Doxing and death threats after the 2019 attendee data exposure
• Summer Game Fest, decentralized showcases and the planned 2026 successor called ICON