Yesterday, I visited the headquarters of Electronic Arts located in sunny Redwood City, California. EA held their Studio Showcase ’07 event and we were one of the many hundreds of attendees from the media and press that attended the gala affair.
While E3, in its heyday, was the thing to go to for the video game industry, the exorbitant costs of running E3 shows was skyrocketing out of sight due to labor unions and local businesses gouging the vendors. Would you pay almost $1500 for just a tray of 50 dried up sandwiches to feed attendees? Neither would we.
But smaller seems to be better, (and cheaper) for EA as it kicked off their version of a downsized E3 with demos, a professionally staged audio visual presentation and key speakers who pitched their wares at the audience. Even through there were no booth babes, free swag, and loud rock bands, the event was well organized and actually was a fun thing to attend.
Everyone got a chance to meet with the producers and lead designers of EA titles and you could feel the excitement and dedication of these people as they animatedly described their games to us. You could tell they loved the industry.
EA did a big production for one of their games called Battlefield: Bad Company and had a full regulation Army helicopter land on EA’s "great lawn," which is the size of a football field.
There was a chalk art display that was put right in the middle of foot traffic. The lady in charge of "protecting" the art from being trampled on didn’t get her orange cones up in time to fence off the area and I was greeted with a "Don’t DO THAT! DON’T WALK THROUGH!" Well excuuuuuseee me because you were too lazy and late with doing your "job." Oh well, there’s always one in the crowd.
The EA campus looks like a place where you could spend all your waking hours in. The buildings are beautiful and spacious, there is a game library for employees where you can check out games, videos and periodicals, gym with exercise equipment showers, and of course, everybody is talking and working on games.
All-in-all, it was a success. We’ll be telling you more about all the games we saw in future previews.
Oh, and btw, the chalk art wasn’t all that great…
