anwhile, the air in Square's Developnt Departnt was thick with cigarette smoke.
Hironobu Sakaguchi sat before the monitors, his beard unshaven.
This was Square's first showing of Final Fantasy VII on a next-generation console, and they had to give it their all.
In Osaka, Kenzo Tsujimoto of Capcom frowned at a proposal presented by Shinji Mikami.
The cover of the proposal featured a zombie looking back over its shoulder, its art style dark and terrifying, a stark contrast to Nintendo's family-friendly atmosphere.
"Isn't this a bit too scary?" the head of sales hesitated. "E3 is a public event, and this kind of subject matter..."
"Scary?" Tsujimoto laughed. He slamd the proposal onto the table. "That's exactly what we want. Everyone's sick of jumping mushrooms and plumbers. Shigeru Miyamoto makes dreams; we make nightmares."
He stood up, walked to the window, and gazed at the bustling nightscape of Osaka. "Approve the Resident Evil E3 exhibition plan. Since this is a 'Software First' event, a ga that can make adults wet their pants is the perfect demonstration of our hardware's power. Whether it's Sega or Sony, if they want to prove their machines are for adults, they absolutely can't refuse this bloody feast."
"Aside from ports like Street Fighter Zero, this is Capcom's debut on the next-generation console platform. We can't afford to be diocre."
anwhile, Hiroshi Kudo of Hudson was more pragmatic.
On the phone with the developnt team in Hokkaido, he said, "Our finances haven't been great lately, but we can't afford to miss such a major industry event. What made Hudson successful? Fun. Excitent. Optimize the multiplayer split-screen mode of Bomberman to its absolute limits. No matter how high-minded their ga philosophies are, the ga that draws a crowd and makes people shout and cheer will always steal the show."
Third-party manufacturers were sharpening their knives, eager to make their mark at the upcoming grand event.
Los Angeles was destined to be anything but peaceful in the coming May.
Many third-party companies treated this inaugural E3 as a gladiatorial arena, hoping to win the crowd's cheers within its walls.
Of course, there were exceptions.
Take Bandai, for instance.
Amidst the ambitious third-party giants, Bandai's situation was delicate, even bordering on a tragicomic absurdity.
Sega's damn Gundam Battle Operation was a precision instrunt designed to humiliate Bandai Gas Division.
Since its porting to the Jupiter platform, those Gunpla builders, who once only nitpicked panel lines and paint sches in model shops, had been brainwashed by so mysterious force.
Their hands no longer clutched only sandpaper and paintbrushes, but also mory cards etched with their personal IDs—their "Dog Tags."
In arcades and living rooms, they reveled in the claustrophobic cockpit perspective, lost in the heavy hydraulic feedback of their mobile suits and the teeth-grinding whine of beam rifles charging.
This wasn't just playing a ga; it was like serving in the military.
Due to its extre realism, the ga couldn't rival the mass appeal of fighting franchises like The King of Fighters and Virtua Fighter in terms of sheer volu. However, its user retention was terrifyingly high.
This was true religious devotion; if they didn't play a few rounds of Zaku daily, their bones itched.
This overwhelming technological superiority cast an eerie, "widow-like" atmosphere over Bandai Headquarters.
Most of Bandai's senior managent had already given up.
In their view, being absorbed by Sega wasn't so bad. After all, Takuya Nakayama was generous with his money and technically brilliant. By handing over the Gas Division to Sega, Bandai could focus on selling toys—a win-win.
So were even privately calculating how many Porsches their stock options would fetch after the rger.
But there were still a few stubborn old-tirs, or perhaps, technical officials with a shred of pride, who refused to kneel and surrender their legacy.
"Even if we have to sell ourselves, we should at least clean ourselves up and put on decent clothes—if only to raise our price."
This was the true state of the Bandai Gas Division at that mont.
In a test room thick with smoke, enough to trigger a fire alarm, the project known as "Final Struggle," Gundam Battlefield Evolution, was undergoing an internal Alpha phase demonstration.
The RX-78-2 Gundam at the center of the screen did, at least, look the part.
Thanks to Bandai's access to the original design data, the mobile suit's modeling was nearly flawless by current technological standards. Even the lighting and textures, when displayed statically, appeared surprisingly convincing.
But that was only when it stood still.
The mont the playtester nudged the joystick, the "White Devil" imdiately moved like a rusty tin toy, tracing a stiff, awkward path across the screen.
This was what Bandai proudly called a 3D space shooter—in reality, it was just a traditional plane-shooting ga forced into a Z-axis, with a Gundam skin slapped on the protagonist.
There was no inertial drift, no AMBAC maneuvers.
Only a few rigid animation modules: horizontal slashes, straight thrusts, and a dash movent with no physical feedback.
"Um—can we pause for a mont?" The playtester set down the controller, rubbed his temples, his face pale.
Chuta Mitsui, who had co specifically to check on the project's progress, frowned. "What's wrong? Is it lagging?"
"It's not lagging," the playtester said, pointing at the pitch-black monitor. "I can't find my bearings."
This was the ga's most fatal flaw.
To save polygon processing resources—or, more likely, out of sheer laziness on the part of the developnt team—the entire ga's background had been rendered as absolute black.
Without the wreckage of Colony Satellites in the distance as a reference, without the glow of stars to indicate direction, not even the starfield texture used for the backdrop was sparse enough to be useful.
As the player's Gundam charged into this void, it was like being thrown into an bottomless ink bottle.
"The CIC is telling the enemy is 30 degrees to my right," the playtester said, picking up the controller again, his voice filled with helplessness. "But when I turn, it's just black. Because I don't even know what 'right' is relative to. In this hellscape, the concepts of up, down, left, and right are completely aningless."
The red dots on the UI were flashing wildly, signaling an enemy attack, but the screen showed nothing but the lone Gundam and a few green UI elents.
The Developnt Departnt manager, Zhang, opened his mouth to retort, but found himself speechless.
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