A slightly shorter missive this week as I’m on my way to Gamescom in Cologne, a convention I attended for the first time in 2006. I played the then-unreleased Nintendo Wii for the first time at my first Gamescom. A few years later, I got a look at Project Natal, Microsoft’s mad motion-controlled game experiment that later became the Kinect. I once had the uncomfortable experience of being driven around Cologne in a limo for 20 minutes, while being shown dodgy footage of a licensed Stargate online game that was never released. For more than 15 years, I have honed my journalistic technique by plying tipsy, jetlagged American game developers for rumours after a few pints of Kölsch by the river.
Gamescom has never had the LA glamour of E3; it was always more workmanlike, great from a coverage perspective but light on pizzazz. I’m fond of it though, not least because as the biggest games convention in the world – with more than 300,000 attendees – it challenges the video games industry’s US-centrism. There are many millions of gamers in Europe too, folks! We deserve a big event. PlayStation, Nintendo and EA have eschewed this show for a while, and in their place you get a mish-mash of unexpected exhibitors that reflect gaming tastes on mainland Europe. Simulation games are huge here, and massive swathes of the show floor are usually given over to games like Farming Simulator. PC gaming is bigger here, so point-and-click adventures, war games and strategy games are also more prominent.
