['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

So how was your E3? Hectic, I bet, wasn't it? One of the advantages to working for a magazine whose primary subject isn't video games is that I don't feel obligated to attend the show any longer -- and there's no way in 'ell I'd attend it for fun, because it really isn't fun. There is nothing identifiably fun about having to elbow a 380-pound man wearing a T-shirt with "Orcs FTW" written on it in order to play Destroy All Humans 2 so you can write your 20th 600-word preview of the day for GameWanX or whatever site you're working for. The fun comes in getting drunk at parties for free and throwing people into the Figueroa Hotel's swimming pool. This is scientific fact and everyone knows it.

I would like to say that things were different back when E3 was held for the first time on May 11-13, 1995, but I'd be lyin'. Sure, the show was smaller -- accepting only about 50,000 GameStop employees instead of over 100,000 -- but the three-day cycle of noise, chicks, and sweating has swirled unabated for 11 years now. If anything the partying was particularly hardy in 1995, because the IDSA (called the ESA nowadays) had just been formed and the industry in general was so fed up with the Consumer Electronics Show that they all jumped for joy, literally, when IDG announced E3. (Fun fact: The CES was planning to hold a game-biz show of their own, CES Interactive, at the exact same time as the first E3. It was cancelled after the IDSA officially sanctioned E3 and companies ignored it en masse.)

Here are the three issues of the 1995 E3 Show Daily. (Inferior sites watermark their images. I dogamark mine.)

If you read the ESA's official E3 history, you may get the idea that they "held" the show for its entire history. This isn't quite true -- they just sanctioned it, and IDG (publisher of GamePro and organizer of such events as the Macworld Expo) actually set up the whole thing. This means that the Show Daily was written by the staff of GamePro and Electronic Entertainment, IDG's de-facto PC games magazine at the time.

IDG turned over show management to the IDSA for the 1999 show, and after that there was a conflict between the two outfits over money owed or something like that (I only heard snippets of the story). Therefore, IDG was never allowed to have a booth on the show floor, and therefore, when I worked at GamePro, I had to update our website from a suite in the Staples Center that we always had to give up on Day 2 because the Lakers would have a playoff game scheduled that evening. Ah, memories. Regardless, with that transition, publication of the Show Daily went to Imagine Media until 2001, when Ziff Davis Media picked up the rights. Future handled the paper this year, and they've got it until 2008. I haven't read their effort yet, and to be honest, I'm not sure how many people really read the Show Daily -- I have the impression most people grab it just so their swag bag has some kind of flat support, for ease of stacking crap on top of.

But what was walking the show floor really like in 1995? For a taste, let's refer to the floor plan as it was published in the 1995 E3 Show Daily:

The South Hall of the LA Convention Center, home to Microsoft, EA and a gaggle of third-parties these days, tends to play second fiddle to the West Hall in the minds of most E3 showgoers. Not so 11 years ago -- Sega, Sony, 3DO, Atari, and Philips (with their CDI console) all had booths here, making this venue the place to scope "the future" as it existed in 1995. In fact, Sega had the largest booth of the show (larger than any first-party's today), and they turned it into a Saturn madhouse, complete with nearly a dozen pro athletes pushing their sports lineup.

Acclaim's booth is the same size as EA's; they had the real-life Batmobile in the booth that year to push their terrifying Batman Forever games. SNK has an enormous booth on the left side for reasons I can't fathom. Bigger than Capcom, Namco and Konami, for Chrissakes. Meanwhile, there are tons of tiny little booths dotted everywhere (mostly PC publishers and hardware makers), a stark contrast to the more spread-out layout of today.

West Hall, as always, is dominated by Nintendo. However, 1995 didn't feature a particularly robust showing from Nintendo -- the Ultra 64 had just been delayed a year, there was no conference, NOA chairman Howard Lincoln spent his keynote address whining about SNES software piracy, and the booth's twin highlights were Killer Instinct and the Virtual Boy. It was arguably a lamer showing than even 2003, when their top attraction was Pac-Man and...erm, that's about it, actually. (Good thing Reggie Fils-Aime was forged in NOA's laboratories in time for their big comeback in '04.)

Big booths from companies that don't exist anymore include Ocean, Gametek, American Softworks, Jaleco, and Berkeley Systems (this is when they were swimming in You Don't Know Jack cash). Biggest of all is the infamous Playmates Interactive, who had their top asset stolen from them when Interplay announced the purchase of Shiny Entertainment just before E3 started.

Booth 4124 is occupied by Abco Distributors, who bought up a great big chunk of space to advertise their hot new title: Cooking with Dom DeLuise, a 2-disc CD-ROM cooking reference. If you thought Eidos holding backyard-wrestling shows in 2004 was lame, how about a fat Italian man showing you how to steam tomatoes? And have him not even dressed up as Mario?

E3 did not occupy Kentia Hall in 1995, so all the dregs of the industry slunk around instead in Petree Hall, now home to Midway and Atari. I'm not including the list of companies in this scan because I honestly don't recognize any of the names apart from magazines and the late American Sammy.

The Day 3 edition of the Show Daily reports that John Wayne Bobbitt made an appearance at a Petree booth: "Rumor has it that he willingly showed his scar to all those who were curious, and periodically employs a comedy writer to come up with genitalia jokes." The Show Daily doesn't identify which booth paid him to show up, but I'm guessing either Bacchus Releasing or "Beautiful, Beautiful Women" (yes, that's the name of a company).

The conclusion to make from all this: E3 today really isn't any different from E3 past, except the porno companies have been shoehorned out by the random Asian MMO publishers. That, and the term "FTW" did not exist in 1995.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He owns enough magazines to smother himself with should the need arise, and his secret fantasy is for someone flush with game-publisher stock options to give him a monthly stipend so he can spend a year researching their full history and finishing the site. In his "off" time he is an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]