This past week the cancellation of E3 2023 was announced, and it’s increasingly looking like this was the last we’ll see of E3, at least in its current format. Major video game companies, Nintendo included, have largely left trade show booths out of their marketing budgets in favor of more direct appeals to fans, such as Nintendo Directs and other similar streams.
Here at Zelda Universe, however, we have a lot of good memories associated with attending E3, so I wanted to share some of our experiences with the convention over the years.
2011
Our first year attending E3 as a website was in 2011, featuring a small crew – just myself and ZU website owner Jess.
We had very good reason to go – this was the Legend of Zelda series’ 25th anniversary, marking the release of not only Skyward Sword but also the Hyrule Historia collector’s book and even a set of 25th-anniversary concerts which led to the creation of the wildly popular Symphony of the Goddesses concert series.
We were at the forefront of this musical experience at Nintendo’s E3 2011 press conference, which started with a surprise orchestral arrangement of the Zelda series. If you watch the video, you can hear the gasps and cheers of ZU staff as more about the upcoming Skyward Sword was revealed.
2012
This was the year of the Wii U’s launch. There were no Zelda releases this year (and the Wii U wouldn’t be getting a proper new console Zelda until the dual-console release of Breath of the Wild five years later) but we didn’t know that yet, and since we had figured out we could attend E3, nothing was going to stop us from attending regularly now.
Well, while I say ‘us’, I personally missed out on this year. Not to worry, a lot more excitement was set to come at the next E3.
2013
This was a big Zelda release year – fans received the incredible A Link Between Worlds for the 3DS, as well as a Wii U remaster of The Wind Waker for the GameCube. For Zelda Universe as a website, though, E3 2013 blew us away for other reasons – we had secured an interview with series director Eiji Aonuma himself.
We’d like to consider ourselves quite a successful volunteer fan community, but typically that’s been limited to reporting on interviews with Zelda‘s creators, not hosting them. But being a media presence at E3 had given us the opportunity to ask the questions we had always wanted to, and we took it, creating what I think still stands up as valuable Zelda journalism.
If you’d like to read our interview with Eiji Aonuma, it is available here.
2014
By this year, we had started to show up in larger numbers. How many Zelda Universe staff are needed to cover E3 in a minor Zelda release year which saw only the release of a spinoff (the first Hyrule Warriors game on Wii U)? As many as we could fit!
From my memory of this photo, we were meeting up to watch a Video Games Live concert across the road from E3. There was always something exciting going on nearby – incidentally, at one point I even used my E3 media pass to wander into a nearby Snoop Dogg concert, but that’s a story for another day.
2015
We hit a new Zelda release year again in 2015, with the release of Tri Force Heroes on the 3DS, along with a long-awaited 3DS remake of Majora’s Mask.
While there was some Zelda content available for demo at E3, most of Nintendo’s marketing this year was instead focused on the 30th anniversary of the Super Mario series and the release of Super Mario Maker for the Wii U.
2016
While other ZU staff went along, I missed this year: my first E3 absence since 2012. Luckily, there wasn’t much there – Nintendo simply dedicated their entire booth to being a huge themed experience for their upcoming game, an obscure release called The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
2017
This was obviously a big year for both Nintendo and the Zelda series – both the Switch console and Breath of the Wild had already launched three months prior to this E3.
While there wasn’t a lot of new Zelda content for us to cover at the event itself, we met with a new group of people that previously hadn’t featured in the series – official Legend of Zelda English voice actors. Not pictured: Revali voice actor Sean Chiplock who we also met on a separate occasion.
2018
This was a quiet year for Zelda releases, so I’ll take this chance to shout out the other reason that we always love to go to E3 – the other fans and creators who we talk to online, but don’t otherwise get the chance to meet outside events like this.
To represent this, here is my favorite E3 photo – YouTuber Chuggaaconroy bodily lifting fellow YouTuber Josh Jepson at the E3 food court while I give an excited thumbs up.
2019
The final in-person year of E3, not that we were to know it at the time. We had a few Zelda releases that year, notably the Link’s Awakening remake for Switch and the Cadence of Hyrule spin-off, but the biggest highlight was the first trailer for Tears of the Kingdom (not that we knew its name at the time).
As we hit the closing hours on the final day of the convention, we stood in front of the now-empty convention hall, happy to have had another great E3 experience but drained from days of walking and waiting in line. A sign out front promised E3’s return in June 2020, so we took a photo together with it on the way out.
Unfortunately, that promise was never fulfilled. But when it comes down to it, wasn’t the real E3 the friendships we made along the way?
