This year’s Summer Game Fest wasn’t perfect, but it salvaged some of E3’s ‘gaming Christmas’ feel

As Spring fades and the sun begins to creep back into view, the first week of June has always heralded an even more pivotal event – the beginning of gaming Christmas.

After months of feverish anticipation and hours spent devouring every morsel of questionably sourced rumours, the giants of the gaming world would converge on Los Angeles to reveal their weird and wonderful gaming wares to the eagerly awaiting world.

This holy week’s name? The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) – and it was bloody brilliant. It was an event that I’d look forward to every year, and in my house it soon became a mini festival.

As the Glastonbury of gaming arrived, in what I can only assume was out of sheer respect, my parents would go on holiday, leaving me surrounded by a parade of pals and an overflowing mini-fridge in my loft room, observing LA’s parade of polygonal proclamations from our GMT stronghold, as we chugged bafflingly soup-like out of date beer from the local offy.

Yet like each bottle of sweet, soupy beer, all good things must come to an end. Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the LA show that once filled me with giddying glee unceremoniously crumbled into nothing, feebly vanishing like a corporation-backed Ben Kenobi.

Fast forward eight years and one global pandemic, and sadly my beloved E3 is no more. Now, sat miles away from my parents’ loft, where I once soaked in the spectacle of warring platform holders, I find myself instead staring bleary eyed at Geoff Keighley, the man almost single-handedly attempting to fill the Akira-esque crater where E3 used to be.

Getting Geoffy Wiv it

Any online event or conference takes time to find its rhythm, and for the fifth annual Summer Geoff Fest – which is what I’m stubbornly calling G3 – it seemed as though Keighley was more determined to bring back some of that missing magic.

Acknowledging the criticisms levelled at December’s rather tone deaf Game Awards – a show that failed to mention the horrific layouts that surrounded it – Keighley kicked off this year’s SGF by adressing the corporate greed that has blighted the industry over the last six months.

It was all surprisingly statesman-like and, for the intro at least, Keighley resisted the urge to sell you a pizza, instead wisely highlighting 2024’s slew of weird and wonderful gaming gems that have been given room to shine in the absence of blockbuster behemoths.

It’s this philosophy of celebrating games of all genres and sizes that ran throughout the lengthy two hour showcase, a relatively (for Summer Game Fest) snappily-paced conference that largely sidelined pointless DLC reveals and bizarre collaborations in favour of short sharp shocks of giddying gaming goodness.

Wasting no time getting to the weird, the show kicked off with the previously leaked Lego Horizon Adventures, a fever dream spin-off outing from Sony that sees Lego dinosaurs battling protagonist Aloy while attempting to devour a hot dog man. Even more curiously, this Lego release marks the first time that a beloved PlayStation mascot will arrive on Nintendo Switch.

G3 only got less predictable from there, ducking and weaving between a relentless barrage of trailers that showed off everything from intriguing indie fare like Cuffbust to the multiplayer Quidditch game that millennials of a certain age have been pining for since their first trip to Privet Drive.

Ahead of Ubisoft’s Monday showcase, we were also given a nostalgia-tickling tease of the increasingly brilliant-looking Star Wars Outlaws.

Where Gamescom X Geoffy’s Opening Night Live dragged more than a rag doll, Summer Games Fest adopted a breezier cadence, and was all the better for it. Sticking with the multi-genre, multi-budget-level theme, there was something for everyone in this year’s showcase.

If you ever dreamed of a chibi Dynasty Warriors Braveheart, then Tears of Metal’s wee men were there charging into view. Bandai Namco signalled the official arrival of the PS5 gen with the reveal of yet another Dragon Ball game, which is sure to appease players who are psyched to kill Raditz and Cell for the thousandth time.

Kudos to Warner Bros, too, who cracked the code of making a VR game look exciting by not showing a single second of actual gameplay, and fans of historic war crimes will be pleased to see that they were well catered for, with the Black Hawk Down inspired Delta Force.

Monster Hunter Wilds got a second look in, too. The creators of Gris and Stanley Parable returned with brand new releases. Kingdom Come 2, Civilization VII and new Alan Wake 2 DLC were all revealed, alongside new showings for the highly anticipated Persona spiritual successor Metaphor: Re Fantazio, and Phantom Blade O impressed with its slick swordplay.

Another clear highlight was the first proper look into film studio Blumhouse’s first ever game label, showing off a litany of retro-leaning horror projects, that all boasted more than a slight whiff of Annapurna games’ cinematic weirdness.

Like any long-running hype train, however, the chugging pseudo-conference eventually ran out of steam. Skate came and went, landing with more of a sickening thud than a killer heelflip. A developer revealed a game that was actually called Deer and Boy and apparently it wasn’t a parody.

I’d like to give a special shout out to the reveal for Killer Bean, a game about a meme-touting, gun-wielding bean that looked so heinous that it briefly made me question whether I had got back on the soupy beers.

As the tight pacing of the first hour and a half slowed to a crawl, it once again begged the question, why the hell is this two hours long? And then as if in answer, the parade of adverts arrived.

With another annual nod to Geoff’s beloved DoorDash and an impossibly long celebrity-filled trailer for a mobile game that I’ve still somehow forgotten, there were still flashes of the kind of sickly corporate shilling that felt less like gamer Christmas and more like a slightly more entertaining Black Friday.

“There were still flashes of the kind of sickly corporate shilling that felt less like gamer Christmas and more like a slightly more entertaining Black Friday.”

Still, to Summer Game Fest’s credit, the shoehorned adverts at least felt far less intrusive and dystopian than in previous years, with most of the more blatant adverts at least flogging you gaming displays and related services rather than just new cars and Doritos.

With the three wise men of Sony, Xbox and Nintendo no longer descending on the LA convention centre, the start of June may no longer be the holy week that it once was.

While Keighley is far from the conference’s missing messiah, it’s encouraging to see Summer Game Fest gradually grow into a more entertaining offering, and I hope that he and the team continue to trim the fat and offer something more compelling for viewers.

With a smattering of separate conferences still to come this weekend, Summer Game Fest was a solid enough place to start off the gaming festivities.

It wasn’t perfect, but this year’s event showed enough to help this writer get back into the holiday spirit – and I’ll be damned if I’ll begrudge Keighley Claus for trying to save gaming Christmas.