Meanwhile, the air in Square's Development Department 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 slammed 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 game 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 mediocre."
Meanwhile, Hiroshi Kudo of Hudson was more pragmatic.
On the phone with the development 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. Excitement. Optimize the multiplayer split-screen mode of Bomberman to its absolute limits. No matter how high-minded their game philosophies are, the game 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 instrument designed to humiliate Bandai Games Division.
Since its porting to the Jupiter platform, those Gunpla builders, who once only nitpicked panel lines and paint schemes in model shops, had been brainwashed by some mysterious force.
Their hands no longer clutched only sandpaper and paintbrushes, but also memory 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 game; it was like serving in the military.
Due to its extreme realism, the game couldn't rival the mass appeal of fighting franchises like The King of Fighters and Virtua Fighter in terms of sheer volume. 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 management 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 Games Division to Sega, Bandai could focus on selling toys—a win-win.
Some were even privately calculating how many Porsches their stock options would fetch after the merger.
But there were still a few stubborn old-timers, 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 Games Division at that moment.
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 moment the playtester nudged the joystick, the "White Devil" immediately 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 game 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 movement with no physical feedback.
"Um—can we pause for a moment?" The playtester set down the controller, rubbed his temples, his face pale.
Chuta Mitsui, who had come 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 game's most fatal flaw.
To save polygon processing resources—or, more likely, out of sheer laziness on the part of the development team—the entire game'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 me 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 meaningless."
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 elements.
The Development Department manager, Zhang, opened his mouth to retort, but found himself speechless.
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