CES as a gamer is very weird.
You're the target audience, but you're in the wrong place.
I have to say I’m lucky I have a very nerdy dad. He has a software company with a singular concept of a product. An excellent salesman and a friend to everyone he encounters. Through this, he has managed to ferry my excitable but undeserving rear into a shrine dedicated to the biggest, flattest, shiniest tech that may or may not be your next Amazon shopping obsession next year.
I’ve gone about 5 times, almost always with a weird eSports focus as a fan waffling between Starcraft II, League of Legends, and fighting-games-in-general. Here’s some of my favorite moments at the convention.
Day9
I met Day9 during the absolute height of Starcraft 2, but I think the most excited person was the event coordinator at SuperMicro. This is a feat, frankly. I loved Starcraft 2 and absolutely everyone lionizes Day9 for being one of the few people willing to front a hosting bill and have streams before Twitch.tv really took off. He was doing some match commentary, a gig I would later discover to be the absolute hardest thing to do in the world. It’s really difficult to hype up inexperienced play to a really small audience, but he did it with tremendous grace.
Basically, marketing gets saddled with planning something to draw people on the show floor, but eSports was really homegrown back then and the only noticeable names had very minimal presence outside of the game itself. The coordinator’s face brightened up like a Christmas tree when I rolled up to the booth and asked where Day9 was. At that moment, you could absolutely tell I was the first person to ask that question. It was crazy to think that one of the absolute biggest pieces of a game was completely unrecognizable to the masses.
Trihex
The Wacom booth was always a place I lived ages ago. They used to have a massive booth with so many huge and impossibly expensive pen displays to demo. At the time, I was a very early adopter of Manga Studio 5, which would later become the ubiquitous ClipStudioPaint when Celsys decided to self-publish. (A move that really got the anti-Adobe train going.) I got on good terms with one of the product managers because I would always show up and work a little magic on the displays like a little demo assistant. Doug’s an awesome guy. I hope he still works there.
Fast forward a couple years. I think Wacom lost a patent for their pen technology, so a substantial number of manufacturers started undercutting them. At the time, they were comfortable with holding the lions’ share, but they definitely understood that they didn’t need to press with the marketing budget. I didn’t know this before I went to their booth and was shocked that they reduced it to a couple small meeting rooms. I peeked around the corner and saw Trihex pop out.
At this moment in time, Trihex was definitely front page Twitch. The TriHard emote was splattered everywhere, used either for good or for very naughty. Speed running was gaining absolutely insane momentum from GDQ, and here this guy was in the flesh. Twitch had been established as a serious platform. I practically shriek, “Woah, Trihex? What are you doing here?” His response:
“You know who I am?” Pointing to himself, eyes wide.
This is a massive shock to me too. It’s not like this is an obscure streamer. He’s active, frequently pulling massive numbers at the time, and has a global emote. Particularly in the retro peripheral space, there isn’t a single person better to market, say, a SNES controller for modern PCs because he’s pulling stunts on runs that automatically make you think his hardware is insane. Even those vendors didn’t know who he was.
Getting Wazzler’d IRL
One of my absolute favorite things about old CES is the idea of doing a progamer challenge as an easy way to win a wager. To me, this is kid in the candy store moment., I’ve got two experiences with this: Trying to cheese Evil Geniuses’ Idra with Protoss 2 base immortal all-in right at the peak of his infamy because an OEM prebuilt company thought it’d be endlessly funny to pit him against people who primarily worked for a living. He defends it and I laugh it off with the 3 other guys who know what Starcraft 2 is.
Similarly, they did this with Justin Wong. This was fresh after his infamous appearance on WCG Ultimate Gamer. If you can take a game off of him, you get a MSI laptop. We’re playing on vanilla SF4 and I don’t play the game, so I pick Sagat and pretend to be cool, but he’s just autopiloting a pressure string. Round two, the guy running the booth gets a piece of literature and slides it in front of Jwong’s eyes and he’s still beating my ass. I’m pretty salty about this.
Afterwards, he asks me how I felt after getting blasted like that. My response is, “At least I can drive a car.” The handful of spectators, all around my age and watchers of WCG Ultimate Gamer, laugh pretty hard at my one moment of insane glory.
If you ever wonder why I respect that guy, we have met multiple times at random airports and events and he never mentions the moment I was a supreme scrub.
DDR Classroom Edition
You won’t believe this, but Konami was really trying to get school district money way back when. One of their big demos was a huge projector wall with 12+ wireless foam-reinforced dancemats. I’m obsessed with this thing because if I had one of these at my school, I probably would have looked so cool.
As a DDR player who has experienced public pads more cratered than the moon, I can safely say that it was the absolute worst setup I have ever played on. The projector was laggy, the pad was off sync, and oh-my-god, the charts were absolute hot garbage with zero syncing and flow. One weird thing about the difficulty ratings was that the easier charts just had notes subtracted from the hardest chart. They literally all follow the same pattern of directions, but there’s just chunks missing in the basic and standard editions. It was absolutely insane how disconnected the product was from the actual game experience.
Still, I wanted to keep playing. I was literally the only person in the entire show that understood how flawed this product was, haha. It was just funny being in a suit with shoes off, trying to faux-freestyle to take the taste of weird autogenned charts out of my mouth. The other booths started to notice that I was showing up a lot. I was showered with praise because I was semi-competent at the game. I even got approached by someone who wanted to get me on a TV show (thank god this never happened.)
The greatest 3 days of my life
SOULCALIBUR VI is announced. I’m in tears. The game had been gently leaked by some random guy named Vergeben, but to see it get announced by a mysterious man in tow behind Harada was a moment that altered my brain chemistry forever. There was a press demo in Europe somewhere, so information on the game was scarce, but the game was showing up somewhere unexpected: CES.
I think Markman managed to broker a connection with a product manager at Razer, so they had the game to demo at the show. I was there, playing the game relentlessly without any queues. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew the game felt right, fun, and absolutely incredible. To just be able to sit there and mash on it for hours on end produced such indescribable bliss. Still, there’s a little sadness to this: I am definitely one of the handful of people that understands how significant this demo is. It’s just me and a couple friends.
Every person who wanted to play it, I pitched it to. I roped in FPS players and got them to mash Reversal Edge until they lost their minds. I played FourWude (who smoked me and made me respect Tekken player prowess and his great knowledge of input delay) and Emily (who also smoked me, but we forged a friendship through this). One of the reasons why I didn’t initially think Reversal Edge was going to be a problem for the game was because I met so many first time players who thought it was pretty fun to play with. I meet that realization with a little hubris as it is the most despised mechanic in the game.
This is one of those origin story things for me as a commentator. The staff at the booth noticed I lived there as much as they worked there and gave me a fidget spinner as a gift at the end of the show, saying “watching you play this game makes me really want to play it.” It always stuck with me. I’m still doing that very thing for this very game.
You might be thinking, these are all very strange memories with these takes. It seems like these exhibitors don’t know their enthusiast audiences that well.
Yeah, they definitely don’t in my experience, but it’s not for a lack of trying. I think gamers in general, no matter how enthusiastic they are, forget that they are quite invisible to the people that work in bringing the product to a purchasable state. In the hardware space, if you’re not the actual manufacturer working for the console, it takes a rather convincing pitch to a large number of companies that will never engage in the fun side of experiencing an end product.
Realistically, these trade shows are about attracting the attention of a very detached person with connections or funding. Sales on this scale must be very difficult and draining. I usually hang around to brighten up the booth employees’ days because I can. There’s a lot of objectively good ideas that just go away and that sucks.
If you think about it, it is a literal job for someone in marketing to seek out the passionate and yet the excitement of the enthusiast is a novel thing to them in many circumstances. I used to think this was a sad reality, but I think it is an encouraging one. Your experience as a user with energy is absolutely wanted and treasured. In the end of a product’s cycle, most of these people look at a spreadsheet that probably fails to meet expectations. Many of them might have wished they met you earlier so they could understand what need this thing fulfills.
Anyway, happy new 2025! I’ll be writing about what I’m excited about and dreading at CES tomorrow.