KONAMI, SQUARE AND EA

 
E3 booths are notoriously lavish, and Konami lived up to this long-running standard with its Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater area. As you can see, it was decorated to look like a jungle, with TVs resting inside rocky walls.

 
Gator-Snake is cool, but looking back on the game, we have to say that “Snake Eater” sounds like a game someone would invent in a sitcom.

 
Konami was on a roll with their booths that year – Silent Hill 4: The Room was made up to look like a dilapidated apartment.

 
This booth came complete with cabinets, stove, sink and schwag-starved journalists.

 
Square running a trivia contest for various prizes. We actually won after correctly identifying two in-jokes Final Fantasy X makes about Final Fantasy IV. The prize? Sigh… a Final Fantasy XI poster.

 
Square always makes a big production out of its booth, and in 2004 erected this stupidly tall, blindingly bright screen that displayed their top titles (for scale, observe the line of people walking through the screen). In this case, the GBA Kingdom Hearts was cycling through.

 
Speaking of screens, EA blasted their lineup loud enough to wake the dead. Def Jam is seen here – too bad pics can’t capture how strange it is to see such a large screen running high-res images so cleanly.

Final page – Activision, Namco and cosplayers!