I am now officially registered, booked and reserved for my first E3 ever, to start in just under a month. I will arrive in LA early on Monday morning, probably too early considering what the rest of the week is going to entail. I don’t know yet what I’m doing on Monday, I’m sure it involves set-up, planning and rehearsal. As many people know, Sony’s press briefing has been scheduled for Monday afternoon. I’m sure many of us will expectantly wait to see what announcements should must be made: price, further timing on the worldwide launch, HDD-inclusion, controller design, online features, etc. It is definitely going to be one heck of an evening afterwards.

Tuesday morning is Nintendo’s briefing, to be held at the famed Kodak Theater, where we can expect a lot more news about the Virtual Console, their big franchises and whatever creatively disruptive things they have cooking up Iwata-san and Miyamoto-san’s sleeves. As soon as the Nintendo briefing is over, most everyone will be headed over to the Chinese Theater, which is just a stone’s throw away, for the Microsoft briefing. It took me a while to realize that this was THE Chinese Theater we see and hear about when some movies premiere in Los Angeles. Wow. I’m really not as free to speculate about what the Microsoft announcements will be (since I already pretty much know them) as I can about Sony and Nintendo, but I’m sure it will be all that everyone seems to expect and more.

Wednesday the show starts and so will the absolutely chaotic mayhem, judging from some show floor pictures of E3 2005 and being told that the floor is pretty much constantly like that throughout the show. Commit me if you have to, but I think this is going to be a great time for a guy like me. I don’t remember what my schedule and responsibilities are for each day, obviously I will be busier than I will probably ever be in my life. There will be a couple of “parties” that I will attend (or at least try to) from the looks of it. I say “parties” because they aren’t really the type of party where you just go to have fun and let off steam. In one way or another they will be related to networking, getting to know other folks in various parts of the industry, getting to meet people I talk to often face to face and generally networking. I mean, it will be fun, but again, not entirely super party time.

I also hope that I can find enough time to walk the floor and adequately check everything out. Partly out of curiosity of course, but I’m really interested in being able to see what’s coming down the pipe for publishers across all platforms, including PC. It will be like being a kid in a candy store. Depending on the level of announcements, it will be interesting to see how far Sony and Nintendo are coming along on their first party titles — in the case of the latter company, there hasn’t been much being said or shown. I can’t even begin to think about what from multi-platform and 360 exclusive publishers I want to see. A lot of it is stuff Microsoft Game Studios is publishing anyway — the Japanese titles. The one thing I do know for certain, is that whatever I see, I know I’ll see enough that it’s going to mortally injure my pocketbook this year. And I can’t wait!