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E3 - Electronic Entertainment Expo 1998 June 8, 1998 Atlanta, GA. For the hottest new software, the place to be last week was E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. And we were there, taking in the displays that covered the equivalent of 35 football fields, seeing what’s new and what’s next in entertainment and edutainment. Sales of these products grew 38% last year to $5.1 billion, so this is BIG business. We spent most of our time looking at educational and productivity software (with a few breaks to chat with Mario Andretti about his new gaming steering wheel from Mad Katz, and with Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, about his sci-fi program from Simon & Schuster, Starship Titanic; Gillian Anderson, X-Files’ Scully, was also there promoting the upcoming adventure program X-Files: The Game). Here’s more of what’s coming: Mindscape will introduce National Geographic Maps, which contain every fold-out map ever published by the magazine. We were impressed with a preview of the program, which featured advanced search capabilities and thousands of fascinating facts. Also coming from National Geographic is National Geographic Greeting Cards, featuring their wonderful photos, and National Geographic Trip Planner Deluxe, with a highly accurate road database, travel locations linked to National Geographic articles and videos and photos. In the edutainment category, look for more titles tied to characters from TV, movies and children’s books. Broderbund will launch Dr. Seuss Preschool, Dr. Seuss Kindergarten and an updated version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? which has a talking foreign-language dictionary and enhanced Internet resources. A group of wacky monsters will help children learn Spanish in Kids! Spanish, from Syracuse Language. Lucas Learning is releasing Star Wars DroidWorks to help children 10 years and older learn and apply, can you imagine, scientific and engineering principles in constructing 3D droids to explore and defeat the Empire’s droids. SouthPeak Interactive will use the Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes characters in a series of puzzle, paint and create programs. IBM and Crayola will also be encouraging art and creativity with Make a Masterpiece, featuring art from around the world, and 3D Castle Creator, where children can assemble their very own castle. For kids’ fun activities–straight from TV land–Broderbund is bringing out The Rugrats Adventure Game and The Rugrats Movie Activity Center, featuring all the Rugrat characters and their usual mayhem; Knowledge Adventure and Simon & Schuster are introducing Sabrina, The Teenage Witch: Spellbound, with voices from the TV show and all of Sabrina’s crossed curses for you to fix. Also coming are Blue’s Birthday Adventure and Blue’s ABC Time Activities, featuring Blue’s Clues TV characters. For the grown-ups: LucasArts will release Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, a 3D animated action-adventure set in exotic locales; Fox Interactive has X Files: The Game, an interactive movie adventure with original footage and story lines, where you can help Mulder and Scully in their investigations. New from Mindscape is Chessmaster 6000, with new voice-annotated games, a 300,000 game database and more tutorials and chess sets. Disney will release Walt Disney: An Intimate History of the Man and His Magic, a multimedia reference that contains rare and exclusive footage and photos. The new IBM World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia will have voice recognition for command and control, dictation and text-to-speech capabilities. Get your ears ready for vast improvements in sound. For theater-like sound, Dolby Surround is now featured in more than 130 CD-ROM titles; also revving up to produce more realistic sound for your computer are Sony, with X360 Sound, and Creative Labs, with Environmental Audio. On display was Intel’s Connected Car PC Technology, a prototype SUV equipped with dozens of computer-based gadgets, made us wish we could have one now. There’s a voice-activated command center where you can request a map display, spoken route directions or GPS position, get information from the Internet for travel, traffic, tourism, and reservations, monitor home systems, have e-mail read to you and much more. And that’s just for the driver. For passengers, there’s color displays for DVD movies, 3D multimedia games and more. These are just the highlights of what we saw at E3, but in a nutshell: the future of computing look very exciting indeed. |
