In May 1995, a Sony executive walked to a microphone, said $299, and walked off, undercutting Sega's $399 Saturn and cementing a brand-new trade show as the industry's kingmaker. This episode tells the biography of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, beginning with the indignity of CES in 1991, when gaming booths were shoved behind adult film vendors in an overflow tent whose leaking roof dripped rainwater onto Sega Genesis consoles and infuriated Tom Kalinske.

We connect E3's birth to the 1993 and 1994 congressional hearings on game violence, the formation of the ESA and a voluntary ratings system, and the first show's 40,000 attendees. Then we follow the failed Tokyo expansion, the costly Atlanta years, the mid-2000s boom when attendance topped 70,000 and booths cost $5 to $10 million, the 2007 and 2008 downsizing into a sterile Santa Moni ...