Videos from before the previous decade haven’t always transferred well to the internet. Some moments are destined to stay at a grainy and highly compressed 720p, but Sony’s infamous E3 2006 press conference is no longer one of them.
An old video of the Sony E3 2006 conference has made its way online
Noclip Game History Archive uploaded a video of the notorious conference as a part of its preservation efforts. The conference has been available through other channels, but is a little on the fuzzy side, as noted by Giant Bomb’s inferior version of the video that was uploaded in 2016.
While Sony has had some celebrated E3 conferences, like the 2016 one that featured God of War’s reveal and the 2015 show with Final Fantasy 7 Remake, The Last Guardian, Shenmue 3, and Horizon Zero Dawn, this 2006 conference was remembered for its deluge of awkward moments, which seemingly foreshadowed the struggles Sony would go on to have during the PS3 era. It was the source of former Sony CEO Kaz Hirai’s “Riiiiiiiidge Racer!,” the giant enemy crabs meme, and the announcement of the PS3’s shocking $599 price tag, which, when adjusted for inflation, is the equivalent of the PS5 costing around $900 now.
There are also a few trailers of first-party games that were canceled, like The Getaway 3 and Eight Days, giving the show more historical importance that goes beyond memes. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Insomniac Games’ launch title Resistance: Fall of Man, the widely panned dragon game Lair, and the Sixaxis-heavy Warhawk, on the other hand, are among some of the games featured in the show that did eventually get released.
This is just one of many older videos Noclip Game History Archive has put online. This channel is a spin-off of Noclip, an outlet famous for its lengthy video game documentaries on games like Horizon Zero Dawn, The Last of Us Part I, the Demon’s Souls remake, and the fan-made Bloodborne PS1-esque demake, just to name a few.
Noclip came into owning boxes of tapes from GameSpot and has made it its mission to put many of them online, a process founder Danny O’Dwyer (who also used to work at GameSpot) detailed in a recent video. These tapes have contained other higher resolution videos from the past, like the reveal trailer for the first Uncharted, the first trailer for Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, and the 2006 teaser for Metal Gear Solid 4.
