E3 2012 Booth design rants and raves

By BatRastered — June 25, 2012
Tags: blog e3-2012 wildrant

Have you been to E3 or another convention and just gaped in awe at how BAD some of the booths look or function? Like, what kind of human being thought THIS would be a good idea?

There are good booths and bad booths every year at E3, some are cramped and crowded, others just one big screen with nothing else to look at or play. Sometimes the booth design makes you stand back and say "WTF were they thinking?"

Check out this year's Capcom booth for example:

Capcom: Yeah, it's a big black box of nothingness. There's a Lost Planet 3 demo on one small corner and inside there are small rooms to play demos of DMC and RE6. For some reason, there was a pole dancer in the DMC room. I'm still not sure what that was about. What's worse, you had to wait in line to get a ticket to one of those rooms, then you stood in line with your ticket at the appropriate time. Uhhh... This is a trade convention, not Disneyland... right?

Contrast Capcom with Square, who gets it right every year. Square's booth has a big screen running their trailers with a large clear area in front of it with some benches. On either side of that, they have many open stations to play the games that they are showing to everyone and a few small rooms with non-playable demos running every 30 minutes (schedules clearly posted, I might add). Behind the counter, the press-only area has plenty of room where we saw a Tomb Raider demo. Well done. Our press stickers they gave us, even let us cut in line for the playable demos on the floor.

Then there's the good booths that have some weird or ridiculous feature... case in point, the giant red LED wall of the 2K booth. This could have just been a wall painted red, but no, they had to have a million LED lights and whatever ungodly sum of money that costs in both construction and electricity. The effect was to make me sick every time I had to walk by it, and to make the WB booth next door move a banner over to block the light from entering their booth. Look at this thing... the picture doesn't do it justice to how bright it was... trust me, it was uncomfortable to look at.

E3 2012 2K Booth

Someone thought this was a good idea... and paid for this!

What about that Transformers alcove in the Activision booth? Why do people feel the need to put roofs over this stuff and make it hot as balls in there since it blocks off the hall's AC from that room? Seriously, just put some kiosks out on the floor and a nice big screen to show your trailers and such. Why is that such an issue?

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E3 2012 Booth design rants and raves

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