Turn the clock back to 2008. It’s E3, and Bethesda has been tapped to open a Microsoft Microsoft Ft press conference with a live demonstration of its next big game, Fall 3. This is huge. Aside from performing on one stage for thousands of people, Fallout as a franchise was kept inactive for a long time. And here was Bethesda, trying to bring back one of the most popular RPGs ever, except now, the post-apocalyptic game was to be a first person shooter. People were suspicious.
The stakes for Bethesda could not be higher. Rehearsing the event was no brainer. But according to a recent podcast snippet between Bethesda executive producer Ted Howard and the people of the Xbox – which now owns Fallout Studios – things are still inevitably wrong. It’s just the nature of a live event.
“What they do during the demo – it’s live, you go to the controller, you play through the demo, blah blah blah – and if something goes wrong, there’s someone else playing too,” Howard said. The idea is that, should the demo come under technical difficulties, presenters can only switch feeds. Someone else says “broken arrow” in someone else’s earpiece, the feeds are swapped.
In this case, Bethesda, senior VP of global marketing Pete Hines, was waiting in the wings. Sure enough, when it was show time, the press conference began with Howard’s wireless controller unable to connect to the game. You can see it happening in the video below – Howard can be heard saying to the audience, “I’m fine.”
Internally, however, Howard was panicking.
“And man, I was just like, ‘Oh, please no,'” Howard recalls. Q hins up sl .k. The trick, however, was not just to keep the demo going. It was to keep Illusion Howard guides the audience through the presentation, which means that what the man behind the scenes should say should continue.
“The whole time I’m rehearsing, I’m thinking, this is the stupidest thing right now, they never need this,” Hines recalls. “Todd knows what he’s doing. It is not breaking. ”
And then of course, it fell. Hines could not help but curse.
“It was like two people went to a dance class, but they still couldn’t dance together,” Howard said. Fortunately, people who knew him couldn’t really say things were going to culminate, as Hines tried his best to anticipate what Haynes was doing.
Bethesda Daves noted that, a Second As a precautionary measure, they have prepared a video to play during the demonstration, only if the other player’s option does not work. Accidental!
“It was the worst demo I’ve ever given,” Howard said.
The podcast also generally talks about MicroSF’s relationship with Bethesda over the years, why the merger was realized, and some hints of what is to come for both companies. Fun fact: those long load times on the console version Moroind? That Bethesda was rebooting your Xbox, custom dogs.
