Winning E3 in Los Angeles!

As I wrote previously, my game, Brobot Beat Down, was accepted to E3 2016! We were one of five students games from five universities around the country to be accepted to the prestigious competition. We received free passes and SCAD was generous enough to pay for our lodging in a gorgeous hotel in downtown LA (view from the window below). While we were there, hundreds if not thousands of the 70,000+ attendees stopped by our booth to check out our networked virtual reality game (including some tools that decided to try to use our booth to conduct interviews, that’s right, I’ll always remember you jokers).

Getting to experience the expo (and have a booth, pictured above) that many of us had grown up reading about in gaming editorials was awesome, and even more awesome was the way they welcomed us into the fold. While there we got to meet dozens of alumni of SCAD, who were gracious and gave us great feedback on our game. In fact, a few of them even invited us to tour their studios (which is how we ended up at Riot Games and Naughty Dog in the evenings).

Exploring the city, game studios and expo was awesome, but by far the best part of the week was when they announced the winner of the E3 College Game Competition, and you guessed it, it was us! Over 9 months prior to that moment I had written on a piece of paper that my only goal for my senior project was to “Win the E3 College Game Competition” so seeing the fruition of our many months of hard work was extremely satisfying.

After we won we were covered by many news outlets (like the one shown above), and were featured in the official E3 press release. Overall, E3 was one of the most memorable events of my life, and I’m extremely thankful to have been able to go. Below is some more information and links on Brobots and our game at E3:

Dozens of news articles including a long podcast interview with EdSurge, which was a new experience for me.

And of course, SCAD was pretty happy that we went on to represent them so well and had to do a couple write-ups, the first of which has my favorite title ever… “I, Brobot: How SCAD VR KOed E3.” and the first time I’ve been in a press release from my school, which was pretty cool.

After E3 Brobot Beat Down was brought to the 2016 Siggraph Conference where it was displayed as an example of virtual reality work. Siggraph 2016 had over 14,000 attendees.