E3 flashback: Booth babes edition
Though they are a much rarer species now, the annual E3 video game trade show was once crawling with scantily clad "booth babes." Eventually, it devolved into self-parody, and you see a lot less of it in recent years.
- Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
Though they are a much rarer species now, the annual E3 video game trade show was once crawling with scantily clad "booth babes."
Over the decade we've been attending the show, things eventually got so out of hand that dedicated "booth babe" Web sites were popping up, and game companies were involved with a kind of promotional model arms race--which in retrospect fits with the spend-whatever-it-takes years of the show in the first half of the 2000s. Eventually, it devolved into a kind of self-parody, and you see a lot less of it in recent years.
For historical context, we present a selection of snaps we shot over the years, intended to highlight the most ridiculous examples from E3's history. Most of these photos were originally shot for, and published on, the now-defunct women's gaming site GameGal.com (founded and run for many years by my game-playing tech journalist spouse) in an annual E3 Hall of Shame section.
