Doubts

It was now Friday evening, two days before the ECTS show and my show passes still hadn’t arrived. My friend Aaron told me “If they don’t come tomorrow, you’re going to have to collect them from the press room at the show”. I didn’t like the idea of having to collect the passes at all, that way both myself and my friend Mo would have to make out to be 18 year olds in front of security type people who have to deal with hundreds of journalists every day.

Apart from this small hiccup I had planned well, I had bought some new clothes especially for the event, talked through the whole thing with Mo and taken every measure to make myself look older (fake beard excluded.)

The Greatest Day

7:30pm and I’m up and about. It takes a lot to get me out of bed but from the moment I opened my eyes that morning I didn’t even blink before I was on my feet. I had planned this day like it was some kind of religious festival and now was the moment I had to act out these plans exactly if the day was to be a success.

I left the house at 8:30 and was sharing the car with my friend Mo and my dad. I was extremely nervous, about as nervous as sitting in the dentist waiting room worrying on what is about to happen. That is the kind of person I am, some people are happy, some people are depressed, I worry.

After a 45 minute car journey we began to approach the Olympia building where ECTS was being held, I could see the big flag posts outside with Gameboy Advance and N64 logos on them. This is the moment where I started to realise what I had got myself involved in, this wasn’t just a bit of fun or a place where I could have a laugh playing games, this was a trade show for showcasing the latest money ventures in a $8 Billion industry.

There were a lot of Journalists around, they were swarming the whole area and myself and Mo were chucked right on to the street with them as we got out of my dad’s car and thanked him for taking us all the way to the other side of London.

As I looked at the Journalists with their clip boards and mobile phones I became worried, even slightly embarrassed that I was insulting them by making a poor attempt at pretending to be one of them in order to have a bit of fun playing some games. Of course I was very serious about playing all these new games, my life seems to revolve around videogames, but I seemed to be the only person excited by the fact that the building in front of me was filled with upcoming Nintendo games, a brand new Nintendo system and my idol Shigeru Miyamoto. Everyone else was treating the event as another day at the office, or even a nuisance that was making them have to get out of bed on a Sunday morning.