We’re a little over a month away from the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo, more commonly known as E3, and Gamasutra has a nice create-a-story to get everyone excited.

If you ever read video game magazines or Web sites in the late 1990s or the earlier part of this decade, you know how huge E3 was for the industry. What started as a simple trade show for publishers evolved into a spectacle of huge announcements, flashing lights and hardly-dressed “booth babes.” For the last two shows, the Entertainment Software Association cut back considerably, stripping away much of the glamor and allowing press by invitation only. The restructuring didn’t go over well. Some publishers backed out of the second show, and Will Wright said the expo “almost feels like a zombie.”

This year is supposed to be a rebirth, with press registration restored, big announcements saved up and, yes, booth babes. The Entertainment Software Association, in addition to claiming that 150 companies will attend, gathered some hype from the big three console manufacturers for its story at Gamasutra.

The biggest hype comes from Microsoft, whose senior VP of the Interactive Entertainment Business, Don Mattrick, said the company’s presence “will completely transform how people think about home entertainment.”

Nintendo and Sony were slightly less restrained. Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said the company promises its “full support” to the show, adding that it’s the place “where creativity is on display, and as a ‘sneak peak’ for our entire industry it helps generate excitement for gamers around the world.”

SCEA president and CEO Jack Tretton simply said that the expo is an “ideal place for us to unveil the latest PlayStation news and products at our press event on June 2.”

Would anyone care to speculate what we’ll see at this year’s show? A streaming video solution for the Playstation 3? A new Mario game? Some new integration between the Xbox 360 and the Zune?

We’ll find out in June. (Shameless plug: I’ll be there to cover the show, so feel free to get your live coverage here.)

 
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