gen ATLAS, God of War Laufey, Spyro and Ocarina of Time briefly gave the showcase season a centre
E3 did not come back in June 2026. It cannot. The last in-person event was held in 2019, a digital edition followed in 2021, and the Entertainment Software Association officially ended E3 in December 2023. But for a few days this year, the old feeling returned: the sense that the entire games industry was gathered around the same handful of announcements.
That feeling has become rare. Modern game reveals are scattered across publisher streams, social feeds, podcasts, trailers and smaller events. Sony held State of Play on 2 June. Summer Game Fest followed on 5 June, Xbox presented its showcase on 7 June, and Nintendo held its Direct on 9 June. Everything was accessible, polished and easy to watch, but there was no single stage or moment holding it together.
E3 once provided that centre. Its best years compressed an enormous industry into a few feverish days. Sony’s 2015 conference remains the most famous example: The Last Guardian reappeared, Final Fantasy VII Remake was announced, and Shenmue III emerged within the same presentation. Sony’s recap still reads like somebody’s impossible wish list. The announcements mattered individually, but their proximity made the night unforgettable.
Summer Game Fest has not recreated that concentration. It sounds less like a destination than a label attached to several weeks of marketing. Hundreds of games pass through the season, often using the same familiar trailer language: a slow view of a ruined landscape, a grave voice discussing extinction or destiny, an orchestral impact, a glimpse of an enormous creature and a request to wishlist the game. Much of it is impressive. Very little survives in the memory.
The problem is not a shortage of good games. It is the sheer number competing for attention at the same speed. When everything is promoted as a major event, almost nothing feels like one.
Four games broke through that blur this year. They came from different studios and appeared in different showcases, but together they briefly restored the shared excitement that E3 once produced.
gen ATLAS
Fumito Ueda’s gen ATLAS was the strangest and most intriguing of the four. Developed by genDESIGN and published by Epic Games, it takes place on an apparently abandoned planet covered in technological ruins and the remains of colossal machines. The player discovers the head of a giant robot that can apparently attach itself to different mechanical bodies, opening new ways to travel, solve puzzles and fight other machines.
There is still no release date, and much of the game remains deliberately unexplained. What made the trailer memorable was not secrecy by itself—trailers are rarely short of vague mysteries—but the feeling that the world had been built around a specific idea. The ruined giants did not seem like decoration placed in the background. They appeared to shape how the player would move through and understand the landscape.
Ueda has spent much of his career placing small, vulnerable figures beside things far larger than themselves. Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian all found emotion in that imbalance. gen ATLAS carries some of the same feeling, but its harder science-fiction setting and interchangeable robot bodies suggest that he is not simply repeating himself.
Ueda told PlayStation that he wanted to surprise the people familiar with his earlier work rather than give them another variation on it. The robotic world and more open structure make that ambition visible. Even in an unfinished state, the game already feels unmistakably like somebody’s work rather than a collection of fashionable ideas.
God of War Laufey
God of War Laufey made its impact in a different way. Santa Monica Studio could easily have continued the series by sending Kratos and Atreus into another mythology. Instead, it placed Faye at the centre—the wife, mother and Jötunn warrior whose choices quietly shaped the entire Norse saga.
The game begins after her funeral. Faye awakens in the Everywhen, an afterlife where gods and creatures from different mythologies exist together. She learns that the plans she left behind to protect Kratos and Atreus are in danger and must find a way back to them.
That premise allows the series to grow without merely making the next threat larger. Faye was previously understood through memories, stories and the grief of the people who survived her. Making her the protagonist turns a deliberately absent character into a person with her own failures, loyalties and reasons for acting.
Santa Monica says her combat combines the speed and movement of the Greek-era games with the heavier character focus of the Norse titles. She can fight across the ground and air, wield a powerful sword and even separate an enemy’s soul from its body. Deborah Ann Woll is returning to play her. The game is coming to PlayStation 5, although no release date has been announced.
The reveal worked because it was recognisably God of War without looking like another Kratos sequel. It opened a different side of the same story and trusted a character who had previously existed at its edges to carry the series forward.
Spyro: A Realm Beyond
Spyro’s return delivered the most immediate burst of nostalgia. Spyro: A Realm Beyond will be the character’s first original mainline adventure in nearly two decades. Toys for Bob, the studio behind Spyro Reignited Trilogy, is developing it for release in spring 2027 on Xbox, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC.
The important part is that the game is not relying on recognition alone. Its central new idea is full, unrestricted flight.
In the original trilogy, Spyro could glide during ordinary levels and fly freely inside a small number of timed challenges. A Realm Beyond brings those movements together and makes flight part of his normal abilities. Toys for Bob says it is designing larger, more vertical environments around that freedom. Spyro is not simply returning to his old playground with better graphics; the way he moves is changing the shape of the world around him.
I also got one piece of history wrong in the original version of this article. Banjo-Kazooie was released in June 1998, several months before Spyro the Dragon arrived that September. Spyro did not pave the way for Banjo. The two games were separate answers to the same challenge: how to make early 3D worlds colourful, readable and enjoyable to explore.
Spyro had achievements of his own. Insomniac developed a level-of-detail system that could show distant parts of a stage using simpler geometry. At a time when many 3D games concealed their limited viewing distance behind heavy fog, Spyro allowed players to look across broad levels, notice a landmark or collectible and wonder how to reach it. The bright colour design made those spaces even easier to understand.
Gliding was perfectly suited to that openness. The new game’s true flight system feels like a natural extension of what made the originals distinctive rather than an unrelated modern feature. That is what a good revival should do: remember why people cared, then take the idea somewhere it could not go before.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
The new version of Ocarina of Time carries a different kind of expectation. It does not need to prove that the original mattered. Its challenge is finding a way to update one of the most influential games ever made without sanding away what made it special.
Nintendo has described the game as being “reborn” exclusively for Switch 2. Nintendo Australia lists its release for 22 October 2026.
The original Ocarina of Time helped establish many ideas that later became normal in third-person games. Z-targeting allowed players to lock onto an enemy, keep it in view and move around it without fighting the camera. Context-sensitive controls allowed the same button to perform different actions depending on the situation. Its world taught players through landmarks, music, character placement and changes between childhood and adulthood.
Those ideas became so common that it is easy to forget how much had to be solved when developers first began building large adventures in three dimensions. Games as different as Dark Souls, God of War and The Witcher still use versions of the targeting and camera systems that Ocarina of Time helped popularise.
That history makes the remake exciting but also dangerous. Replacing the models, lighting and textures is straightforward. Preserving the atmosphere, restraint and slightly unsettling quality of the original is harder. Nintendo must decide what to leave untouched, what now feels unnecessarily awkward, and how much new material can be added before the game becomes something else.
The announcement commanded attention because it was not simply another famous title returning. It was Nintendo reopening a work that helped shape nearly thirty years of game design.
What the Four Games Shared
These games did not resemble one another. That was precisely why they stood out.
gen ATLAS offered an unfamiliar world from a creator with a recognisable point of view. Laufey shifted a major franchise toward a character who had never been allowed to tell her own story. A Realm Beyond brought back a beloved series with a clear reason to exist beyond nostalgia. Ocarina of Time asked how one of gaming’s foundations should be carried into another generation.
They did not save E3. The ESA permanently ended the event, and changing the name of Summer Game Fest would not recreate the business conditions or shared attention that once sustained it.
But these four announcements reminded me what I actually miss. It was never the convention centre itself, the corporate executives pretending to be relaxed or the awkward applause between demonstrations. It was the concentration: the belief that something important might happen while everyone was watching.
Modern showcases do not need more games. They need firmer editing, more varied pacing and the confidence to leave weaker material out. A presentation should not feel like an inventory of everything currently in production. It should give individual games enough room to become memorable.
For a few days in June 2026, these four managed it. The noise receded, the industry felt like one conversation again, and the old E3 electricity flickered back—not because E3 had returned, but because something finally held our attention.
