I’m currently sitting on a plane, on my way to Los Angeles for the 2012 E3 expo with very little elbow room, trying to type up this little day one diary. It’s a little odd for me, as folks who know me will attest that I don’t tend to do stuff like this. I play it safe; I don’t often leave the country and, when offered the chance to go to E3, I fully expected to either put it off, or flake out and not go. Yet here I am, ready to fulfil one of my life-long ambitions. Every day I’m going to try and put together one of these diary pieces, so here goes.

Every adventure starts with a single step. I’ve probably got that wrong and, yes ok, I was watching Lord of the Rings last night, but the point still stands. E3 2012 – it’s an adventure. We have been planning this trip for something like six months and this morning at around 3:30 I was up and ready to roll. By ready to roll, I mean “incredibly nervous about the trip ahead”. Before I go any further, I should thank my parents and family – this trip has cost a lot of time and money to pull off, but they have supported me tremendously. They still have no idea why I’m going though; my dad still refers to my articles as reports and my mum worries that I may be kidnapped and sold on to the sex trade, but they have been there to help me make this thing possible. Another big thanks to folk at work who were very interested in what I was up to (and for giving me the time off, I apologise for any swearing).

Oh and lest I forget, superduper double thanks to Lorna for all her hard work over the last few weeks and months to get this trip sorted for us; she is amazing and it sucks that she wasn’t able to come along to the show. Anyway, enough of the Oscar acceptance speech bullshit, it’s diary time!

3.30 am and I’m up and ready to make the short car journey to meet the boss man at Glasgow Airport to travel down to London Heathrow. Everything went pretty smoothly, up until I was relied upon to see which gate we were departing from, when it turned out it that it wasn’t the one I thought, and so we then had to make a quick dash around the terminal. Sorry Mark! I’ve also had to watch Mark humph this huge bag full of laptop and camera gear for most of the day. Needless to say my worrying about my little laptop bag being too heavy was a bit stupid. During the wait in the airport Mark and I discussed the new Google Glass (Mainly how they may be the forebearer to the human race finally bowing down to some cyborg overlords) and what we were excited to see this coming week. No surprise then, that the main games discussed were XCOM and Planetside 2.

Luckily the flight down to London was quick and smooth. Mark and I discussing the ins and outs of MMOs. Yes, I do go on about them a bit. I found out that Mark hadn’t heard of the “classics” like EverQuest and The Matrix Online and this may have pushed me into a slight rant about what these games were about and who Sony Online Entertainment were. Honestly though, I will cover more this week than the Massively Multiplayer Online games. After a quick lunch of boiled bacon and powdered egg, we arrived in a drizzly, London to meet up with the rest of the crew.

A quick trip to the gate, with my first “Huh, 17 year old Mark in the passport looks nothing like 24 year old Mark” look from the woman at the gate, and we were away. I’m currently sandwiched between Toffer and Mark (with his fucking bouncy seat amigo in front). Tonight we get our passes and prepare for all the work tomorrow. I can’t wait.

So, that’s it so far. I’ve watched three quarters of Chronicle, a film I cleverly bought on iTunes for £13.99 the night before, without checking the movies which would be shown for free in-flight. Tomorrow GamingLives will be covering the Microsoft, EA and Sony press conferences before the real fun begins on Tuesday and I’m really looking forward to a lot of the things I’ll get to see this week, some stuff I can’t really talk about yet and some other stuff that… I also can’t really talk about. Also from GLHQLA, we will be delivering the very best in podcast entertainment for you guys to listen to at a reasonable hour.

The E3 adventure starts here. Well…unless I get turned away at customs.

Addendum: I didn’t get turned away at customs, although I did have to give a power point presentation on what the NHS was and why it was great to the customs guy who didn’t know what an Administrator did. We snuck down to the convention centre to pick up our passes and I got me one of these.  Anyway, I’m finishing this from the house, which is fantastic. Stay tuned spidey fans!

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