“First of all, it would be great if I didn’t have to put a release date out at all,” Nintendo’s longtime chief game designer Shigeru Miyamoto recently told me when I asked him about the tendency for Zelda games to be late. “But I have to.” We both laughed.

Nintendo has publicly denied that joke from an E3 demo for the upcoming Wii U game Paper Mario: Color Splash is a reference to a harassment campaign that targeted game designer Zoe Quinn. The company says it’s a nod to the Watergate scandal from the 1970s.

It’s been nearly 10 years since development started on The Last Guardian, designer Fumito Ueda’s long-anticipated follow-up to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. I caught up with Ueda at E3 to talk about his lengthy journey.

Though I didn’t get a chance to play that newfangled Legend of Zelda that everyone was raving about, there was plenty to get excited about at E3.

I played a lot of games at E3, an annual whirlwind of demos and announcements that can be as exhausting as it is exciting. Let’s talk about some of them, shall we?

Sony Santa Monica has big plans to shake up God of War. “We looked at every aspect of this game differently,” creative director Cory Barlog told me at E3, “all centered around the concept of ‘Why? Why am I doing this? Why am I here? Why am I making these decisions?’”

Between interviews, video shoots and encounters with mascots, I played a bunch of games at and around E3 last week. Let me tell you about them.

The carpets have been rolled up, the speakers torn down. The bathrooms have gotten a vigorous cleaning. E3 is over, but our memories linger. Let’s chat.

I literally gasped when the Resident Evil logo came up at Sony’s E3 press conference. A big budget horror game in VR?! My dreams came crashing down to Earth after playing it in VR, unfortunately. Right now, it’s a mess.

Hollywood effects studio Spectral Motion were hired by Sony to create a little something for Horizon Zero Dawn’s E3 demo. The suit they came up with ended up being one of the lowkey stars of the entire show.

Whenever I see a new trailer for Horizon Zero Dawn, I mutter to myself: “please don’t suck.” Based on the 30 minutes I played this week, things are looking promising, and it’s not just the big stuff: it’s the game’s smaller details, too.

Dragon Quest VII was one of the biggest games of its time, a significant leap over its predecessors in terms of raw size. So when the developers at Square decided to remake it for 3DS, they ran into some issues.

We ended this E3 the way we started, by going hands-on with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Here, for your viewing pleasure, is direct feed footage of some cool moments that happened naturally as we played the game.

Welcome to E3 2016! Kotaku is in Los Angeles for the week, bringing you all the news, interviews, media, and more from the year’s biggest trade show. We’ll update this post regularly as E3 continues, so check back!

E3’s press conferences are great for showcasing all those fancy-pantsy new games but, more importantly, they’re also an invaluable source of the most glorious corporate folly: a place to revel in poorly-conceived skits, mirthless misfires and moments of such inexplicable lunacy that its impossible to see how anyone…

The lines at E3 are really long. Wanna know how long? Kotaku’s editor in chief Stephen Totilo gave us a live tour.

I was wondering if we’d written about Death’s Gambit before, and all I could find was a 2014 post about how much I loved a GIF I saw of it. That GIF is still cool, but the actual game looks good, too.