Sony, Microsoft set stage for gaming's next fight

LOS ANGELES - After hours of technical jargon at Sony’s pre-E3 press briefing Monday, Sony Entertainment CEO Ken Kutaragi stepped up to the podium. "Now I have the final and biggest announcement," he said to the crowd of thousands. He then stepped back to reveal, sitting on a pedestal, the Sony PlayStation 3. Or rather, three of them: black, white and silver.

And they looked like ... well ... the PlayStation 2. Only shinier. And rounder.

Hundreds of digital-camera carrying hands shot up in the air to capture the moment. In the darkened Culver City soundstage the cameras' digital displays reminded one of a futuristic variant of the old rock concert standby of raising a lighter to "Freebird."

Across town at Microsoft’s pre-E3 briefing later in the day, Xbox executive J Allard was reaching for similar prosaic moments, saying with a straight face that the gaming medium would eventually reach a billion people. That’s right, a billion people.

(MSNBC is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)

It’s easy to believe that video gaming is the center of the universe at an event like E3, where the tens of thousands of individuals who live, breathe and make a living off of video games gather to, well, live, breathe and make a living off of video games.

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Nowhere does this Messiah complex get more extreme than the pre-E3 press conferences by the big three: Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. It’s as if the corporate officers and the goggle-eyed developers were talking about ending world hunger and not — gulp — toys.

But what toys! Both next generation consoles promise revolutionary graphics, HDTV capability, surround sound, digital media streaming and video conferencing.

These are the types of toys, according to Kutaragi, that "belong in the center of the living room." The Xbox 360 team shares the same vision.

How many living rooms do these guys think we have?

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