It took eight years, and we have gotten pretty close at a few points along the way (most notably in 2023), but we are back. For the first time since Playstation ostensibly abandoned June’s traditional big summer blowout, the pandemic shuttered the classic Los Angeles showcase branding, and Geoff Keighley began his Summer Game Fest initiative, the traditional console gaming “Big Three” have brought their presentation A-game within the same week, just as Keighley himself finally nailed a Game Fest show worthy of matching hype with the finest of his annual Game Awards celebrations.

There may be a thick cloud of sobering economic realities hovering over the videogame industry right now, but for the entirety of this past week, just about every major publisher added enough of its own flavour to spawn a banquet that delivered on hype, spectacle, and dare I say even joy, with old-school panache. At least for one 7-day period (give or take) in 2026, the real spirit of E3s past was alive and well.

Let’s dig into what we learned!

Dates, Dates, Dates

On the morning of June 3rd, just before the Sony State of Play kickstarted the rapid announcement season, the GTA-free September 2026 release schedule looked promising but just about manageable. We knew ex-CD Projekt dev darling The Blood of Dawnwalker was set to bring it in and Marvel’s Wolverine would own its midpoint, but the rest of the month’s offerings – while meaty in prospect – seemed targeted at specific niche audiences: Phantom Blade 0 for the soulslike fans, Dawn of War 4 for RTS sweats, and Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter for the JRPG sickos like me.

Just over an hour later, suffice to say that was no longer the case – and the situation only got worse over the ensuing days.

Despite a Phantom Blade 0 delay into late October, Playstation’s big summer showpiece was the scene of a brutal calendar crime that had any prospective player with a wide genre lens reeling. The extremely exciting character-action-flavoured Control Resonant now awaits Alan Wake universe stans on September 24th, but so does Silent Hill Townfall, Konami’s first entry in their resurgent survival horror juggernaut since last year’s trailblazing Japanese side story. Kings of 2026 Capcom have seen fit to release Onimusha: Way of the Sword, the next game in their ongoing hit streak, just one day after this double-whammy. And the debut of the gorgeous Rayman Legends Retold at the Sony show hardly helped the big picture, as the ground-up remake of my favourite 2D platformer of all time will launch less than a week later, on October 1st. Oh, and Ace Combat 8 is due the day after that. It’s a lot.

But by the end of the main Summer Game Fest show, Day of the Devs, the Xbox Games Showcase, and the Nintendo Direct, September had also added co-op retro-sci-fi gem Orbitals to the 3rd, ambitious 2D/3D hybrid platformer Screen Bound to the 10th, Napoleon shooter Valor Mortis to the 24th, Minecraft Dungeons II to the 29th, and most upsettingly both Trine 6 and Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave to that treacherous 17th (Trails day; nothing can help me now). October has also filled out somewhat (both Gears E-Day AND Star Wars: Galactic Racer on the 6th feels mean), but the real undersold ambush seems to be on the 27th of August, when the second volume of the Metal Gear Solid Collection will fight it out with A Plague Tale: Resonance, Brigandine Abyss, and Star Wars: Zero Company (two of those are tactical RPGs, by the way). Yes, not only is “September” insanely stacked, it effectively goes for six weeks this year. Publishers really are scared of GTA VI…

…And a Long-Held Promise For the Future

The Sony State of Play did also feature some goodness outside of September 2026, including the welcome return of the Stuntman series and an unexpected full-on numbered sequel to Until Dawn that looks far enough along to make its purported 2027 release window. But in a sign of things to come, the star of the show was a 20-odd-minute showcase of next year’s mythology-mashing God of War: Laufey, and there’s just something so warmly nostalgic about looking at a single extended gameplay demo in early June, wide-eyed in the freezing early morning while wrapped in a blanket or hoodie.

Perhaps emboldened by the positive reception to last year’s long look at The Witcher 4, the hotly-anticipated Final Fantasy VII Revelation reveal at the very end of the main Summer Game Fest show was treated as its own extended blowout, and Xbox doubled up on the deep-dive trend by both beginning and ending their show with long, unbroken looks at Gears of War: E-Day. While the presenting choice flies in the face of recent years’ strong rapid-fire videogame shows, I think there’s still room for a bit of a slower zoom-in on a massive IP now and then; if nothing else, it shows immense confidence on the part of the presenter.

Speaking of confidence, the Xbox showcase in particular continued the company’s recent commitment to transparency by slapping a label on every trailer detailing whether the footage onscreen was brought to us via CGI, “in-engine”, or “in-game” assets, and even the 2027 stuff shown at the event was mostly comprised of the latter. In fact with only a couple of rather obvious big-name exceptions, the theme of the whole week was 2027 games that each looked like they have a genuine shot at releasing on time. Clockwork Revolution and the left-field franchise-pivot Senua both fall under this category, as does stunningly trippy debutant Magicians: The Devil’s Deal (made right here in Australia) and maybe even, at long last, State of Decay 3? In any case, there is a nice little nest of concrete dates building up in early 2027 that is already starting to remind me of 2024’s beyond-ideal top-heavy RPG calendar. Fable is allegedly in February, joined by the next era of Tomb Raider games by way of Legacy of Atlantis, dated in the State of Play.

Before both of them – in mid-January of all places – we will supposedly have our hands on the House of Yakuza’s next big swing, Stranger Than Heaven, which was one of the major reveals within Geoff Keighley’s well-tuned Summer Game Fest main show. He also nabbed the biggest of many Capcom news headlines across the week by starting the show with Resident Evil Veronica – a reimagining of the PS2’s Code: Veronica that’s just exciting by default – as well as ushering in the re-reveal of The Wolf Among Us 2: We Really Are Doing It This Time.

The central showcase also unveiled Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, an ambitious-looking sequel with a brand-new protagonist and even more stunning visuals, as well as a proper title for Fumito Ueda’s mysterious new game, now gen ATLAS. Add not one but two new Cuphead games, the debut game from ex-Naughty Dog team That’s No Moon (Crossfire, not to be confused with that franchise Remedy worked on), tantalising new-IP reveals like the mysterious Haex, and a clear absence of gacha-powered advertising; this really was the best SGF show yet. Geoff’s only done seven of them, but still, credit where it’s due. The lulls in momentum were few and far between, and it was great to see recent GameSpot/Giant Bomb departure Lucy James given the co-host microphone.

With the sad absence of a dedicated Devolver show the only black mark on the June hype schedule (following an unfortunate and ironic financial crippling), Day of the Devs became my number-one source for instant indie wishlists this year, and it did not disappoint. It would be easier to list the games that didn’t interest me in that show, but a few standouts still bear a mention: first and foremost is Super Yooka-Laylee Kart, which looks exactly like that title implies it would. Four-player splitscreen and an old-school skill-ceiling design approach were all I needed to hear to sell me hook, line and sinker on Playtonic’s latest nostalgia shot.

Elsewhere Slap Out of It! gets Ben Starr bonus points and looks like a strangely fun mix between Thank Goodness You’re Here! and Bugsnax, while Tenebris Somnia‘s blend of indie filmmaking and Signalis-esque gameplay may just be novel enough to overcome my straight-horror resistance. And of course, Threads of Time is in serious danger of following in the footsteps of fellow Canadian-developed JRPG Sea of Stars as a personal Game of the Year contender for me in an already-RPG-dense 2027. Bring ’em on.

A Lukewarm Return to Exclusives

Over the last two years of truly farcical ups and downs for the Xbox brand, I have regularly flirted with the idea of writing a dedicated article on the company’s increasingly strained role within the wider industry. But it seems like each and every time I start up a draft, Xbox makes yet another face-changing announcement that alters their trajectory once again – usually in a super unclear way that only raises more questions. Well, during the SGF 2026 season, they did that again!

New CEO Asha Sharma was not shy to appear early in the 2026 showcase and associate her front-facing visage with this freshly-reactive era of Xbox, an era that has already been associated with some pretty consumer-friendly plays (she did, after all, drop the Game Pass Ultimate price tag as one of her first moves). But while she and longtime Xbox bigwig Matt Booty were keen to ram home how big a deal it is that Clockwork Revolution and Gears E-Day will not appear on any videogame platforms beyond Xbox and PC, the never-before-seen Senua is still coming to PS5, and that surprise new Spyro game is coming to everything, so there is still no clear pattern in this new world; the brand identity of Xbox in its 25th year is still as murky as that green plastic on those new pieces of anniversary Xbox hardware (To make it very clear, I desperately want that controller).

The showcase was as amazing as ever (Halo: Campaign Evolved has an INCREDIBLE July release date, and shout-out to the amazing art style of Vivarium); the overwhelming presence of the Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere badges continues to impress, but what could there possibly be to gain from selectively reversing your console exclusivity policy this late in the life cycle of your current system? It’s only more expensive than ever to buy one. I want to say it’s a play to sacrifice the “now” in exchange for a stronger message going into the next console cycle, but Xbox has shown very little to suggest there’s any kind of long-term plan behind the scenes ever since the big Activision-Blizzard purchase announcement in 2022. I’d be shocked if the impressive-looking E-Day doesn’t sell primarily on PC.

What PC-only players will not be playing, apparently, is Wolverine, Until Dawn 2, or God of War: Laufey. Following steadily-declining port sales and maybe even one too many horrific PC performance stories, Playstation has decided the experiment is over, and single-player PS console exclusives will no longer make their way over to Windows and Linux after enough time has passed. Multiplayer stuff will likely still go over – March’s Marathon is probably the biggest indicator there – but the blue team has made its own tepid policy change. This one’s a lot more straightforward, to be fair, but the industry is so volatile at the moment that it’s hard to trust that this about-face will stick, either. Eh, I guess we’ll see. Never a dull moment writing these…

No Show, No Problem: The Third Parties That Carried The Week

Their national team may have been a shock elimination from qualification for this week’s upcoming FIFA World Cup, but Poland’s finest Bloober Team made their presence known across the entire week, despite their relatively small stature just a few years ago. They are apparently working on a multiplayer horror game in the Saw franchise, an expansion for last year’s solid Cronos: The New Dawn, an unexpected psych-horror take on a legendary IP in the form of Star Trek: Shadow Frontier, and a Switch 2 port of Observer: System Redux for good measure. We learned about all of these this week. Wild.

Of course when it comes to big publishers adept at using other platforms to boost their signal, nobody has historically done it better than Sega, and watching them repeatedly square up to a white-hot Capcom over the four main summer shows this year was an absolute pleasure. Both resurgent Japanese titans provided candidates for the season’s largest announcements – amusingly enough mostly situated within the two western presentations – but even though they were completely absent from the State of Play I’d give the slight edge to the hedgehog lads this time around.

The blue blur himself only showed up via spin-offs during Summer Game Fest, albeit welcome surprise ones: Sonic Racing CrossWorlds is poised for another, even more ridiculous season of free-for-all guest characters, and he will also appear alongside his regular crew in a new Pico Park game (which I of course will buy). But alongside that aforementioned Stranger Than Heaven extravaganza, Sega’s full SGF salvo also included the shock unveiling of Alien Isolation 2, and a fist-pumping revival of the last remaining dormant major fighting game franchise by way of Virtua Fighter Crossroads. A big enough deal to spawn its own dedicated presentation and clearly taking a tonal note or two from Capcom’s own successful Street Fighter 6, the game instantly captured my attention and ended up as one of my favourite games of the show.

Though it has become the latest flashpoint in a heated ongoing debate surrounding generative AI in videogame development (not about whether it sucks – that’s not a debate – but about just how many developers might be using it and not telling the public), Sega also finally brought their new Crazy Taxi reboot out to play, and regardless of controversy the thing looks like an arcade-flavoured dream to play. You just can’t get that kind of experience in modern triple-A gaming anymore, and it stands out like a bright-yellow thumb. Incidentally, so does the Switch 2 port of Metaphor Re:Fantazio, the only major videogame with the courage/stupidity to announce a November release date in this pre-GTA VI world. It’s kind of fitting, honestly, given the David-vs-Goliath story setup of my 2024 GOTY…

Somehow not content with this output, however, Sega not only polished off a long-trapped Vanillaware diamond via the ambitiously expanded upcoming Muramasa: Revenant Blades during the Nintendo Direct, but deemed the 2026 Xbox showcase the stage to bring out its most coveted title card: Persona 6 exists! Capcom is really moving right now, they’ve finally learned their lesson about trying to do their own shows, and have consistently brought the quality for far longer than Sega in the modern era, but this week they had to be content with a strong second place on the third-party hype podium. Tifa as a guest character in Street Fighter is sick, though.

Bandai Namco, Konami, Koei Tecmo, and a comparatively anemic Ubisoft also each showed up throughout the festivities more than once, and KT especially appears to be growing rapidly since all those new Nintendo development partnerships came to light last year. As all but the thickest pillars of the traditional western games industry continue to crumble one-by-one under the pressures of mismanagement, trend-chasing, and ill-fitting corporate systems, Japanese development / publishing only looks stronger than it has in decades.

Nintendo Indirect

Surprisingly, the biggest Japanese recipient of SGF benefits was the one we didn’t even know would present at first. Right as the Switch 2 entered the week of its first birthday, every conceivable show not related to the Big N was well on its way to answering the biggest questions asked at the console’s launch – the same ones that have dogged every Nintendo console for as long as I can remember: would the inherently portable system truly be able to handle current-gen games, and would the third-party publishers of those games actually show up? Well, even if a proper Nintendo Direct had not been announced at the eleventh hour to complete the old-school E3 dream, Switch 2 owners would still have been eating good.

The following is a collage shared on the NintendoSwitch2 subreddit, listing out only Switch 2 third-party games announced (or, in the odd case of Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition, dated) over the last week or so, before Nintendo had even posted that the Direct was happening.

The vast majority of these games are yet to release, and so we appear to have genuine answers to those age-old questions: at least for now, games are coming, and so a decent chunk of big releases will have viable, accessible portable forms for the foreseeable future. What’s more, right before the Direct itself rolled around, the list continued to grow: Atelier Yumia, Sea of Stars and Final Fantasy X / X-2 all got standalone social media posts for imminent Switch 2 releases. That widely-speculated initial shortage of Switch 2 dev kits appears to have been sorted; in fact the best indicator yet (and this one’s for my east coast Aussies) is that even last year’s poorly-received Rugby League 26 is now on the eShop as of this week! Yay!

Amidst all the excitement, the Nintendo Music smartphone app was also quietly updated during the week and now works with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, meaning I can now actually use it in my daily life. Took way too long of course, but I guess that’s just Nintendo’s M.O. at this point.

A True Dream Slate

For me these summer showcase seasons are always about so much more than the announcements themselves; I always adore looking for trends, unpicking presentation styles, and taking in a range of reactions from different sources. But I could not finish this year’s edition without acknowledging the sheer significance of the headlining 2026 reveals to both me personally and my like-minded friend circles. After all, as much as I love discovering new games and developers, it’s not every year (or even any year?) that you get treated to fresh Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Persona, Zelda, and Xenoblade reveals at the same event. Those are five of my all-time top ten videogame franchises – and they ain’t near the bottom of that list.

First and foremost, Final Fantasy VII Revelation looks absolutely amazing, but admittedly I didn’t need to see much to be sold on the game. The seamless map expansion and sprinkling of a job-system flavour onto the series’ already delectable mechanical suite are cherries on top of the double-layer cake that is the relatively imminent release window and simultaneous multi-platform launch. Following the journey of this once-in-a-lifetime trilogy has been a joy from start to finish, and the peak moment of the entire week for me was watching the Maximilian Dood live-stream reaction to the blowout SGF endcap, where the super-fan took a phone call from Square Enix telling him game director Naoki Hamaguchi wanted to go over to his house immediately for an interview. Surreal scenes involving a notebook and an insanely-good translator followed, and I was grinning like an idiot the entire time.

Secondly, the Persona 4 Revival gameplay reveal at the Xbox show went some way to allaying my fears about the potential sterility of the project. The game looks like it’s taking a pretty similar approach to that of Persona 3 Reload in terms of its sprite-ified 3D modelling and combat flow, but with enough uniquely Inaba visual touches in the storytelling scenes to deliver on the necessary tone. The voice recasting was expected, but some characters (Yukiko) are going to take some adjustment on my end as far as vocal direction is concerned. Persona 4 Golden is a painfully special game to me, so I will probably remain nervous about the remake until I start to play it, but signs are good so far. It definitely has an incredible release date, right near Fable in that peak Q1-RPG February slot.

It has actually taken me a few days for the gravity of the Persona 6 announcement to sink in, mostly thanks to countless feverish reactions from younger friends and influencers. I’ve been conditioned to avoid getting excited about mere title cards, especially Persona title cards (that ridiculously long P5 hype cycle haunts my nightmares), but there are admittedly three cool takeaways already: the game’s got a P3-ish, maybe even heavily SMT-leaning tone; it’s going to heavily feature my beloved colour green in the UI; and most impressively, Xbox has locked the game in for a day-one Game Pass deal. Given it didn’t even have one for Metaphor Re:Fantazio, that’s a huge show of confidence. Honestly, it’s probably more exciting for the ongoing existence of Game Pass than for Persona, given how far away P6 could very well still be from release.

If not for Revelation, Xenoblade Genesis would probably be my pick for game of the entire showcase season. Sure, the simultaneous reveal of three consequential Xenoblade Chronicles Switch 2 Editions is exciting, but the idea of Monolith Soft spreading their considerable wings in a brand-new world with a brand-new aesthetic, set of characters, and potentially battle system fills me with the kind of sheer glee I haven’t felt in this hobby for a long time. If it does in fact release next year – and Monolith’s impressively efficient track record gives us few reasons to believe it won’t – we may be looking at a new contender for the best-ever year for RPGs – already!

Finally, Ocarina of Time. Oh, Ocarina of Time. With the biggest, most annoying question in the Zelda fandom answered at last – does this mythical remake actually exist – the second-biggest remains just out of reach; just what kind of re-release are we dealing with here? Will it be remade from the ground up with new assets but extremely faithful geometry like the 2011 version? It’s hard to see that as the most likely case, so is this more of a reimagining? Will it shake out somewhere in between? I’ll be honest, at first glance I don’t love this excessively shiny “realistic” take on Link, but we’ve only seen one shot so far, and I am all about the visuals and soundtrack flourishes in that tapestry intro. I cannot wait for the next update on this one.

While we’re talking Direct announcements, I might as well quickly touch on the rest of the Direct: it may have done the normal Nintendo thing and left fans with plenty of unanswered questions (why no date for The Duskbloods? Where’s the rest of the Ocarina reveal? Is Zelda really going to tackle GTA one-on-one in November? Does that mean more than one Direct this year?), and it was an odd choice to start with the exciting-yet-niche Rhythm Paradise Groove (which is getting an RPG mode and bespoke multiplayer games? Yes please), but to me the show’s stubborn refusal to adapt its formula to the climate of online hysteria around it made for an ironically perfect cap to an astonishingly high-impact week.

For all their success, the prior three showcases were admittedly pretty light on anything but the very biggest JRPGs, and almost completely devoid of those neat unexpected shadow drops that usually enhance the June hype period by giving you something to play right away; it also did seem a bit odd that Sega and Capcom had run so rampant all week while Square Enix seemed comparatively quiet (Revelation aside). So as someone who watches all the shows and enjoys watching the variety of exciting titles roll out from behind curtains into reality, the June 2026 Nintendo Direct felt like the final piece of a beautiful puzzle.

We got plenty of both Square and JRPGs, often naturally in the same segment (that sucker punch of a Kingdom Hearts IV re-reveal represented a significant shift in Japanese developer relations, that much is clear), and almost enough shadow drops to make up for their absence beforehand: Rise of the Tomb Raider, Atelier Yumia, demos for both Star Fox and Kingdom Hearts III, the Switch 2 upgrade for Xenoblade Chronicles, and most excitingly a new NES Remix-like update to Nintendo Switch Online that opens up a world of possibilities for appreciation of legacy Nintendo games. So yeah, I liked it.

What a week.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to begin re-orienting my entire life around that disgraceful September schedule.