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.