You can now watch one of E3's most infamous and disastrous presentations in all its HD glory.
As far as iconic E3 conferences go, there's a lot of them. There's 1995's fantastic 299 moment, Keanu Reeves and his breathtaking appearance in 2019, and too many live hands-on mishaps to count. Perhaps one of the most memorable years, though, is E3 2006 with the absolute car crash that was Sony's press conference.
YouTuber Noclip has uploaded a pristine 1080p version of the entire two-hour conference to YouTube. It's almost entirely intact, bar a small two-minute gap that's missing around 90 minutes in. Mercifully, it's only for a Tiger Woods game. Though that could be devastating news depending on your passion for mid-2000s golf games.
It's the first time we've been able to see the entire conference outside of fuzzy, low-resolution snippets. Noclip says in the video's description that it was "sourced from two HDCAM's recording the source broadcast feed." [[link]] Noclip is also searching for the missing Tiger Woods [[link]] clip to completely restore the presentation, if by any chance you happen to be holding onto that [[link]] sort of thing.
If you're not privy to Sony's infamous E3 2006 conference, I implore you to check out the YouTube video in its entirety. It's an onslaught of eye-wateringly cringe moments, a real lesson in how not to do a big ol' videogames presentation. It was the birth of the fantastic "Riiiiiidge Racer!" meme, a not-insignificant amount of time dedicated to a "giant enemy crab," and the deafeningly silent reaction to the announcement that the PlayStation 3 would be a whopping $599.
The upload is part of Noclip's ongoing effort to preserve old videogame footage, which is all housed over on its secondary channel. The channel seems to be slowly combing through numerous E3 conferences this year—earlier this month it rescued footage from E3 2001, bringing never-seen-before footage of a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic presentation.
We also got the first look at behind closed doors footage of Neverwinter Nights from E3 2000 and 2001, though they're understandably only available in standard definition. Last year saw Noclip release unedited footage of cancelled Doom 4 gameplay, which was originally seen cut up in a documentary uploaded by the channel back in 2006.