E3 is best remembered for its glitzy press conferences, where big publishers put their best feet forward as they showcase their games to massive audiences online. But it wasn't always that way. Just look at when Square turned the much-anticipated US reveal of Final Fantasy 8 into a desperately awkward stalling match.

In 1998, Square was riding high on the success of Final Fantasy 7, a game which had proven a hit even in North America, where JRPGs had historically been a niche genre. At the time, Square had mostly partnered with Sony to publish its PlayStation titles, but that was about to change with the formation of Square Electronic Arts.

As the name suggests, this would be a joint venture between Square and EA to help bring the Japanese company's games to market in North America. (Another company, Electronic Arts Square, would do the same for EA's games in Japan.) At E3 1998, they detailed this partnership in front of journalists, highlighting titles like Parasite Eve, Xenogears, and yes, Final Fantasy 8 as among the first to be published by Square Electronic Arts.

That press conference was not meant to be seen by the public, but an attendee by the name of Anthony Parisi happened to be there, filming with a camcorder. Parisi's tape – alongside an absolute treasure trove of other materials related to E3 – was recently published as part of the Video Game History Foundation's digital archive, giving us what the group calls "possibly the only surviving video of the US debut of Final Fantasy VIII."

It sounds momentous, but if you follow the link above, scroll to the 57:19 mark in the video, and watch the whole 35-minute press conference for yourself, you'll find that it feels like anything but a big deal.

A handful of EA and Square reps sit down behind an innocuous table and simply tell members of the media about what they plan to do. It is a press conference in the most traditional sense, and the exact kind of thing E3 was for before the livestreaming era.

Eventually, the execs run down the games they're showing at E3 and, alongside the hands-on demos, promise "a preview of Final Fantasy 8." In the video, we hear someone near the camera quietly whisper, "Nice."

A Square rep politely asks attendees to refrain from filming this preview, but thankfully, this camera operator chooses to outright ignore that request, pointing the camera directly at the projector screen.

Yes! Anthony Parisi's tape from E3 1998 has possibly the only surviving video of the US debut of Final Fantasy VIII, including six full minutes of the Squaresoft staff fumbling with the projector trying to get the trailer to playarchive.gamehistory.org/item/3996212...

— @gamehistoryorg.bsky.social (@gamehistoryorg.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-24T20:17:54.786Z

Except the screen remains blank. Audio from this mystery trailer begins to play several times, but video never accompanies it. Minutes pass. It's unclear exactly how many minutes pass, because there's a cut in the middle of the footage. When we come back, Square and EA are setting up to take questions from the audience in a seemingly impromptu Q&A session as others continue to try getting the projector running. At one point, the microphones cut out too.

This keeps happening for at least seven minutes in front of a crowd increasingly restless to see Final Fantasy 8 – it's probably even longer, given the jump in the footage. At long last, the lights dim, and the video begins to play… completely without audio. The crowd gets one last laugh in before they finally get to see the trailer, complete with soundtrack, debuting about a minute of impressive CG footage featuring the soon-to-be beloved protagonist, Squall.

It's all a fun reminder of what the old E3 was: an event for publishers to show their upcoming products to retail buyers and members of the media. E3's more public face, where these "press conferences" turned into high-production events broadcast for gamers around the world, wouldn't really get underway until the mid-'00s.

There's one more detail from this press conference I want to highlight – one that I found pretty notable given the constant mass layoffs happening around the game industry, many of which are directly tied to major publishers overspending on mergers and acquisitions with other studios. The partnership between EA and Square, it seems, was intended to be very different.

"As opposed to many joint ventures, this one will actually create jobs, as opposed to reduce jobs in the industry," then EA president John Riccitiello argued, which is a downright stunning thing to hear a video game executive say now, nearly three decades later. "This is not an efficiency proposition, this is an effectiveness proposition. This is going to build this industry, and build the businesses of Square and EA."

Of course, Riccitiello was leading EA when it would shut down multiple studios and lay off thousands of employees through the late '00s, so I guess not all joint ventures are created equal. Square Electronic Arts would disappear after the Square Enix merger, but not before bringing us North American players some of the best JRPGs of all time.

This is our ranking of the best Final Fantasy games of all time.

Raphaël Colantonio became a PC gamer for a very specific reason—he was a huge Ultima fan and wanted to play Ultima 7. "Number six did not come out on Apple. It was so painful to me, the idea I could not play Ultima, that I bought a PC," says the co-founder of Arkane Studios. "It ended up being exactly what I wanted, because it [had] way more possibilities than any of the Ultimas until then."

After working at companies like EA and Infogrames, in 1999 Colantonio co-founded Arkane Studios. The studio's debut game was Arx Fatalis, a first-person RPG inspired by Looking Glass' genre-redefining Ultima Underworld. Over the next two decades, Arkane established itself as the modern successor to Looking Glass, developing some of the PC's best games, such as 2012's Dishonored and 2017's Prey.

Following Prey's release, Colantonio left Arkane to establish WolfEye studios, which published its first game—Weird West—in 2022. WolfEye is currently working on an unnamed first-person RPG—though it may actually have a name now, at least internally. "I think we have it," Colantonio says.

Colantonio took a break from WolfEye's next project for a rooftop reconnaissance of his Steam library. We discussed tactical cats, dystopian decision-making, and ripping off the tech behind the world's greatest stealth game.

What game are you currently playing?

The one that I'm playing right now is Mewgenics.

I played Mewgenics because I was a big fan of The Binding of Isaac, and I just bought it with eyes closed, not knowing what I was getting into, and initially I was disappointed because it felt like a very different game than what I was expecting. I thought it would be action, and instead it was more like a turn-based combat game.

They have this metagame that I don't think works super well. I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing with my cats, like, how can I actually benefit from their legacies to create better cats? To me, so far, this part is very blurry. I'm just waiting day-by-day [for] the new cats [to] come in and then some of them die.

But then it kind of grew on me over time, and I think some of it was, [it] kept me in by the rage in some ways, and by the fun in some other ways, because it had to be fun enough that I wanted to see more, and [it has] some really cool combo[s] because it is a little bit in the style of The Binding of Isaac … it's almost like it relies on not being tuned. So you can have an absolutely shitty run, or you can have this incredibly OP run, which feels super satisfying until you die or make a mistake.

I was thinking, what other [tactics] games did I play that I put a lot of hours in? Into the Breach was one of them, which is definitely on the tactics side. I would say XCOM also was a big one for me. Those are not games that I would be good at designing, but I enjoy playing them.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

I played Cyberpunk for the first time. And I finished it.

I probably sound like an asshole all the time when I speak about games, because I sound very extreme. There are things that I absolutely love, that is the best thing in the world, and then I can be picky and complain about the things people don't notice.

I wouldn't say Cyberpunk grabbed me. I saw the strings. There were so many strings to me in the game that bothered me. But it grabbed me for its production … it's a pretty smooth ride. It's good direction, looks incredible, very good cinematics. Story was interesting. But my choices—it took me a while to realise that actually there were choices. After maybe four or five hours, I was convinced that this game only had fake choices and no consequences whatsoever, because they do so much of the thing where 'Are you going to this or are you going to do that?' And no matter what you do, it's more to give you a little bit of attention rather than anything that happens after that.

At the same time, what they do, they do so well. Like the size of the city, the driving, the feeling of a living city. It's a big game, and then there are choices that open [up] at some point. Some of the powers and some of the synergy between the[m]—you can definitely see some of the Deus Ex love that is behind it. But I think it's such a big game that they had to sacrifice some of what made Deus Ex so cool.

No doubt, it's a great experience. It's just that because I'm such an old gamer and so picky, that it's very hard for me to like everything about a game. I would say the last time I liked everything about a game was probably Baldur's Gate 3. There's just nothing I can say here. Like, just nothing.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

I played Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. The question is why did I play it? Could have been for research purposes. No, I think I played it because, first of all, I'm a fan of Lovecraft. But the game I don't think was super well received.

I remember Todd Vaugn, a guy at Bethesda, had worked on it … he told me I should play it, because there's some things I would probably like about it. And it's true, there was something about the atmosphere that they managed to do very well. And then the game was probably too brutal at times, so it eventually became frustrating.

Making a game is so hard, because some games have fantastic qualities, but then still fail to connect at the end, which is unfair of course because it's brutal. People ship the game and either it works or it doesn't. But the amount of work is the same. I think that's one of those that could have been really cool.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

According to Steam, it would be Wasteland 2. It says 649 hours, which is funny because it's more than I spent apparently on Weird West.

But anyway, yeah, it grabbed me. It was a really cool game. For good reasons, it's very Fallout-ish. And also … I think I was [playing Wasteland 2] during Prey at the time. I was working on Prey, so it was probably somewhere around, yeah, that's right, it says 2015. So I was developing Prey back then.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

It depends what the question is. If it's like 'What is a game that will always stay in my heart?' There are a few of those. Never uninstalled? I think Steam gives me the comfort and confidence that I can uninstall something and then reinstall it later. So in that sense I could uninstall anything.

I definitely love Thief, Fallout, Deus Ex. When Thief came out, I was a developer already. I hadn't [started] Arx Fatalis yet. I was a big fan of Underworld. Underworld was Looking Glass, and I knew there was this new game coming out from the Looking Glass guys.

So I was extremely excited about it, and it came out and everybody else was playing Metal Gear Solid, and I was playing [Thief] instead. This one was super analogue in the way the stealth worked, and the feedback was more immersive. They were very different things, and [Thief] was not very pretty, but incredibly atmospheric, and it grabbed me because you could feel some of the design philosophy from that Looking Glass thing that I could not yet really well analyse. I could sense there was something there that was feeling like home.

The first time I saw the rope arrow was 'Oh wow, I can dynamically create vertical paths anywhere.' And even though I did not necessarily have those words or this analysis in my head as I was playing it, I realised there was something analogue about it as opposed to, say, Zelda, where they would say "Here is the hook, and you have a grappling hook, now you can grapple the grappling hook." Whereas here it was like "Anywhere there was wood."

There were moments in the game where I was playing with the four-speaker system. I can't remember the name of their audio protocol back then, I think it was EAX or whatever. And wow, the quality of the sound made up for [the graphics] and the spatialisation and the fact that the sounds were travelling through portals.

So Dishonored was very much our own expression of a Thief game, right? … We entirely ripped off their portals and propagation system for Dishonored. They had made a paper about it, and so they were begging to be ripped off, frankly, and we shamelessly took it and used it, which worked really well, and it's a very brilliant idea. The idea being, you place portals, and the sound travels through those portals, so that really helps you locate where sound comes from.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

I am using DaVinci Resolve whenever I want to do mockups of something either for the game, or for my band. So I do a little bit of video editing. And there is one [other] thing I have to tell you. It is called DiskState. It's something that shows you in a visual form where your hard drive [space] is. It's funny because this one, it's been with me since maybe the '90s, and every time I have a new PC, the first thing I do is I install DiskState.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

It's not bad. Frankly, I'm pretty proud. I'm trying to recall now because I'm not in front of my PC, but it's pretty clean. I've seen some super messy desktops. I've seen some with nothing [on them], which I don't understand either. But maybe I have four or five folders, and then five, six icons, and that's it.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, a game with a title that feels like it ought to have a colon or an em dash somewhere in there, is finally here and it's selling like whatever the nautical equivalent of hotcakes is. Hardtack, I guess. Not only did it sell 2 million copies in a single day, a recent financial report includes Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot saying "Two weeks in, the title has already exceeded the annual expectations we had."

"The strong launch of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced in early July by Vantage Studios is an encouraging proof point," he said. "The game is the highest-rated Assassin's Creed title since the original Black Flag, and we are very pleased with the praise it received from players … I would like to warmly thank the teams whose talent and dedication brought it to life."

Guillemot's thanks come at an interesting time, given that nearly a third of Ubisoft Barcelona was laid off just weeks ago, triggering a labor strike. This was part of a larger wave of layoffs which affected hundreds of workers. As it has done with a variety of Ubisoft games, Ubisoft Barcelona supported the development of Black Flag Resynced and "did all the underwater levels" as tech and gameplay animator Manel Cota posted on X back then.

Regardless, the ludicrous sales Black Flag Resynced is enjoying seem like a signal that the original game's reputation is strong enough to carry this remake through potential turnoffs for prospective players, such as the day one DLC, simplified swordfights, and in-game shop. In his review, PC Gamer's Morgan Park called the game "a well-made, but inessential remake that loses more than it gains."

If you've been hitting the high seas yourself, check out our guide on how to see all the new stuff—if not, the original is there and as good as ever.

Capcom has been churning through remakes of its best Resident Evil games over the last few years, with Resident Evil: Code Veronica up next, but dusting off the horror tomes serves more than one purpose for the publisher. Capcom producer Masachika Kawata says remakes help the company release back-to-back games in the series and help invest more money back into all-new games.

Speaking to Game Informer magazine in its latest issue, Kawata explains that one of the reasons why the publisher creates so many remakes is that "producing a new entry in the Resident Evil series every year would be quite an undertaking and a difficult task" otherwise. Resident Evil isn't properly an annual franchise yet, but the only big gaps in its recent history have been in 2024 and 2025.

"Being able to revisit older games and remake them helps Capcom meet that goal of releasing a Resident Evil title each year, but it also allows the team to continually challenge themselves and hone their craft," Kawata adds. "That's not to say the remakes are any less important. In fact, they're just as important as the mainline titles." (Good spot, NintendoEverything!)

The proof is arguably in the pudding with Resident Evil Requeim, a game that managed to marry the tight and sweat-inducing first-person horror of RE7 and RE8 with the bloody, third-person horror-action of Capcom's recently remade games.

"Capcom is lucky enough to have found this cycle that can continue to provide us with the financial resources to create things like new entries in the Resident Evil series and completely new IP like Pragmata," he continues. "So there is that relationship there."

Of course, the well of old Resident Evil games will eventually run dry. Capcom could re-remake the first game and then try to redeem Resident Evils 5 and 6, sure, but at some point, it'll need to start making multiple original Resident Evil games simultaneously should the company want to keep up the cadence it's on now.

Resident Evil 4 made Capcom another $560 million and became the best-selling remake of the generation, analyst says, more than tripling sales of Oblivion Remastered and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth

Ryan Gosling came to Marvel with a vision for Ghost Rider, according to studio boss Kevin Feige. It was announced during Marvel's SDCC 2026 panel that the Blade Runner 2049 actor would be joining the MCU as the comic book character in a new movie directed by Shawn Levy.

"I am going to let Ryan reveal what he wants to reveal, when he wants to reveal it, and what he wanted to reveal today is: he's playing Ghost Rider," Feige told Comicbook.com. "He is a huge fan of the comics; he did come to us particularly with a specific vision, based on some particular comics, but I'll let him unveil that as he wants to."

At the moment we don't know much more about the Ghost Rider movie other than its logo and that it will be released in 2028. This means we don't know which version of the character will debut in film, Johnny Blaze or Danny Ketch.

Ghost Rider has had mixed success on screen before, having been played by Nicolas Cage in two live-action films and by Gabriel Luna in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

First up for Levy and Reynolds is Star Wars: Starfighter, which will be released in 2027. Feige has seen the movie, and told audiences at SDCC that he thinks it's "awesome".

Elsewhere, at the Marvel panel, some new footage from Avengers: Doomsday debuted, highlighting the history between Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom. It was also confirmed that David Jonsson is joining the MCU as T'Challa's son in the upcoming Black Panther 3. We also got an exclusive look at Spider-Man: Brand New Day ahead of its release in theaters next week.

For more, check out our guide to everything announced at San Diego Comic-Con 2026 and our breakdown of the SDCC 2026 schedule. We've also rounded up all of the upcoming Marvel movies and shows on the way in 2026 and beyond.