Sheldon Wilson is creative director/producer at Torch Television and New Media, Toronto.

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Los Angeles: For three days in the middle of May, amongst California palm trees and downtown traffic, where last-minute travelers searched in vain for a hotel room and car rental lots sat empty, the interactive digital community lined up for the chance to show their wares and flex their muscles. And flex they did.

The industry’s heavy hitters pulled out all the stops as they tried to outdo their competition, creating multimillion-dollar displays which would have seemed more at home in a Hollywood soundstage than on the floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Add a steady stream of the famous (and not so famous) such as Michael Douglas, Deion Sanders, Mario Andretti, Alice Cooper and Alex Trebek, with a sea of blue suits and cell phones, mix in more than a few lasers with a little smoke, and top it all off with a small army of larger-than-life video game characters, and you’ve got the next best thing to an out-of-body extraterrestrial experience, the second annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).

About 35,000 manufacturers, programmers and retailers attended the opening day of the three-day event, which was closed to the public. The enormous crowds jammed the city streets surrounding the convention center with traffic by 10:30 a.m., filling the 6,000-spot underground parking garage to capacity just half an hour after the opening of the gates.

It was this same overwhelming response to last year’s Expo that prompted the show’s organizers to move the exhibit from Los Angeles to the Atlanta Convention Center next year, where there will be more room to facilitate the increasing interest in the Expo.

The big news? Sony executive vp Jim Whims breaks the rules of a friendly roundtable discussion which opened the Expo to announce the company’s plan to drop the price of its Sony Play Station from us$299 to us$199.

Following the announcement Whims proclaimed, ‘At Sony, our philosophy regarding price changes is really very simple. Go big or go home.’

The announcement initiated an emergency overseas conference call – which went well into the early morning – with the heads of Sega. At the opening of day two of the Expo, Sega of America announced that it too was lowering the price of its Sega Saturn to us$199.

Industry leaders predict the price reductions will be a huge boost to the industry, making this its most successful year to date.

Determined to cash in on some of this digital dinero, this year Hollywood heavy hitters once again stepped into the ring ready to grab their own piece of the interactive pie.

Drawing some of the larger crowds was Steven Spielberg’s high-profile offering Movie Makers, which puts the game player in the director’s chair, calling the shots, changing the scripts, making the edit, and hiring and firing cast at will. With more than two hours of original footage directed by Spielberg, Movie Makers, which stars Pulp Fiction’s Quentin Tarantino and Jennifer Aniston of Friends, is sure to give the user a big-budget movie making thrill.

‘The dream of Steven’s was to give kids the feeling of being the director,’ says Bill Gross, ceo of Knowledge Adventure, which produced the title that Spielberg’s Dream Works Interactive will distribute on cd-rom in the fall.

November will mark the release of Trilobyte’s cd-rom Tender Loving Care, which uses a series of interactions with actor John Hurt to build a personality profile of the player and adjusts the story from there.

The makers of the highly successful 7th Guest and 11th Hour say their latest offering is a combination of cd-rom story and feature film (which premiered during the show at the Directors Guild in Hollywood).

Upon completion of Tender Loving Care, this Silicon Valley company found itself facing some very real Hollywood concerns – it needs a theatrical distributor to release the film segment of the cd-rom.

‘We have lots of leverage with software distributors who want to deal with us,’ says Rob Landeros, Trilobyte’s founder, ‘but films are a different matter.’

‘What the film community doesn’t understand is how difficult it is to make an interactive product,’ says David Wheeler, Trilobyte’s interactive filmmaker.

On the flip side of that coin, one of Tinseltown’s more famous couples, director Renny Harlin and actress Geena Davis, are developing the popular cd-rom game Terror t.r.a.x. into a weekly episodic series with Paramount Television.

The small-screen version of the game will be a mix between Cops and The X-Files. (It seems everything these days is a cross between something and X-Files).

Canadian companies such as Markham, Ont.’s ReadySoft, which produced the popular titles Dragon’s Lair and Brain Dead 13, were in fine form at this year’s Expo, but along with rows of other companies from around the world, it was hard not to be overshadowed by the monolithic displays of industry giants such as Sega and Nintendo.

The sheer size of their city-like displays demanded a crowd, crowds attracted not so much by the game play as by the chance to walk throughout these science-fiction structures while shaking hands and rubbing elbows with stars who had been shipped in to sign autographs and pose for photos with fans.

I guess it’s as Sony’s Whims says: ‘Go big or go home.’ And if this year’s E3 convention was any indication, this industry is going anywhere but home.