Taken from a letter to the company on 8/23/04:

Hey all, just got back from my trip to the Leipzig gaming convention last night and thought I'd share some of my adventure.

First off, this convention is nothing like I thought it was going to be. Picture E3 shrunken down into one hall instead of two and you'll get an idea for size and scope. What's really cool about this show is that it is open to the public. On Saturday, they were estimating upwards of 60,000 people visiting the show. Judging by how insane it was, I believe it.

I spent the first day of the show doing behind closed door demos for the press. We had a small room (10x10) with an Xbox and a bad-ass sony PC. Ubi German PR would bring in a group of 5-15 journalist (print, online, mainstream, TV, you name it) and I went through a 15 minute demo. I started doing demos at around 8:30 in the morning and went non-stop until 7:30 at night. If I had to estimate, I'd say I gave the demo to around 250-300 people that day. I've been to a lot of press type events and this was by far the most journalists I've ever seen in one day. Here's a picture of me doing an interview for a news program on a national German TV station. I was told it would air that evening. I have no idea if it did.

The second day was spent in the Ubisoft Booth. This booth was awesome! Imagine a slightly trimmed down version of the Ubi E3 booth. I thought this one was cooler because they had a huge stage set up in the front where they were constantly giving prizes away, giving demos of games or having live entertainment. (They had one of Germany's most popular hip-hop bands perform. They were a trip!) I spent the day doing demos up on the stage and hanging out in the BiA area of the booth.

About the BiA section of the Booth. It was crazy cool! The area was decked out with telephone poles, ammo crates, cammo, sand bags and even a working AA gun! The Xbox version of the game was playable and man did people want to play it. Here is a picture of the inside of the BiA area - it's hard to make anything out because of the sea of people trying to see the game:

Here is the line of people waiting to get in. People were waiting upwards of 30 min or more just to get into the area:

And unlike E3, we had Booth Babes! There were two of them. This particular girl was really cool and spoke pretty good English.

The Ubi German team was awesome. Those guys know how to promote a game. I was really impressed by them and they were a lot of fun to hang out with. They brought me to some really cool parties and really made me feel welcome. Here's a shot of one of our German PR guys showing off our nomination for Best Xbox Game of Show!