TGS 09: Companies missing in action this year

Blame it the downturn of the world’s economic system. Blame it on the recent mergers of several game companies. Shake your finger at the media for blowing the Swine Flu out of proportion. Something’s happened here, and this year’s Tokyo Game Show seemed small and less energetic than they had hoped for.

From the very first moment we stepped on the floor, we were thinking that the event was smaller than the year before, and thought that some of the regulars were absent from the line-up. We dropped some quick journalism action by comparing the exhibitor lists from this year to last year’s and found that these companies were no-shows this time around:

• Hudson
• FromSoftware
• Irem
• Marvelous
• SNK Playmore
• TOMY
• ARC System Works

This lesser number of companies means that much less games and booth babes, which equals that much less excitement. You could feel the difference. It wasn’t a sad show at all, though. Despite the smaller showing, there were plenty of good games shown to look forward to. Let’s hope gaming bounced back next year.