Partial Power Outage Hits E3, Cuts Off Demos and Streams

Day two of E3 is underway as industry members, influencers, and everyday fans took to the convention center in Los Angeles to play and learn about the biggest games on the horizon, but a partial power outage but the gaming on pause for a short while. The momentary power outage affected just one part of the convention center, but in doing so, it caused some of the various gaming stations set up by different companies to go dark. Streams like the Nintendo Treehouse broadcast also went down for a while, but they were back up and running before long.

Like most things do, news of the power outage started spreading on social media sites like Twitter as people in attendance sounded off about the lack of power. Accounts from different people showed images of the semi-darkened showfloor where people weren’t quite sure what to do for a few minutes since there were no games to play.

Nintendo and Ubisoft were two companies who had content playing at the time and had their broadcasts affected. Some people were watching a demo of Ubisoft’s new Watchdogs game called Watchdogs Legion when the stream cut out and attributed that power outage to DEDSEC, the group that you’ll become a part of in that game.

For Nintendo’s Treehouse presentation, the company had quite a wholesome response to the whole incident. They put up an image of a Zelda game long before there was ever any news of a Breath of the Wild sequel, an image that said the Treehouse stream was experiencing some difficulties and would be back momentarily.

Nintendo’s fans also had the benefit of just undocking their Switches and were able to keep on playing, power or no power, so score one for the handheld console.

The power appears to be restored now, so all the streams and demos should be able to continue on uninterrupted.