The latest edition of the Electronic Entertainment Expo – better known simply as E3 – just wrapped up in Los Angeles, California. What is now a keystone event for the video game industry, with gamers worldwide tuning into the press conferences via numerous streaming services to get the latest information on upcoming games and systems, started out of simply the need for a gaming-focused event.

Prior to the establishment of E3, video game companies participated in other related trade shows like the Consumer Electronics Show. However, they were usually relegated to a small section at the back of the expo hall; former Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske once said that, in 1991, CES allowed Sega’s booth (and by extent the then-new Genesis console) to get rained on. Kalinske and Sega stopped attending CES, and other large gaming companies soon followed suit.

By the mid-1990s, thanks to the booming home console gaming industry, the video game developers and publishers realized the need for a gaming-specific expo to highlight their products. An attempt was made to improve how CES treated the video game industry, but nothing came of that. Eventually, thanks to help from the Interactive Digital Software Association – the association formed in response to congressional hearings, responsible for the creation of the ESRB rating system and currently called the Entertainment Software Association – E3 was born.

The inaugural event was held in May 1995 and despite some uncertainty about how the show would go, the first E3 drew more than 40,000 attendees, showing off the strength of the gaming industry at large. Eventually, by the end of the ‘90s, E3 was drawing more than 60,000 gaming fans and professionals.

In the mid-aughts, efforts were made to cater the show exclusively to video game professionals. The 2007 show was held in Santa Monica, CA, and limited attendees just to media and retail individuals instead of allowing public access. That year and the following year’s event were called the “E3 Media and Business Summit” and featured low attendance caps of no more than 10,000 people. Both those shows received criticism for limiting the industry’s ability to be publicly visible with their new products, as eliminating public participation meant the event didn’t receive nearly as much media coverage.

In response to those complaints, E3 expanded back to an attendance cap of 45,000 people and has once again been held in Los Angeles, though was still closed to the public until 2017. The 2017 show limited public fan attendance to just 15,000 people, though by now E3 has managed to strike a balance between media and retail professionals and general public fans.

E3 remains perhaps the most important annual event for the video game industry. Major developers and publishers, such as Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Ubisoft, Activision, and more use the event to build hype for their products for the following year. And with streaming sites like Twitch providing better access than ever before for fans around the world to check out what’s happening, there’s never been better access for the casual gamer to see what’s new.