The new Internet capabilities of Dreamcast,
PlayStation 2 and X-Box means that in the near future - by the end of the year in the case of Dreamcast - console players will be doing battle online against PC players, something few people would have contemplated three or four years ago.
While the emphasis at E3 was on online gaming for consoles and PCs there was a surprise inclusion in the equation. Mobile phone company Nokia had not one but two stands promoting online gaming over third generation mobile phone networks.
A team from the Nokia research and development facility in Sydney worked the stands that were set up to attract would-be developers. Australia will be one of the first countries in the world to adopt the new 3G networks, which are capable of data transfer rates of up to two Mbits/sec.
With more than 600 million Internet enabled mobile phones and handheld devices expected to be in use by 2003 there is a potentially huge market for mobile online games.
The current games are as basic as Tic Tac Toe, but as technology and the processing power of mobile phones increases they will rapidly become more sophisticated. The current Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) version 1.2 does not allow for colour, but version 2.0 is expected to do so, and Intel already has prototypes of its StrongARM 2 processors, capable of 700 million instructions per second - or the equivalent of a Pentium III - being readied for use in small handheld devices and cellular phones.
In America, however, where cellular phone systems are scandalously inadequate, the phone games are little more than a curiosity at this stage. It will take America three years to catch up to Australia, according to industry analysts.
While Nokia created curiosity value most people at E3 were there to see the consoles.
Although Sony stole the show by the sheer weight of the number of games for both PlayStation 1 and 2, X-Box won the award for glitz, while Dreamcast looked remarkably healthy for something many had prematurely written off. Only Nintendo was having trouble keeping up.
State of play
Enter X-Box
Playstation2 in the flesh
Nintendo play catches up
Dreamcast alive and kicking
The next generation