uring attendees to your booth at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) can be harder than reaching the 255th level of Pac-Man. So to build traffic for the 2011 E3 in Los Angeles, game publisher Bethesda Softworks LLC brought its A game.

Attendees entered the 7,400-square-foot exhibit that was split into two sections through a plaza-like entrance placed on a high-traffic aisle. To stoke guests' interest, a duo of imposing 8-by-15-foot LCD arrays on the booth's exterior looped trailers of Bethesda Softwork's latest games:
"The Elder Scrolls (TES) V: Skyrim," "Rage," and "Prey 2."

Inside, however, the company brought the digital entertainment to life with 3-D models depicting the games' besieged and berserk characters: A 25-foot-long dragon (made of foam, Fiberglas, and resin) with a 50-foot-wide wingspan from "TES V" hung like a reptilian B-52 over the booth space. Meanwhile, life-size mutants from "Rage" scuttled up the side of a 15-foot-high, hand-carved foam wall after the game's shotgun-toting hero. Nearby, another wall of the same material etched with hieroglyphic-like markings told the story of the "TES" saga.

Visitors channeled through the exhibit in sequence much as they would a video game. First up was the 30-by-30-foot theater where 70 people at a time enjoyed a presentation on "TES V." Guests then moved to the section devoted to "Rage," where they participated in a hands-on demo at 16 available kiosks.

Once they finished the demo, visitors snaked around the curving, 10-foot-high walls to the "Prey 2" area. While guests watched a 20-minute demo, a rear-projection holographic screen inside a 6-foot-diameter Plexiglas sphere hung from an overhead truss flashed a video loop from the game, in which a strange bounty hunter is transported to an even stranger land. Drawing accolades from influential gaming sites, the booth showed that Bethesda Softworks was definitely at the top of its game. e