What happens when your tiny little historical blunder becomes one of the most recognisable memes in the history of gaming? 20 years on, here’s a story about a giant enemy crab and the massive damage it caused.
Becoming The Giant
By the time E3 2006 rolled around, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or you know, E3, had already made a name for itself as the home for big moments and announcements. The first one alone in 1995 had the monumental bit of heel work from then-Sony America head Steve Race when he announced that the PS1’s price would be $299, undercutting the recently revealed Sega Saturn and its $399 price point.
A year later, everyone would get in on the undercutting business, with Sony, Sega and Nintendo all dropping their respective consoles to $199 in a price war the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the UK’s Baked Bean War of the mid-90s.
It only took until ‘98 for E3 to start developing a bit of the pageantry; the pomp and circumstance you’d expect from a more modern gaming showcase. 1998 saw the B-52’s and the Foo Fighters performing at Nintendo and Sony’s showcases respectively. Apparently Dave Grohl of the Foo’s even told a bunch of Sony execs to “take off those damn suits and ties and shake your booty!.”
As the years racked up though, so did the blunders. Microsoft tried to inject some excitement into the reveal of the first Xbox during E3 2001, bringing out Rock “The John” Dwayneson to chum it up with Bill Gates on stage. Meanwhile, the console wouldn’t even start up during the showcase, and Halo: Combat Evolved would be shown on the showfloor running at about half the framerate it should’ve been. It was less of a stumble out of the gates and more of a swan dive into a punji pit, so it’s a miracle the Xbox is celebrating 25 years this year. Their best year ever.
CRAB BATTLE
E3 2006 in sunny Los Angeles on May 8th. A day that can only be described as one of the biggest showcase own goals ever in the form of Sony’s presentation. From top to bottom, this was a masterclass in unintentionally creating immortal moments, often for the wrong reasons.
Let’s start with the reveal of the PS3’s price tag, $599, which might seem cheap compared to the price of consoles in today’s “everything is expensive and worse” landscape, but back in 2006, it felt like a kick in the teeth. Compare that to the Xbox 360 which had already launched and you could get it for as little as $299, and E3 was off to a terrible start for Sony.
At least we also had prominent Sony producer and then-soon-to-be vice president of their corporate executive group Kaz Hirai adorably exclaiming
The people at home loved it, even if those in the theater were as silent as a mime in a morgue with sleep paralysis.
It’s when we get to the presentation of Genji 2, sequel to the PS2 samurai slasher that would later be renamed to Genji: Days Of The Blade, that the Sony showcase nose dives off a cliff into legendary meme status. Led by an on-stage presentation of the game by Sony producer Bill Ritch.
This PS3 entry promised, well, it promised quite a lot. Ritch would talk about the gameplay evolutions that were only possible on the PS3, but then say something like “you attack its weak point for massive damage” like that hasn’t been the way of gaming since the 80s. Half the marketing of then PS3 competitor Lost Planet was that the aliens had huge glowing weak spots. This wasn’t innovation.
Of course, we need to address the crustacean in the room of what had the giant glowing weak spot, as towards the start of the presentation, Bill makes the critical error of saying that Genji will feature “famous battles which actually took place in ancient Japan”. Just two and a half minutes later, Bill would utter the immortal words
Oh, Bill.
Now, now, to be fair to Bill, having a historical skew in your fantasy game isn’t a bad thing, and vice versa. Look at how the older Assassin’s Creed games weave a fantastical conspiracy into very real figures from history, or how A Plague Tale adds a supernatural element to the Hundred Years War.
In fairness to Genji 2 as well, Bill isn’t incorrect either. Both Genji games drew influence from Heike Monogatari, known as The Tale of the Heike, which is a compiled account of the struggle between the Taira Clan and the Minamoto Clan during the Genpei War from 1180 to 1185. It’s historical fantasy, making it not too dissimilar to Homer’s Iliad and other works from Greek and Roman times.
But you need to make it clear you’re doing both in order for people to accept it, which is where Mr Ritch metaphorically slips on a banana peel while juggling pies. You can almost hear it in the way he says “…so here’s this giant enemy crab”. It’s like he’s a bit resigned to say it; he’s realised “maybe this giant enemy crab shouldn’t be here”. You can tell in the way he sort of awkwardly clears his throat after that this is a crab battle he might be losing.
Not only that, but it’s also combined with the fact that this crowd is clearly not into what’s been happening on stage throughout Sony’s presentation. Maybe Bill thought drawing attention to the crab would actually get at least a laugh from the live crowd, but if attention was the goal? The cursed monkey paw curls one finger. Oh well, at least E3 was a niche thing, only to be seen by a few super fans in forums?
E3 penned a deal with the G4 network in 2005 to have the presentations televised. More than ever, the general public was getting access to these trade shows that were previously limited to the gaming professionals. On top of that, the birth of YouTube in 2005 gave the world an easily accessible video platform on the internet, meaning it was easier than ever for someone at home to take an event and immediately u pload it to the internet. More importantly, it meant people could more easily poke a bit of fun at it.
Legacy of the Crab
Or a lot.
The perfect storm had been created for Giant Enemy Crab to become the biggest meme in gaming since All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Know Your Meme attributes the spread of this meme to a video from @macaw45 on YouTube, which received over a million views, with the Giant Enemy Crab and other quotes from the showcase also receiving plenty of shares and references across forums that are now largely considered lost media.
Newgrounds were also pretty quick on the uptake, or pissuptake, developing a flash animation called Giant Enemy Crab Battle within weeks of the showcase. Then again, saying Newgrounds had a joke about something in the mid-2000s is like saying the sun rose in the morning and we’re going to sneak mentions of F-Zero GX into unrelated videos. It’s a foregone conclusion, basically.
The gaming industry at large also saw the opportunity for a bit of harmless fun, shoving references to Giant Enemy Crab into any game they could.
Borderlands 1 had a Giant Enemy Crab known as a Larva Crab Worm, complete with a one-shot kill weak spot “for massive damage”, though let’s not forget that Crawmerax The Invincible is just an even bigger Giant Enemy Crab.
Meanwhile, an alternate skin for the League of Legends character Urgot is called Giant Enemy Crabgot, the 25 minute boss fight in the Gallo Tower level of Vampire Survivors against a literal Giant Enemy Crab and there’s even a dev studio named after the meme. Oh, and a podcast. Even Sony themselves decided that they weren’t immune from getting in on the fun, even if it took them nearly 20 years, as the meme was referenced in Astro Bot.
Months later, Genji 2, now known as Days of the Blade, would be released as a PS3 launch title in November 2006, or February 2007 in PAL regions. Compared to the legendarily large reception the meme released back in May, the game itself received a bit of a critical drubbing when reviews came around, settling at a 55 on Metacritic.
Most reviews would agree that while the graphics were decent enough for a PS3 launch title, the core gameplay wasn’t the next-gen revolution that was promised, and no amount of real-time weapon switching would solve that. VGChartz estimates that Genji: Days of the Blade sold around 750,000 copies, and yeah, we know that VGChartz isn’t the most reliable source in the world, but the fact we’re resorting to that, coupled with developers Game Republic not making a third game despite creator Yoshiki Oshimoto expressing interest, shows that Genji was overshadowed by a massive hostile invertebrate.
The Cost Of The Crab
In-person showcases would continue long after E3 2006, and almost all of them contained some mistakes, weirdness or jokes that didn’t quite pan out like they did in a corporate boardroom. There’s Call of Duty claiming that next-gen technology is when fish move out of the way, or the Uncharted 4 demo in 2015 starting with 30 seconds of Nate standing around because they couldn’t find the controller, and the age old classic of the director of Ninety-Nine Nights 2, Tak Fuji saying “you will be sucked” if you button mash.
Basically, mistakes and goofs were ever present before Genji 2 and the Giant Enemy Crab, and they’re still around today.
What’s a bit sad about watching the full Genji presentation though is it’s clear that Bill is deeply nervous about being on stage and trying to show off the game in the best light. You can tell that Bill’s not the most comfortable in the spotlight, and maybe someone got in his ear pre-showcase about emphasising the historical aspect of Genji, leading to the legendary meme we now know and love.
Bill Ritch, unfortunately, would seem to fade into the background after the incident, with only a few video game credits after Genji, though he was a vice president on the original Uncharted game. His last game seems to have been Ju:On The Grudge on the Wii, which would finish me off too, to be fair.
He’s still had a long career in media though, according to his LinkedIn profile anyway, including some time at Amazon and Disney, before settling in for over a decade with Warner Bros. Entertainment. You know, unless he hasn’t updated his LinkedIn since 2013.
As for what he has to say about Giant Enemy Crab and his involvement in it, we don’t know. The Know Your Meme page we referenced earlier cites a post attributed to Kotaku titled Crab Dude Interviewed For Massive Damage, but the link is dead and basically the way the site used to be set up stopped working with the Wayback Machine sometime last year. I guess it’s lost media?
Compared to other instances mentioned in this video, it sure seems like Bill Ritch would’ve rather distanced himself entirely from the Giant Enemy Crab showcase. Xbox owned their blunders, albeit years after the fact, bringing them up in their own documentary a few years back, while Reggie used E3 2004 to become a walking meme. Just look at any Reggie appearance in a Mega64 video, for starters.
Regrettably for us, the general public, moments like Giant Enemy Crab are becoming fewer and farther between. The death of E3 has meant that in-person showcases are a thing of the past, with the only one keeping that spirit alive is Geoff Keighley with Summer Game Fest, his appearances at Gamescom Opening Night and The Game Awards. His showcases feel like the only ones left that are live, in-person and feel unpredictable. Sometimes that’s an extended Among Us bit that falls flat, other times it’s a genuine security risk rambling about reformed orthodox rabbi Bill Clinton, or maybe it’s a FPS developer wearing a dumb hat then failing to live up to it after launch, but that’s the magic of being live.
Compare that to Sony State of Play, a Nintendo Direct or an Xbox Showcase. They’re all digital events, pre-pac kaged and pre-recorded so that there’s no mistakes or blunders. You might get memorable game reveals, but any sense of personality or humanity tends to fall by the wayside. The best you get is an indie focused showcase where the dev team really wants you to see their “heckin’ pupper”, which is better than nothing.
We’re not trying to say that Giant Enemy Crab should be a sad story and that you should never laugh at it ever again. It’s objectively very funny. It’s just a shame that we don’t get more showcases with these moments. We’d love to live in a world where there’s more wholesome scenes like Keanu Reeves saying people are breathtaking, and gaffes like revealing a mobile game in front of a hardcore PC crowd and then flip it around on the booing crowd by saying “do you guys not have phones?” We’ll take 100 of them over watching another Xbox showcase with some soulless CEOs that ends with an extended look at the next Call of Duty.
Where’s the enemy crabs, damn it?
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