PlayStation's June 2026 State of Play aired on June 2, and within the hour it had been turned into lists. IGN had its everything-announced video up, The Verge, Eurogamer, GameSpot and Wccftech ran live recaps, and PlayStation's own channel pushed a release date trailer for Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis. By the next morning, the show was a checklist of names, dates and platforms.
We don't have a problem with recaps. They're the fastest way to catch up, especially in a week when Summer Game Fest is about to pile on another round of announcements. But watching this one, what struck us was how much work the familiar names were doing, and how little a recap tells you about why a trailer grabbed you.
Why old names cut through a showcase
A showcase trailer gets a couple of minutes, and your attention during those minutes is patchy. You're checking chat, opening another tab, looking up when the music swells. A new IP has to explain its world, its genre and why you should care, all before you look away.
A name like Tomb Raider skips most of that. Everyone watching brings their own version: the 1996 original and its impossible jumps, the Crystal Dynamics reboot trilogy, or just a name that's always been around. A release date trailer for Legacy of Atlantis doesn't need to build any of it from scratch. The audience already arrives with some affection, some suspicion, some fatigue, and all of that counts as attention.
That's why publishers lean on legacy series during showcase season. It can be cynical, but games are also bound up with where you were when you played them, so it's no surprise the industry keeps going back to names people already carry around.
Recognising a game isn't the same as wanting it
The catch is that recognising a game and wanting to play it are different things. A familiar logo makes you sit up. It doesn't tell you whether the new game has a reason to exist beyond "remember this?"
The returning series we've liked best understood what was alive in the original and found a way to make it work now. The ones we've regretted buying mostly invoked the old feeling (the theme, the costume, the line delivered with a pause for applause) and hoped that would carry the rest. From a two-minute trailer, the two can look almost identical.
The reverse problem is just as real. A new game with no recognisable badge can have exactly the mood you keep saying you want, and slide out of your head by Thursday because nothing anchored it.
What a recap can't tell you
A recap is good at public facts: the date, the trailers, the platforms, which announcements are biggest. It can't tell you why a particular trailer landed for you, and three months later that's the part you'll need.
You see the name again, feel a faint tug, and can't say where it came from. Was it the setting? The studio? A mechanic? A friend who'd love it? Or just the logo? Those are different kinds of interest, and they lead to different decisions about whether to buy at launch, wait for reviews, or pass.
How to get something useful out of a showcase
We've settled on a habit that takes about five minutes:
- Watch the show and don't take notes. Let it wash over you.
- The next day, write down what you remember without checking a recap. That's your honest list. Anything you still remember a day later is a real signal.
- Then read a recap and add anything worth a second look that you'd forgotten.
- Add one line of why next to each. "Tomb Raider, wait for reviews, curious whether it's more reboot or more classic." "Weird puzzle game, send to Mia." "Looked like a winter game."
- For legacy series, be honest about whether it's the game or the name. If you can't say what the new one does differently, write that down too.
That note matters most for the familiar names, because they're the easiest to wishlist on reflex. We keep ours in Perthro, where a plan-to-play entry can carry a line of context, but a notes app does the job. For the bigger version of this, covering the whole summer showcase run, see our guide to following Summer Game Fest without drowning in wishlists.
The old names still have to earn it
We're glad series come back. A younger player gets their own first Tomb Raider, and an older one gets to see how their taste has changed since the last one. But recognition should only get a game a closer look. What decides whether we play Legacy of Atlantis is what reviewers say it actually does, and we'll find out when it's out.
