It was confirmed this week, after the dust had settled on the huge GamesCom event in Cologne, Germany, that it had become the world’s largest games fair. Some 245,000 punters turned up between 19-22 August to take in the best the gaming industry had to offer. And FIFA 10 was one of the biggest draws of the show.

It seemed to us at the time that most of that lot had pitched up just to have a go at FIFA 10, which was available to the public for the first time at the show. Just take a look at the picture above - we were caught in the middle of that lot somewhere. Some of them had inflatable swords. It was a worrying time.

Just a few minutes after the doors opened on the first day, we recorded the little video below. It’s a good job we did - the sheer number of people thronging the stands during the rest of the week would have made any video-making like this a dangerous exercise.

What was on offer to play on the FIFA stand was essentially the demo, which will be available for everyone to download for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on 10th September in Europe, and on 17th September in the States.

The demo will feature exhibition matches and a small selection of teams. You’ll also be able to upload replay videos from the game to the EA SPORTS Football World website should you fancy it. What you won’t see until the final game arrives are some of the all-new, big-ticket features producer David Rutter introduced for the first time during his pre-show press conference.

The presentation was streamed live on the Internets at the time, but we were naturally there with cameras in hand to record proceedings. If you missed it, watch it below.

At around 10am the following day, the public were given their moment. Within about five minutes of the doors opening the FIFA stand was three men deep. We still can’t quite figure out how that happened - it took us at least 10 minutes to walk across the enormous campus to the EA area. These guys were fast.

Turnover on the consoles was fast, with a group of hardworking marshals making sure people didn’t hog the game to themselves for too long. Some of these, err, booth boys, were leading members of the German FIFA community, in fact, and were more than happy to chat to us about their leagues and websites. They certainly knew their stuff, and their presence there was another testament to the great job the FIFA 10 dev team has done in terms of involving the community with the game.

We stalked the booth at this time, looking to record a few interviews with people as they finished their games. Everyone was more than happy to talk, of course, but only in German. That’s on account of them being German - something we ought to have expected in hindsight. After about three hours of Stevie loudly mispronouncing the words “sprechen sie English?” over the conference din, we managed to grab a few words from the chaps you can see in the video below.

It wasn’t long before the intense crowds made lumping heavy camera equipment around a bit of a scary prospect. And the crowds only got bigger as the week went on - the queue for the FIFA 10 stand was a good 10 people deep at one point.

We retreated often to the relative safety of EA’s rather sci-fi business lounge round the back. That’s more to do with the fact there was a PS3 with FIFA 10 code on it - without the queues - than anything else if we’re honest. FIFA 10 on the Wii was also there and I should say right now that we spent as much, if not more, time on that. It was a real party item backstage. This backstage area was also where we recorded the FIFA 10 podcast for the week, and where FIFA 10 producer David Rutter and EA SPORTS president Peter Moore hung out to perform a monstrous number of interviews with some of the 4,000 journalists that attended GamesCom this year. Including us, of course. See those interviews below.

So that was GamesCom. Intense, crowded, noisy, and brilliant. The reaction (and this is me being as unbiased as I can, here!) to FIFA 10 was amazing. The queues never abated at the stand, and no-one we spoke to had any bad words to say about the game. And that is quite a result, I reckon. Premier UK games site Eurogamer has since nominated FIFA 10 in its game-of-show awards (twice), and that’s pretty unusual for a sports game. And everything I have read elsewhere since the show, including via my own Twitter account, has been overwhelmingly positive.

When you take still-unfinished code to a show of that magnitude and allow tens of thousands of people to abuse it however they like, that must be a reaction the team over in Vancouver are really proud of. I know I’d be.

Tolles spiel.