I am thinking of a show a bit like Ebert and Roeper , perhaps also including interviews with gamemakers. It could be half an hour long and shown every weekend. AFAIK there doesn’t exist any show of this kind (certainly not on the networks). I had read some time back of a planned game channel called G4 but I don’t know if it got off the ground.
As I see it such a show has a lot of things going for it:
1)TV is an ideal medium.: Just like film reviews and unlike book reviews, TV is a great medium for game reviews for the obvious reason that you can actually show the game in progress.
2)Low costs: No major costs really. You need a studio and a few presenters. There are many game magazines like PC Gamer and Gamespot who have the brandname and expertise to do this kind of show. Most gamemakers would be thrilled to appear on such a show to plug their games.
3)An attractive target audience: Most males from around 7 to 30 play games in some form or another. That’s a hugely attractive demographic for advertisers. Videogame ads alone would probably make such a show profitable.
The only reason I can think of for the absence of such a show is that the people who run TV stations are middle-aged types who have never really played games and don’t have the imagination to understand their appeal to TV viewers.
Shows like this are like Entertainment Tonight; they have no value as reruns since the material is dated, and they can’t even do shows like “Whatever happened to the cast of Diff’rent Strokes?” since once a game is made obsolete by improving technology, relatively few people are nostalgic about it.
There are/were a few Canadian shows like Prisoners of Gravity and the Anti-Gravity Room that included video-game reviews, but also general sci-fi/fantasy media content like film and comic-book interviews. This gave them a somewhat longer shelf life.
No nostalgia? Bah! I break out the ol’ NES on a semiregular basis.
Geez, I remember a couple of shows, but damned if I could tell you the names. One was a game show, and usually featured trivia along with rounds of gaming, such as “score 1000 points in thirty seconds.”
As a reply to the OP, a show set totally on games would have to appeal to that extremely broad target audience. They must review good games, but more importantly, they must review bad games. Ebert & Roeper have to give bad reviews, because there are bad movies. There are bad games, so there must be bad game reviews - but people who give games poor marks may lose money from those who would sponsor a show about video games: game manufacturers.
Brahe: okay, we geezers do pine for the olden days (I installed an Apple II emulator on my PC once just to finish a computer game that I had been stuck on in 1987) but try waxing poetic about NFL Stars 97 to a television audience of 12-17 year olds and they’ll change the channel.
You’re right about the negative review thing. Entertainment Tonight used to do film reviews, some of which were negative, but stopped around 1990 or so, probably because:
[ul][li]ET was owned by Paramount, who was making many of the films that were getting panned[/li][li]Being negative will get your reporters banned from celebrity parties and premieres, as well as cutting your supply of celebrity interviews.[/li][/ul]
As a result, ET ended up doing puff-piece promotions for movies instead of reviews. The only time they ever talk about a movie negatively is after the press and public have already panned it, i.e. when it’s “safe”. A video-game review show that routinely panned games could suddenly find advance copies and interviews were suddenly no longer available.
“There are bad games, so there must be bad game reviews - but people who give games poor marks may lose money from those who would sponsor a show about video games: game manufacturers.”
Hmm. But exactly the same is true of game magazines and they don’t hesitate to give bad reviews to games , occasionally ones with big ad budgets. The same is true of a lot of media in general and generally some kind of separation between editorial and advertising is maintained even if it isn’t always perfect.
I am not sure about the point of replay value. There is a lot of shows out there with little or no replay value; news, sports round-ups, Ebert/Roeper etc.
And actually Silver is right ; games have a lot of nostalgic value. People might not actually want to play their old games but they may well like to see video-reviews to remind them what the excitement was about.
Yeah, I think that host was J.T. Roth, who also hosted a kids glop program that was in the Double Dare vein. Why do I know this?
The touble is, its very hard to make a video game show exciting. The GamePro show had to end with the hosts pretending to play video games and acting more “kinetic” (i.e. lots of bobbing and weaving wile playing froma standing position) than most players ever get, just to look interesting for the closing credits.
During the Nintendo craze there was another show that demonstrated how weak the market for video-game shows is. The show was in a large studio with big screens where kids played the faster action-oriented games for prozes, Of course, when you split screen into four panels (one for each of the two contestants and their screen, with basic Nintedno level graphics you end up with a really boring show. Its just no fun to watch others play a video game, for the most part. Add to the this the host tried to make things interesting by making lots of “OOOOOOH!!! YEAAAAAAAAAHH!” sounds. He made Duff-man look sincere.
Such a game might have worked better during the Street Figter II fad, but that is water under the bridge.
Actually, it was J.D. Roth, and his other show was Fun House. Why do I know this?
That is interesting, that they haven’t tried a video game show in a while. What have they given us over the years?
[ul]
[li]Various review shows, as mentioned[/li][li]Game shows. Not many of them, because, as pointed out, watching a guy playing a video game is just boring. Some shows, such as Starcade mixed the playing with trivia about the games.[/li][li]Cartoons. These are probably the most easily done, since creating a show based on a pre-existing character and his world is pretty easy. (Yeah, I know this isn’t what the OP was referring to, but I decided to bring it up since it is pretty simply done.) And my, have there been a lot of them over the years! Let’s see, there was Pac-Man, The Saturday Supercade (various cartoons based on popular arcade games of the time), The Super Mario Bros. Super Show (with Captain Lou Albano as Mario-also featuring Zelda), Two Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons (a comedy in weekday syndication, and a more serious, adventure cartoon for Saturday-featuring Jaleel “Urkel” White as Sonic), and countless others. From Japan, we have Pokémon and Kirby: Right Back At 'Ya!, coming this fall.[/li][/ul]
If this G4 network is successful, we may see some more of the first two. The third type is always successful, so no use commenting on if the game-hero cartoon will falter or fail.
“Not many of them, because, as pointed out, watching a guy playing a video game is just boring”
Actually I am not sure this is true. You don’t have to actually show the guys who are playing. You could have full-screen of the game itself perhaps with expert commentary.
I think real-time strategy games would be quite interesting to watch in this fashion particularly between expert players and with good background commentary. If nothing else it would be a fun way for players to learn how to play the game better. For the big games like Warcraft there is already a built-in audience of millions who are interested in the game.
Certain action games could also be quite interesting to watch.
With the right kind of marketing, I wouldn’t be surprised if professional game tournaments with the most popular games would find enthusiastic TV audiences., not least because games are getting more and more attractive to look at and therefore more TV-friendly
IMO there are big commercial opportunities in this area of popular culture that are currently not being exploited. I think it will just take someone who hits on the right formula to make such shows interesting. Perhaps G4 will do the trick.
This was a game show that came out in the early 1980s, where contestants (usually young teen-agers or pre-pubescent boys) would compete against each other by playing video games that were out in the arcades at the time (e.g. Burger Time, Atari’s Star Wars, Q-Bert, and once even Dragon’s Lair).
The winner was whoever accumulated the most total game points, i.e. the scores from the actual video games were used. This was a little unfair toward “low scoring” games, though – a basketball video game where you could score maybe 14 points in 30 seconds would be “weighted” a lot less than Star Wars, where you could easily score 14,000 points in the same 30 seconds.
It’s entirely possible that such a show has already been produced and test-marketed, and that the producer or syndicator did not see enough potential revenue to go ahead with the program. Given how many media companies are involved in both broadcasting and gaming, and the potential for (buzzword alert!) synergy between divisions, there probably are good reasons that they aren’t producing such shows.
There wre a lot of video game shows: Sonic, Mario Brothers Super Show, Zelda, Pokemon. You see, those were thirty minute commercials. The pro-family foundations rail the TV stations for that.
Sounds like Nick Arcade. Each team moved “Mikey” across a computerized game board, and under each square was a question or challenge. At the end of the show, the winning team went “inside a video game”, jumping across platforms and dodging fireballs.
If you draw a parallel between video games and professional sports, the problems of doing shows become rather evident:
There is no such thing as a “pro” video-game league for people to follow. Hence, no daily/weekly reading of scores or team development.
In its current form, video games (mostly) suck as spectator activity. You have to be fairly familiar with a game before you can make sense of what you’re seeing, and given the high rate of turnover in the game industry, this is hard to achive. Multi-player RTS and RPG games area partial solution, but even then it’s hard to get a viewer drawn into the action when everything’s limited to a high overhead view (contrast with the number of close-ups in sports programs, for instance).
The amount of news generated by video games isn’t enough material to fill a weekly half-hour show, IMO. The secretive and competitive nature of the game industry means the most exciting news – upcoming game releases – will end up being largely regurgitation of the company’s PR.
Game reviews have to be fairly positive to avoid pissing off the companies; however, all-positive reviews don’t interest viewers.
Personally, I’d be happy to see a return of Starcade, with a focus on home video-game consoles, better production and planning, and some “intro” material to help folks who aren’t savvy with the current game being played to follow along.
“Game reviews have to be fairly positive to avoid pissing off the companies; however, all-positive reviews don’t interest viewers.”
I am not sure why everyone seems to believe this; like I said game magazines have the same constraints and seem to manage quite fine without kowtowing completely to game companies so much that they lose readers. Advertisers never have complete bargaining power because they are also looking out for the perfect show to put their ads on.Besides if the show attracts enough viewers it doesn’t have to be dependent on game ads, it could run ads for many products appealing to young males.
. “The amount of news generated by video games isn’t enough material to fill a weekly half-hour show, IMO”
If you are talking about three consoles and the PC this isn’t true either. If you check out gamespot there is new material almost every day even excluding reviews. If you consider previews for new games, interviews with game designers, game tips for popular games,hardware reviews etc. there is more than enough material for a half-hour show.
There are many groups that sponsor large events for prizes, most notably the CPL. Many people follow the particular clans that participate in different games with a zest akin to actual sports fans. The games of choice in this league are Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, and the Quake series (along with various mods), games which have been out for several years.
While televising such an event would be tricky, I suppose there are ways to do it, but at cost. Allowing media to join in games as spectators to follow players around would work, but for total coverage, a server would have to be working at double capacity.