Bad Influence! [07/01/93]

1993-01-07
20m

In contrast to GamesMaster's challenge-based teatime cheekiness, CITV's Bad Influence! used the early 90s video game boom as a route into the wider worlds of computing and technology.

Produced by Yorkshire Television, this magazine show was anchored in a wide-ranging curiosity and was ably presented across its four-year run by two appealing hosts: the platinum-blonde Violet Berlin and the polo-shirted Andy Crane. While the series title knowingly nods to the contemporary moral panic around video games and their effects on children, Bad Influence! sought to educate and inform, in a similar way to the BBC's Tomorrow's World.

In this edition from January 1993, Crane and Berlin look at several spin-off versions of the hit 1991 game Lemmings across multiple platforms, from PC to Super Nintendo to GameBoy. Crane later heads to Soho to visit the Moving Picture Company (MPC) and speak with animator Gareth Edwards about cutting-edge computer graphics used in commercials. Then, Crane and Berlin look ahead to the future of home entertainment made possible by the CD-ROM format, which promised untold advances in graphics and data storage - such as containing the entire 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary on one single disc. Reviews in this edition include Ecco the Dolphin and the Mickey Mouse adventure, The Magical Quest.

Looking back with 2020 vision, we see the 1990s as a time of constant technological innovation, and the seeds of what would come to define the 21st Century. For example, within a decade, MPC would be one of the film industry's go-to effects studios, providing the computer-generated magic behind the Harry Potter and James Bond franchises.

Still, Bad Influence! is a welcome relic of a bygone, pre-internet generation, perhaps no better seen than in the closing 'Datablast' end credits segment, where 60-odd pages of news, reviews, fan art, cheat codes and more fly by in a mere 20 seconds - the presumption being that viewers would record the programme on videotape and read through afterwards, pausing and moving through the text frame-by-frame.

A look at the latest in computers and games. Z. Wright reports from America
and Nam Rood has tips on `back doors' into games.

Pushing Buttons: Video Games on TV

How gaming turned from futuristic novelty to cultural juggernaut.

This collection captures an important step in the story of video games as an industry, art form and cultural force. While arcade machines had become a purse-draining leisure activity across the UK, the advent of the video game console in the mid-1980s mostly bypassed British households thanks to the popularity of 8-bit home computers such as the BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64, which offered educational, programming and technical experiences as well as simple entertainment. That all changed in the 1990s, though, when the Japanese video game companies Nintendo and Sega cracked the UK and quickly dominated the market, making their mascots Mario and Sonic into pop-culture superstars. Their Game Boy, Super Nintendo and Mega Drive consoles prioritised pure pleasure, and legions of young fans followed their sirens’ call.

The representation of video games on the small screen charted this shift. Where crude pixellated graphics and bleep-bloop electronic sound effects had once been used as a language for communicating with young audiences in educational programmes, and computer games at large had been viewed as a novelty, nerdy or niche concern, gaming became a serious topic for television in the form of magazine and challenge shows such as Bad Influence and GamesMaster (the latter inspired by creator Jane Hewland’s own son’s obsession with Nintendo’s Duck Hunt).

Elsewhere, current affairs series sought to make sense of this new influence on the nation’s children, alternately feeding and commenting on a growing moral panic around the adverse effects of welcoming video games into our lives – concerns that, even thirty years on, still define our relationship with this thrilling, enthralling art form. Press start and play on. Let the games begin!

14 videos in this collection

Gamesmaster [07/01/92]

1992-01-07