Gamesmaster [07/01/92]

1992-01-07
24m

Dominik Diamond presents the first episode of TV's first ever video game magazine show.

Launching on Channel 4 in 1992, GamesMaster brought video games to teatime television, with a mixture of challenges, celebrity guests and expert reviews, all corralled by the disembodied head of astronomer Patrick Moore (in character as the titular GamesMaster) and the winking, pun-filled humour of host Dominik Diamond.

The conundrum of how to represent the excitement of playing video games on television has been a decades-long debate (and one ultimately sidestepped by the rise of E-Sports, Twitch livestreams and Let's Play YouTube videos). GamesMaster adopted the tried-and-tested challenge game show format, as young hopefuls played popular games of the day and competed for the coveted Golden Joystick, in front of a spirited studio audience with live commentary from Diamond and a roster of games critics and pundits (including many journalists from the then-booming world of video game magazines, such as Mean Machine's Julian 'Jaz' Rignall).

Moore, a household name thanks to decades as the nation's leading authority on astronomy and host of The Sky at Night, is here cast as an ambivalent outsider figure: a character whose camp, cantankerous quality was no doubt informed by the veteran broadcaster's relative ignorance towards the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog and Simon's Quest.

In this edition, the first episode of the series' initial seven-year run, the GamesMaster format appears almost fully formed, complete with a gothic-industrial, retrofuturistic aesthetic that saw St Paul's Church in London transformed into a chaotic, steampunk rave - a neat approximation of the grungy spirit of the pop cultural moment, and the attitude of video game fandom of the time. Future episodes would see Diamond and co taken to prison, hell, heaven and back as they followed the medium through this surge of popularity across the 1990s.

Challenges in this edition include a coin-collecting race through Nintendo platformer Super Mario Bros. 3, a gunslinging jaunt through the 'full motion video' Western shoot-em-up Mad Dog McCree, and a head-to-head on the football game Manchester United Europe between a young man from Bishop's Stortford and Wimbledon striker John Fashanu.

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