Why did TV companies never try to cover video games properly? – Reader’s Feature

A reader laments the death of mainstream TV coverage of video games and asks why shows like Videogame Nation and Cybernet were treated so badly.

It’s been near enough 10 years since the cancellation of Videogame Nation, the UK’s last original review-based television show about console gaming, back in the summer of 2016. Despite the popularity of gaming – retro gaming especially – being reflected on numerous YouTube channels and the like, and despite big companies such as Nintendo, Sega, and Konami releasing mini-consoles from yesteryear, mainstream television is still ignoring gaming for some bizarre and blinkered reason.

Now, before some people out there start rolling their eyes and muttering something about ‘not this old chestnut again’, yes, it is a real and continuing problem that television executives and producers demonstrably have towards anything that they essentially aren’t interested in. Or to be more precise, what their ill-informed market research tells them to not have an interest in.

Many gaming shows have been made over the last three decades, but nowhere near as many as other types of television shows, such as procedural investigatory police dramas, true life crime documentaries, hospital ward shows, lame unfunny middle class-centred comedies, and so-called reality shows that are nothing of the sort.

Why are some sections of the television owning British public constantly overlooked by TV producers and executives while these same individuals think nothing about filling the TV schedules morning, noon, and night with programmes about American muscle cars, flipping property, or eating in New York restaurants? How is any of this related to British audiences? No wonder people interested in gaming absconded to YouTube and online forums years ago.

Television producers and executive suits don’t really care. I have a feeling they always had a contemptuous attitude towards those interested in computer and video games all along, as can be seen in how they handled the very few shows that actually got on to our TV screens.

The over-touted GamesMaster was the one that started it all off for console television shows back in the 90s. Gaming shows that came after were almost without exception better though. Shows such as Bits (1999 to 2001), Thumb Bandits (2001 to 2002), and not forgetting my favourite Cybernet. That show was even my mum’s favourite gaming show, as it was full of driving games during the PlayStation era.

Cybernet. A show that comparatively few people actually saw (in Scotland anyway) due to the show being broadcast stupidly late through the night – usually after 3am, such is the contempt those in television decision-making departments had. That show was unprecedented though, in that it showed what we all wanted. Wall-to-wall games. No talking heads concerned about their career portfolios. Just a voiceover from the mysterious Lucy Longhurst.

Gaming shows weren’t just something relegated to the past as Go 8 Bit (or Dara O Briain’s Go 8 Bit for the pedantic out there) that ran on Freeview channel Dave could have ran for far longer than it did (2016 to 2018), as it was essentially based on the tried, tested, and market oversaturation panel show format. The one that the British public are constantly reminded that they like so much, due to the sheer number of shows subscribing to that format over the years.

It’s important to note that I am not some media degree-clutching middle class hipster type who’s a chum of anyone who worked on Videogame Nation, or any of the other shows mentioned here. I’m just like countless other viewers out there, that have inadvertently given up waiting for television executives and producers to come up with anything worth bothering about when their track record ranges from appalling to self-sabotaging.

It’s not even that I thought Videogame Nation was particularly brilliant or good even. It was all we the British public had in the way of gaming on TV at the time and now we haven’t even got that. How does mainstream television survive? I don’t know, as nothing the mainstream channels show is likely to be pulling in much cash in the way of any big companies advertisements, outside of the captured audiences of maybe Coronation Street.

People need to ask the question of what’s wrong with mainstream television channels and their constant absence of gaming shows. It would cost them next to nothing to do re-runs of old gaming shows such as GamesMaster, Bits, and Cybernet, even if it’s through the night, if needs be, as people search for this content on YouTube anyway. I suspect it never even crossed the minds of the majority of those working in TV land to do this, such is the level of their clueless detachment.

By reader R M

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