Bad Influence!, GamesMaster, and Digitiser: British gaming TV in the 90s and its return
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- Опубліковано 17 сер 2024
- Bad Influence!, GamesMaster and Digitiser - three British gaming TV instutions, but where are they now? Join me and a whole host of other retro tech and gaming UA-cam people for memories, homages, modern interpretations and more. What was on your telly in the '90s, and did you ever successfully campaign to be allowed to watch people play Sonic instead of the continuing adventures of Harold Bishop?
Because I didn't, and that's why everybody else had to help me remember GamesMaster.
Thank you to the vocal and visual talents of:
@aBadEducationTV
@MoreFunMakingIt
@Yesterzine
@Digitiser
@RoseTintedSpectrum
And the ever-lovely Chris Bell for Super Page 58, the greatest Digitiser archive this world has ever known. Visit it today. Or another day of your choice. www.superpage5...
Digitiser Live (28th/29th July 2023) event info and tickets:
FAQ: www.digitiser2...
Tickets Friday: harrowarts.com...
Tickets Saturday: harrowarts.com...
Breaking Bad Influence:
Uno: • Breaking Bad Influence...
Due: • Breaking Bad Influence...
Tre: • Breaking Bad Influence...
What's-a matter you: • Breaking Bad Influence...
Mr Biffo has an excellent Patreon with tiers to suit all budgets: / mrbiffo
Rose Tinted Spectrum also has an excellent Patreon. You could be called a beanie baby! / posts
Photo of James Marsters for that one terrible pun by Patrick Lee, licensed under CC-BY 2.0 [creativecommon...]. I modified it from the original source.
Bad Influence! and GamesMaster clips supplied by the Internet Archive, originally by Yorkshire Television for ITV and Hewland International for Channel 4 respectively.
Digitiser and Breaking Bad Influence clips used with permission.
Supplementary stock footage from Pexels.
Some imagery from Wikimedia Commons public domain collection.
Sound effects from Freesound CC0/public domain collections.
This week Z is reporting on:
0:00 A difficult relationship
1:36 I don't half say 'in the nineties' a lot
2:40 A vital question
3:16 Of course you were
4:30 Micro machinations
5:20 Bin with an openable flap
6:03 Children are rubbish at reviewing things
6:37 Rise of the regrets
7:25 Don't tell the Supervision people
8:03 Nam Rood
8:50 Nam Wolf
9:45 Stand by for Datablast
10:46 Michael Heseltine content
11:16 Illuminatus
11:40 GamesMaster Live (with aBadEducationTV)
14:05 Cows in space, sheep on TV
15:57 Repeatable and reheatable
16:35 Lesley Gore Special
17:18 The rules of the land
17:47 Competition time (with More Fun Making It)
19:45 The disembodied head of Moore
21:01 The ballad of Bandana Dave (with Dudley of Yesterzine)
22:54 Recently revived
23:35 Digitising
24:49 Connect up via modem
25:40 Whatever you do, don't mention retro Kickstarters
26:59 Really, you could just watch this instead
27:32 Translating Teletext (with Mr Biffo)
28:55 David Braben's toilet habits
29:18 Bringing Back Binfluence
29:50 This is another thing you could watch instead
30:49 Mystery Science Theatre 1996
31:03 WHY? (with Rose Tinted Spectrum)
32:06 It concludes
32:58 I am officially less good at this than Andy Wear
Comments are pre-reviewed to avoid spam. I aim to publish all comments, including dissent, but overly pedantic or negative ones may be moderated. Hearing about different experiences and what things were like in other countries adds a lot to the video! Please try to do so in a positive way.
Bonus fact: at the time of writing I've still got three of those damn ciders to get through, because the local shop only did them in packs of four. This is what we call dedication to the craft.
Er... alright, these days Violet Berlin produces interactive exhibitions for museums and that, including a recent exhibition on war games for the Imperial War Museum. Andy Wear appeared in Mr Biffo's Found Footage, in a homage to GamesMaster. Andy Crane probably still exists somewhere. And we hope Sohail continued his redemption arc to have only the best opinions about games.
I really hope everyone understands the idea of taking the piss out of something you genuinely loved otherwise that's going to be a LOT of unnecessary defending of Bad Influence to get through... - Ігри
Nam Wolf definitely needs to become a thing
I'm not sure if I've got the joints for crawling around on the garage floor like that on a regular basis.
So, if Nam Rood was secretly “Door Man”, then I guess “Nam Wolf” must be “Flow Man”. I look forward to your freestyle rap tape.
I tend to leave that sort of thing to footgear, really.
Excellent work! Loved the presentation on this.
It's been a definite beneficiary of me having a fully remote job, starting a render going at lunchtime and then spending the afternoon trying not to be distracted by the GPU fans going on the desktop next to me.
That was SUPEPRB sir. Superb! Lovely CGI work, lovely stories. Kudos!
Thanks! It's been lovely to have some other people add their own stories, definitely something I'd like to do again in future. (Until I run out of people willing to spend time and effort to appear on a miniscule channel with questionable production values!)
Dude just described my day. I'm off to play train sim.
What has life come to
That was worth the wait! Brilliant job Mr Wolf. You managed to drag a few memories out of deep storage. Some of them were good!
Wonderful video! An excellent companion piece to Mr Rosetinted's "Bad Influence" series 🥰
Breaking Bad Influence is lovely, I still think it's one of the shining examples of taking the piss out of something while still loving it dearly.
It does make me wonder, where would the British gaming industry se if the BBC back in the 1980s actually lauded and celebrated the British gaming industry, or even better, if the public service broadcasters, the BBC, ITV companies and Channel 4 got involved in the gaming industry.
I really can imagine BBC Software, ITV Games and maybe even 4Play being hugs publishers, alongside S4C releasing games in Welsh.
Oh boy, what a good thing to wake up to.
Haha! I remember the Sonic 2 bus - it even pulled up in the school car park for an afternoon. It was outside McDonald’s for a while and my hi score stayed on the upstairs console for weeks
Just what I needed getting home from work. 👍
Growing up Gaming telly for me was when a mate of mine managed to record some Gamesworld for me on VHS. Memories.
I wonder if that's the same one someone else mentioned from Sky One? A quick check suggests it's another Hewland International show, they must have been having a productive old '90s gaming show wise.
Also I was a GamesMaster kid 'cos I had a TV in my bedroom and a Games World kid because we had Sky!
I watched the GamesMaster revival, and I don't think it's actually as bad as everyone makes it out to be.
I really quite enjoyed it. Admittedly, as covered in this video I didn't come to it with that much nostalgia for the original, other than a general, "hey, remember when they had shows about games on the TV" but I liked that Rab and Sir Trevor brought their own character to it.
@@TimberwolfK Going in, I already knew the revival was never going to be as good as the original, but it was still pretty fun.
Then again, that's how I will approach the BBC version of Gladiators when it airs sometime over the next couple of months.
Your Nam Rood skit was Jurassic!
I'm from Norway, and we didn't get Bad Influence or GamesMaster over here, but we did have access to Sky Channel over satellite (before it became a subscription service only), so I did see the first season of Games World!
Games World was kind of a middle ground between GamesMaster and Bad Influence, running from Monday to Friday, with different segments for each day. Monday, Wednesday and Friday had "Beat the Elite", where contestants battled each other and inhouse joke characters called Vidiators (one which was Jesus, and one who seemed to be a parody of Bill Gates, among others), Tuesday was House of Games, with reviews and news about games, and Thursdays was Madam Pixel's Peep Parlour where a bunch of oddball characters played by David Walliams (and a Dominatrix played by Diane Youdale) gave viewers tips and cheats for various games.
It's was all very silly, very weird, very nineties and very fun! One of the opening sequences featured Super Mario being kidnapped by a subway that took into the "Games World".
There was also a segment where viewers could call in and compete in games via the touch buttons on their phones. One game I remember seeing, but which I can't find any information about, or any episode on UA-cam where this game featured, was one where you controlled a squirrel walking around a maze collecting nuts.
The only reason I know I didn't dream it up is because it's even mentioned in a review of the show on IMDB. If anyone else remembers this, or know of a video of this, please speak up!
In Finland we had _Tilt!_ which was a very solid show that ran from 1997 to early 2010s. No studio audience, annoying guests or other fillers. Just video game news, previews, and reviews. I loved it. Here's one episode from 2005 ua-cam.com/video/lBTtdAKAwrI/v-deo.html
Sadly I don't know any Finnish (other than a couple of the swear words from My Summer Car) but what strikes me about that is how "UA-cam" it is in presentation style - almost all of it being direct footage and only the occasional green screen link.
I’m gonna need an explanation of the memorability of Patsy Palmer and Dean Gaffney installing a PC game.
Unless, of course, it’s as simple as yer More Fun Making It fella finding Patsy as “ravishingly attractive” as Dominik did.
I asked! Just the pure absurdity of the thing, getting two soap actors messing around on a technical level with PCs.
I started with Windows 95 and so while I dimly remember having to sod about with DOS for some titles, I didn’t have anything like this level of faff. I also didn’t realise the PCs started the challenge still in their boxes so, yeah, a wild televisual concept.
I'm the outlier I think, as I watched Bad Influence, mostly for the bits about SGI I think. I also watched games master.
Have a feeling it was something other than Bad Influence, but I remember seeing the SGI flight sim on some TV show in the early '90s and being MASSIVELY envious - it looked so smooth!
It got ported to Windows and OpenGL at some point in the late '90s, I downloaded it thinking the future had clearly arrived.
@@TimberwolfK The one that stuck in my head was when Violet visited rare when then where working on donkey Kong, showing lots of very impressive sgi kit and 3d animation.
Probably early Noughties, but I am sure I am the only person on the planet who remembers an obscure gaming tips show on Sky One in which a embryonic David Walliams would shout "Get off my manor!" after dispensing a cheat code whilst dressed as a police detective named DCI Mike Hatter.
It's entirely possible! Early '90s satellite TV was a wild frontier land, whatever you could make cheaply and get on the airwaves was fair game.
@@TimberwolfK I think Sky had a knockoff of Games Master with a leather-clad Jet from Gladiators.
I'll be in my bunk.
Games World, I think! Seems to be getting a few mentions. I thought it sounded like a knockoff, then noticed it had the same production company, guess it was a successful formula for Hewland.
@@TimberwolfK I think it was an early iteration of Games World, I think it went to to evolve into a Gladiators style Gamesmaster clone with "Vidiators" who would routinely either be utterly trounced by the Joe Public punter, or would completely dominate said punter leaving them a humiliated broken shell. Bob Mills hosted it I recall. There was also another version of this with Walliams in a more significant role as some kind of sub human servant to Big Boy Barry, one of the afore mentioned Vidiators, it was almost a kind of games based sitcom affair.
edit: Hah! I found a clip ua-cam.com/video/a1C0yCyLHM8/v-deo.html 1993 apparently
I also used to like Bitz, which was definitely in the Tv Boss's "Games TV shows should only be shown in the middle of the night" phase.
They all paled in comparison to the giant that was 'BITS.'
At least 2 of the presenters were actual girl gamers. Not just pretending. Sure.. They were still reading scripts a lot of the time. But it felt realer than watching Patrick Moore saying words that might as well have been written in Klingon for how much he knew about what he was talking about.
I did love that the revival series had Trevor McDonald giving it exactly the same, "I have no idea what any of this means, but they've said I'll get paid at the end of it" vibe.
Rishi Sunak didnt have sky and your moaning about not having a TV in you bedroom.
😂😂
We're both evidence of the terrible things which come of having to grow up with taped Simpsons.
Who's the doofus that thought Worms was 'going to be a Lemmings clone'? They're not even vaguely the same genre of game. Typical non gamer trying to review games as a job. It's like me being paid to work in an operating theatre and stating "What!? You mean a heart transplant isn't just another name for a brain transplant? But they both have squishy organs being replaced"
"Ooh it's got teensly little characters in it.. must be a Lemmings clone.." ffs..