On last week’s episode of GFW Radio, co-host Shawn Elliott spent a few minutes riffing on some old episodes of GamePro TV he’d just seen on YouTube. When I was a kid, this was a show I watched on purpose--and taped for later, obsessive re-viewings. Granted, it didn’t take me long to become spiteful and jaded, but in 1991, people on TV talking about video games was a big goddamned deal. For the love of all that’s holy, I even watched both versions of Video Power.
Looking back, GamePro TV wasn’t nearly as terrible as it could have been. Everything on the show looks like it was hit with a hose that sprayed both splatter paint and denim, but this was simply a fact of life for those of us living through the rough transition from the 80s to the 90s. And we certainly didn’t let the guitar riffs that accompanied all of our actions get us down. Life was all about hanging with your friends who were an odd mix of Wayne, Garth, and Cody from Step By Step, and kickin’ back with some Battletoads (crystal meth had not been not invented yet).
In order to document this unique period of American history, YouTube user SiliconeraNickFricke has uploaded some old VHS copies of GamePro TV that I’m pretty sure he stole from a cardboard box at my parents’ house. I’ve taken the liberty of arbitrarily choosing a random episode and annotating some key moments via the timestamps below:
00:21 - BrenNANN was the reason I watched GamePro TV in seclusion. Even the shame of being caught masturbating didn’t match that of someone walking in on me willfully staring at this goon.
01:55 - I think the main reason GamePro TV didn’t work is that the majority of each episode consisted of J.D. Roth awkwardly reading you passwords over footage of NES games.
05:00 - Life Before the Internet, Vol. 1: If you were ever stuck in a game, the only option was to send a VHS tape to GamePro TV and hope to god they took pity on you. Asking kids on the playground would only result in stories about mythical relatives who “worked at Nintendo.”
08:10 – Listen for the self-loathing in J.D. Roth’s voice as he tries to make the discovery of a sound test in a Game Boy game sound exciting.
08:55 – Roth explains GamePro’s ratings scale for the illiterate. Notice how there is no “1” in their scale of 1-5.
14:00 – Another 2.5 minutes of J.D. Roth reading letters and numbers. FEEL THE THUNDER
17:15 – Simpler Time Moment: BrenNANNNN brags about how the Genesis version of Madden sold over 250,000 copies. People are now murdered for such numbers.
20:50 – I ache for death.
P.S. Brennan looks like THIS now.