Pour one out for G4

 

The first time I heard about G4 was a on a news report while my mom was watching TV. The report said that G4 would be the first channel dedicated to video game programming and on the screen were images from Grand Theft Auto 3. I was ecstatic. I was everything I could have hoped for. I was a fourteen year old boy with an almost unhealthy obsession with my medium. I checked the TV everyday for the next month hoping we would get the channel.

When I finally found G4 I was amazed to see CO-Hosts of the show Judgment Day Victor Lucas and Tommy Tallarico, talking about Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time on TV. From that point on I was hooked, channel 326 was on almost 24 hours a day in my house. I loved all the shows: Filter, Pulse, Cheat!, Arena, all of them really. I even watched Portal, a show about MMOs, a genre I wouldn't play till I was in college four years later. 

G4 gave me something I could call my own. I was too old for Disney and Nickelodeon but never really fell in love with MTV. Nothing on TV spoke to me at the time. I was going through the awkward teenager phase but had nothing to latch on to, until G4.

 On G4TV.com they had questions from the chat room which at the time blew my mind, now it's common place in pod casts and Internet shows but it was all so new in 2002. G4 was everything I could have wanted because for the first time I could show something from video games to my parents and prove that these are important and that we do have a social presence. 

I should have known that my elation wouldn't last. Don't get me wrong I had an amazing time with the station but eventually it couldn't sustain itself. First there was the merger with TechTV, the subsequent re-branding, and re-re branding, and eventually it was about to collapse.  

The founder of G4, Charles Hirschhorn, envisioned the channel as a sort of medium to bridge the gap between gamers and developers. He wanted the channel to represent the growing social relevance that video games were gaining.  He wanted developers to have the ability to create content specifically for G4, but this would never happen and eventually he was removed from his position and with him the dream died. 

After his departure the channel ventured down a different path. G4 quickly devolved into a shell of its former self. It was now a lifestyle channel with video game content taking a backseat. Don't get me wrong Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb are among the best in our industry at covering games, but they along with Kevin Pereira at Attack of the Show are the last bastions of my forgotten television channel.

Let me clarify that I am only talking about the TV station and not the website. The people over at G4tv.com are still putting out amazing work and I know that have zero bearing over the Television channel.

Now the station is little more than Spike TV lite with reruns of cops filling out the majority of their schedule. It makes me sad; this was the station that introduced me to Howard Scott Warsaw, Trip Hawkins, Will Wright, and Billy Mitchell. Without G4 I wouldn't know about the Video Game Crash in 1983 or the Robotic Operation Buddy's impact on the North America video game market.

G4 as I knew it has been gone for a while now but let’s not forget what it once was. Today we have basically the entire Internet as our own TV station but G4 was the first try and it was on cable. We can now see that TV is unnecessary due to the Internet smacking it in the face. Back in 2002 we as gamers were given something to call our own, while it may not exist anymore, it did at one time and we remember.