General Questions and Information Thread

Games World is also not properly documented. Sky One aired this every day of the week starting in March 1993 - if you look online for episodes lists, you get sporadic clips from the first couple of years it was on air, some even claiming it was a weekly show, probably because not all days followed the same format. Though it looks like hey had omnibus episodes at some point, so that's fun.

It's unlikely the show ran continously for x years (Sky supposedly dropped a 1994 episode for plugging the associated-but-not Games World magazine - what did they show instead?), but the precise starts and ends of each series isn't written down.

 

Like I said, the 1st series of GamesWorld was amazing, just the best around. I loved how each night was a different episode and you also had John Ross's wife reviewing games on a Tuesday night with her big boobs ( I was a male teenager after all) I wish I had kept more of the 1st series of Games World, but the only one I left on my VHS tapes is Maddems Peep Parlour
which was shown on a Thursday night




Also a little piece of useless information on her trip to Japan. Violet Berlin told me on Twitter, that Hayao Nakayama gave the whole Bad Infleiunce grew a Game Gear each as a present and allowed Violet to conduct her interviews in normal clothing, with some of the Japanese staff thought it wasn't professional or in-keeping with Japanese, but Nakayama-san overruled them.

That man was so much SEGA and SEGA never was the same when was forced to step down

 

This reminded me of a piece on the Simpsons' broadcast history over here on Dead Homer Society. If the figures about UK satellite takeup are correct, although that series helped I would definitely call it a niche proposition in the 90s.

Making things even more complicated, there was also that sort of Games World spinoff which didn't run on Sky One during the gap between the 1995 and 1998 series. The story with this one seems to be that because its production company was solely making all of the content on the shortlived Computer Channel for a while, they decided to revive one of the weekly episode formats for it. Further details are of course scant, but for at least one series they filmed it at SegaWorld London (which I may have mentioned on here before):

On a related note, Alex 'Big Boy Barry' Verry himself has also said in interviews that during one of the original series they shot a feature at Sega World Bournemouth in its early days. This ended badly when he got stuck upside down on an R360 having felt sick already for most of the day. And apparently the B-roll footage of these events may still exist, which I would honestly pay good money for.

 

SKY was getting pretty big and popular in 90's and you could see this with the impact it had on American Wrestling Inthe UK . WWF merchandise was getting bigger, WWF games were selling in good numbers and Summer Slam 1992 in Wembley was massive a complete sell out. You wouldn't have got that sort of impact if SKY was limited to a small number of people

After the 1st series of Games World, you had the likes of The Big Boy Barry Show and the spins and I'm sure at one point it was being filmed in Namcoworld which Derck ran who used to appear a lot on Games Master, but I'm 100% sure. Still, I did keep a few of the old tapes from back in the day

 

This is really meant to be about improving wikis rather than "things were good" but Ofcom's figures suggest non-analogue terrestrial uptake was about 20-25% in 1998 (the peak?) - I'd have to dig for earlier figures, you can imagine it being less in the years prior. The House of Commons graphed it out in 2006.

 

Those episodes before SegaWorld were shot at "The Edge" in Harrow (little documented arcade-cum-internet cafe ran by Bass Leisure that only lasted a couple years). To the best of my knowledge they never did it from Namco Wonderpark in Soho, or later Namco Station over on the Southbank, but I suppose they could've done in some episodes not up on YouTube yet - Wonderpark's fighting game scene did get covered on GamesMaster, and the place was also used in some parts of Reactive on the BBC.

It's splitting semantics really, but if reach did only go from 4% to 20% or so over the entire course of the 90s, the likes of Sky would've still been niche here in the wider scheme of things. Yes the popularity of things like Simpsons and WWF plainly extended out from early on, but big American phenomenons like those were of course always going to; home media (VHS tapes etc) and the whole thing of going round the houses of more well off friends who could afford it come into the equation here.

So yes, at the end of the day, complete runs and dates of smaller UK productions they showed e.g. Games World aren't going to be the easiest things to dredge up today. I was hoping the BFI Collections page might hold some answers, but with only three episodes from the first series apparently in their own archives even their info is vague (they have absolutely no idea on Cybernet too - so that's one thing we have over them).

 

I just remember Derek Linch being on GamesWorld, showing the Tips Bouncer around the arcade , Derek used to run Namco's Arcade in London back then and would be on Games Master quite a lot as a quest commentator

And compared to BBC anything was going to seem niche even the likes of Channel 4. I doubt Vince Mcmahon of all people, would have risked a prized Jewel Pay Per View event to be held in the UK without some serious data and money, telling him it was getting ever more popular in the UK and would sell out. One could only watch WWF on SKY at the time. ITV did have WCW back that was at 2:Am on Sunday morning. You could also see SKY making an impact with UK Sky News featuring in likes of Mission Impossible


Mind you back in the 1990s some people would think and say gaming was a niche hobby and interest, even when Sonic 2 was bringing more money on its UK launch day than Simply Red was making off their album sales for the whole year It is such a shame that the 1st series of Games World is next to impossible to find and has never been shown again, not even on Challenge TV.

I really liked Bravo on SKY and they were great for horror films, Manga and also did have great gaming shows like GamePad, When Games Attack and Gamer.TV

 

Someone's uploaded the first 15 episodes of Games World to YouTube, which means I can absolutely confirm the first series ran for at least three weeks.

Then I had a crisis of confidence. Series 2 started on the 20th September 1993 but... uh... I think Sky was showing series 1 the week before. Basically, once they ran out of new episodes, they started airing repeats - the cut-off seems to be around early July, but it means that according to the schedules, Games World never stopped. It looks like there might have been a short break November/December time, and series 3 apparently had a late 1994 start.

 

https://archive.org/details/AmigaCo...ing/AmigaComputing057-Feb93/page/n13/mode/1up

It's amazing what you accidentally find:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...senbaum-peers-into-the-game-zone-1474952.html

I was looking for series 4. Games World ran for three series, then had a break - its return in 1998/1999 had a different formula with different people, now airing weekly on Saturdays at 11am. Nobody cares about the fourth series of Games World - there's no hype, there's no discussion, there's not even a passing mention that "hey, it's back" - it just turned up and went away (there's suggestions they killed it mid-series so you never found out who won). Although Guru Larry turned up in one episode, so that's a thing.

I was thinking maybe Sky's old corporate site might explain why it axed what was once one of its most popular shows. I didn't get an answer because records don't go back that far - I just got new questions:

dead link! No records!



I have a vague recollection of Sega sponsoring the interactive games bit of Sky Digital, but that would have been later. And yes I did look for Sega games on that service - I don't think there were any.

 

Deleted scan.

So, Channel One launched in London on 30th November 1994, and "Interactive" was first broadcast the following day on 1st December. April 20th 1995 episode covered "the new Sega game park". But good luck finding any episodes of this as it was only broadcast on cable TV in London. A Bristol version launched February 1st 1996, which I remember as Bristol getting it's own cable TV channel was a bit of a novelty. A Liverpool version launched October 17th 1996.

The last listing for "Interactive" I can find is for 6th October 1997, so it lasted for nearly 3 years. From October 10th 1997 they start broadcasting Cybernet instead, and at the reasonable time of 20:30, for the small number of people that could receive it. In September 1998 Channel One London and Bristol closed down, but the Liverpool version continued as it had a different ownership structure. Cybernet was still being broadcast on September 23rd, but the local newspaper stopped printing listings for the channel then, although they still advertised on the TV listings page, so may well have continued showing Cybernet. Cybernet then appears on Sci-Fi Channel from April 2nd 1999, at first at 02:00, but later at a decent time of 8pm. It was still running on Sci-Fi June 4th 2000, but the newspaper archive isn't too good from 2000 onwards, so don't have full listings for Sci-Fi after this.

I suspect there were two different TV rights sold in the UK, a terrestrial one, and an exclusive satellite/cable TV one as there doesn't seem to be any examples of two different satellite/cable channels running it at the same time.

Edit: posted this halfway through typing by mistake.
Edit 2: Removed speculation of Trocadero, it might be a bit early for that, more likely one of the Sega Parks.

 

Well this took me about a week as I couldn't find any software that supports scrolling or bitmaps larger than the CD-G screen area (288x192 pixels), as all software is karaoke focused, but learned a bit about CD-G in the process. You can continuously stream new content into the border area (total screen with border is 300 x 216 pixels) and shift the display area by a pixel at a time. With full 16 colours I could get lows of ~18 fps scrolling vertically, which I capped at 15 FPS so it ran smoother at 60 Hz. With palette optimisation 20 FPS might be possible. As there's less pixels to push when horizontally scrolling 25 FPS should work for PAL, 30 FPS might be possible, but maybe not quite full screen or colours.

 

I remember one episode of Games World having a feature on pirated games, with the presenter saying something like "They're most likely unfinished games and worthless, just throw them away"

 

I can't ever remember GamesWorld being on a Saturday morning, or SEGA doing any digital games on the red button. by 1998 .tv had moved on to the likes of GameOver which was a brilliant TV gaming show that was so overlooked by many.

GameOver were pretty much the 1st UK station to show an import DC. I wish I could have those days back

 

Hewland International doing their best to stay undocumented.



Computorzz. In 1996 "The Computer Channel" was launched on Sky, which ran for a whopping 2 hours a day, sharing a space with Granada Good Life. Because the channel's broadcasting hours were so short an entire day's worth of content can be uploaded to YouTube. In March 1998 it would be rebranded as ".tv" - the hours would extend (only on Digital??), there'd be attempts to diversify, and the channel would be killed in 2001 because nobody was watching.

I heard a rumour that Games World turned up here. And it did, annoyingly both as repeats of the show from Sky One, but later as shorter ten-minute segments acting more like a magazine show. It was then replaced with "Game Over" - slightly longer, cheaper to produce, same schtick.

A lot of Computer Channel/.tv's output was games related, and thus within the scope of Sega Retro. I think the internet underestimates quite how much was broadcast - at one point the channel devoted Thursdays entirely to the subject of gaming - there's assorted clips over the internet of travels to E3 2001 and Charlie Brooker dressed as a monk, and of course very little of its output is "searchable".

Basically, five years of ~mystery~.

 

The issue I think many might have had a well ai did was when the computer channel 1st launched it used a different frequency and so I needed a extra box fitted to my SKY box to watch it . When SKY digital launched that's wasn't a issue and .TV was really a wonderful channel for anyone into gaming I really enjoyed Game over and Chips with Everything with the lovely Kate Russell.

It's thanks to .TV that I was made into a Xbox when they showed JSRF running on the Xbox at E3 2001. I knew there and then what my next system would be after the DC.

 

Happy birthday, here's four episodes:

"new and improved"

I also made a page for its successor: Game Over (UK) which takes cost cutting to a new extreme. Here's one fronted from a literal corner. There's another series from around 2000 that looks a bit better, but it still doesn't look as if they were blessed with a dedicated room, let alone one of those newfangled "studios".


If you're curious on the timeline so far:

1993-03: Games World series 1, Sky One
1993-09: Games World series 2, Sky One
1994: Games World series 3, Sky One
1996: Games World series ???, The Computer Channel
1998: Game Over series 1, .tv
1998: Games World series 4 (or a reboot), Sky One
2000: Game Over series x, .tv

I've also spent an unhealthy amount of time watching YouTube documentaries about analogue cable and satellite broadcasting in the UK. So now I know about the other Computer Channel (spoilers: it's unrelated) and the tragedy of BSB. Now I want a Squarial and a D-MAC receiver.

 

So was the 1998 series really series 4?

This is something I'm pretty knowledgeable about as I was a bit of a satellite enthusiast back then and had a big motorised dish which could pick up TV from all over Europe and beyond, which was useful after Sky started encrypting most of their channels. Back then most other stuff wasn't scrambled, so you could still pick up cable TV channels like Discovery and Travel channel (on Intelsat as listed in the Satellite Times page you posted previously) which were only meant for the cable TV headends, but could be still be picked up by enthusiasts. You'd also get newsfeeds and live sporting events getting beamed back to the TV stations in the clear. It was pretty cool intercepting Trans-Atlantic feeds in NTSC. D-MAC was a superior format to PAL, but it was really only used by BSB for a very short period, and then Scandinavia after BSB got bought out and the satellite got sold and moved to a different position.

https://segaretro.org/File:PowerUp_UK_1996-09-14.jpg



The Computer Channel launched November 1st 1996 for just 2 hours/day (bandwidth was limited, so many "channels" really just time-shared the same channel). Games World was there day one. As Team Andromeda pointed out, this launched on the new Astra 1D satellite, which had to use lower than standard frequencies as the standard ones had all been used up. This meant older boxes needed a small frequency shifter to put the new channels into the range that the boxes could accept, so I guess that many viewers probably missed out on the launch. The next satellites went digital, which relieved the bandwidth issue as multiple channels could then be compressed and broadcast on a single transponder.

So, was the 1998 Games World referred to at the time as season 4, or is this something that people have retconned after not knowing about the season(s?) broadcast on The Computer Channel in-between?

 

Wow thanks, That's my Friday night viewing sorted.

I also used to like G@amers on sky, but a shame the show was short lived.

 

I used to love his Professor History segments

It was a pain when SKY switched to the new signal, for those of use with the old SKY boxes My mum had to had a little box that you have to switch to watch the new channels and all of them was prone to interference and noise, was so happy when mum had took the SKY digital offer