Image via G4TV
Almost a decade ago, the TV network for gamers, G4, abruptly ceased its programming. The cable channel sunsetted quickly; a loss chalked up to an impending rebrand radically different from its existing form. Yet for those who watched G4, its sudden shutter felt like a tremendous loss. In the mid-aughts, the idea of a network devoted entirely to video gaming seemed as frivolous as gaming itself. Despite their increasingly mainstream appeal, a generous read of video gaming at the time was often relegated to a hobbyist nature. A less considerate—and more common—assessment involved the incorrect generalization that video games were rotting the brains of America’s youth.
Launched in late April of 2002, G4 was a joint venture between NBCUniversal and Dish Network focused on being a rival to Tech TV but catered towards a younger generation. A merger between the two rivals occurred in March of 2004, ultimately leading to the halcyon days of the channel. Programming like X-Play, a videogame review show hosted by Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb, and Attack of the Show, a live variety TV show hosted by a crew of talent including Kevin Pereira, Blair Herter, Chris Gore, Sarah Jean Underwood, Alison Haislip, and (most notably) Olivia Munn lead the way for G4, helping to legitimize video gaming as an art form and as a topic of critical conversation.
“Once I saw G4, and saw people standing in front of video game consoles and talking, it was like ‘Hold on. Are me and my four friends not as big of weirdos as we thought?’” said WWE Superstar Xavier Woods, a.k.a. Austin Creed. “It was the first time that all of this world [of video games] opened up and saw there are multitudes of adults who take this seriously. Like it’s their job, and maybe we can aspire to do something like that. It was the first shining ray of hope to tell me that video games are not melting my brain.”
The feeling Woods describes is one of a myriad of reasons why it was gutting for many when NBCUniversal halted programming in 2012 as part of a planned rebrand to the Esquire channel, a move to leveraging further non-gaming programming—shows like Cops and Cheaters that were never well-received by its audience—already airing on the network. Only G4 never transitioned; NBCUniversal decided to spin the Style channel into Esquire, leaving the once-proud gaming network dominant in move equal parts baffling and frustrating—double so as gaming took leaps and bounds into the mainstream with the astronomical rise of eSports, streaming, board games, and the continued popularity of console systems.
Yet rumors of G4’s demise were seemingly exaggerated, as a cryptic tweet suddenly appeared in the middle of 2020 teasing...something. Booting up out of nowhere like the Nintendo 64 you likely have sitting in your closet, G4 was back. The long road to revival ends on November 16, when the channel will debut on Comcast Xfinity, Verizon Fios, Cox Communications, and streaming on Twitch. So why bring back G4 now?
“Comcast brought G4 back for a number of reasons—a lot of them business-related,” Blair Herter, former host of X-Play turned SVP of Branding, told me. “But also because they’re like, ‘Holy shit, man. This is a brand that’s been in the NBC storage closet for the last eight years. Like we’re still getting asked about this.’” The other part, Herter believes, is due to just how much the gaming landscape has changed. “Gaming, in particular, has become so big that there kind of needs to be a central hub—a gathering ground. A playground, if you will, for all of these voices,” he said. “I think that’s what G4 can be.”
In addition to returning favorite shows like Attack of the Show! and Xplay (like Jay-Z did in the past, Xplay dropped the hyphen), G4 will launch new shows: Boosted, a weekly Esports-focused show, and Dungeons & Dragons Presents: Invitation To Party, a weekly live tabletop game., with more series will follow. The new suite of programming is an effort on the part of G4 to wrap its arms around how gaming, both digitally and otherwise, has grown and evolved in its absence. Along with this depth and breadth of programming will be a wide array of fresh perspectives—not only in terms of diversity in personalities like Woods, Gina Darling, The Black Hokage, Kaseem G, Jirard “The Completionist” Khalil, Fiona Nova, CodeMiko, and others—but in terms of what each one of those new hosts is interested in talking about. In fact, G4 is going with a creator-first approach in a way that feels pretty radical for a corporate-owned entity.
“When we were in negotiations, they told me, ‘Gina, we don’t ever want to get in the way of what you’re doing. You can come in for one or two days—you want to change your contract to whatever suits you, then you can do that,’” Darling said. “They really made it really clear in the beginning they don’t want to overstep in anything I’m doing.”
The inherent flexibility for G4’s new suite of hosts is a feature, not a bug. Herter told me there will be “8-15 hours of creator-driven content that are going to happen in and around all of our programming,” which allows these creators to show off their individual personalities, albeit with more resources—art directors, editors, etc—behind them than if there were to continue to work solo. This decision evokes feelings of how Marvel Studios plucks burgeoning talent to come on and direct their movies while offering them a chance to show off their own sensibilities in a larger environment.
Few are better suited to showing off their personality within a pre-established brand than Woods. The WWE superstar’s UpUpDownDown YouTube channel is one of the platform’s most popular gaming-related series, with hundreds of millions of views. UpUpDownDown is owned by WWE, but provided a platform for Woods to channel his passion for gaming alongside other WWE talent. The show’s structure involves everything from Woods getting his world rocked in Rocket Knight Adventures or facing off against his wrestling contemporaries in fighting games like WWE 2K18.
By the time G4 came knocking, Woods already had extensive knowledge about how a produced show about video games should, look, feel, and function. Oh, and he had the skill set to be a magnetic host. “I think what’s interesting is that professional wrestling gets you ready for so many different kinds of things,” he said. “[From] your improvisational skills, your physical storytelling skills, your physical comedy skills, how to just kind of roll with whatever anybody’s doing. That’s kind of what my experience has been at G4.” While Woods couldn’t yet reveal the name of the program he’ll host, he did state the show will be “a little more competition-based” than UpUpDownDown while bringing together the “talking trash” of the wrestling world and some “eSports” flair in a natural combination of his professional career and an interest he’s loved since he and his friends used to “trade demo disks” with one another. This new show won’t be the only thing he’s doing, as Herter confirmed to me Woods would be the “showrunner” for two new Twitch shows G4 is launching as well.
Plenty of new shows are coming to G4, but old favorites are back too. Legendary host Adam Sessler will return to the fold after voicing his frustrations about the channel’s closing. He felt emboldened by initial conversations to come back for more. “The group of people I was talking to, these are the people that watched G4. These are people that liked G4,” he told me. “I started to feel very confident that, okay if they’re going to do it again, they’re going to sort of undo some of the mistakes of the past. There was an awareness of how things have changed, that a much broader group of people are playing games. We were not going to be ignorant of that—which I think, to a greater extent, we were back in the old days of G4.”
I mention to Sessler that his new reviews—a few of which have trickled out ahead of the relaunch, including a Metroid Dread review that sparked some fan backlash— are more akin to the long-form work he got to do outside of the old X-Play (notably his varied appearances on the 1UP Yours podcast and his eventual pivot to Rev3 Gaming). To borrow some parlance from Woods’ primary occupation, the Sessler of X-Play felt like a wrestling persona, while his work outside of G4 felt more nuanced. Those YouTube videos from the last few months are indicative of how Xplay’s Sessler will function. “There are things that we want to cover that we never had the luxury to cover before,” he said. “I like to go off on a few tangents or bring in literary references—not just for the sake of it—but [because this game] seems to be borrowing from this cinematic technique or this literary technique because I really do believe that we should be talking about games more in a larger cultural context. The way we’re handling television now, like the multiple ways that we’re able to present ourselves, allows for as much of that—if not more.”
Sessler’s persona, however you decide to describe it, looms large. When Corey Smallwood (aka The Black Hokage) thought about where he wanted streaming to eventually take him, the idea of being the “Black Adam Sessler” was a goal. When I asked him about it, he said, “I didn’t know I’d said that. Several of my viewers pointed it out to me on Twitter that I said in a video like 10 years ago. Sometimes I sit there, and I’m like, ‘Yo. This dude is my coworker.’ It’s a blessing.”
Attack of the Show!, on the other hand, may skew a lot closer to the Attack of old—especially if Darling has her way. She’s looking to bring a particular kind of energy to the show. “I remember Attack just being crazy,” she said. “Just all these crazy antics, which I love doing so much. [It’s] the show that I resonate with the most, that I can bring the most of my personality and skills into. I want to make every episode memorable, unpredictable, and fun.” It’s an energy that certainly falls in line with the AOTS of the past, where it wasn’t uncommon to see Olivia Munn eat a bunch of random food. Darling’s energy and interplay with her Attack co-hosts already feels at home with the show of yore; A recently released video featuring some of the Attack crew at Halloween Horror Nights feels as if it was ripped from the show’s past.
Considering fans were responsible, in some part, for bringing G4 back, there’s a natural question as to how much influence they’ll continue to have in shaping the new phase of the network. Fan feedback is good, up to a point, but if you lean too much one way, it’s easy to fall into a Rise of Skywalker situation where too much fan service can actively hurt a project instead of helping it. How will G4 balance that? “What we’re looking for is the surprising feedback that challenges us, that challenges the way we think about our programming, that inspires us to grow and do different things,” Herter said. “Where we have an added level of challenge—but also responsibility and opportunity—is that G4 fans are what kept G4 alive. So we do feel a responsibility to give our fans some ownership. There’s a very fine line we have to walk there.”
While fans may have input into how the channel grows, there will be ways it naturally evolves. The talent G4 brought into the fold will participate in “8-15 hours of creator-driven content blocks” that will bookend programming. If there’s something in those blocks—a fun moment, an interesting interview, a particular fun interaction, etc.—that becomes a hit, it can naturally move into the fold elsewhere. “If Fiona Nova, for example, creates this amazing interview series—like some format we’ve never thought of before—yes, she can continue doing it in her creator block,” said Herter. “But we can also wrap that format up into Xplay and make it an official Xplay segment.” Outside of these genuine moments, G4 also has other ambitions, including building its eSports presence. “Our competitive gaming portfolio in 2022 is going to surprise a lot of people,” Herter proudly told me.
Outside of the new shoes and the potential of the channel’s future, the return will come with weighty expectations—not only in terms of how G4 functions but how the new talent will function within this larger machine. For The Black Hokage, being himself is what matters most. “Authenticity, being true to yourself. That was something I was worried about when [G4] asked me to come on board,” he said. “I actually had a meeting with my boss, and she was like, ‘I brought you here because you do something different.’ I was worried about fitting in because I feel like my sense of humor is a little bit different. I come from a different environment—we speak differently. But she was like, ‘No. Be yourself.’”
G4 is entering into an entirely different era in 2021 than it found itself in back in 2002. The ways in which its audience consumes content—related to both gaming and television—are radically different. Combining this altered landscape with the weighty expectations of any reboot puts the network with a difficult challenge. Yet the new G4 already seems more intelligent, flexible, and poised to capitalize on the future than it did when it went off the air. Its hosts also realize G4 was never really about its programming—not in the traditional sense anyway. It was about something much, much bigger.
“I want [the audience] to feel like how I felt when I watched it when I was a kid. As an only child [who grew up] playing video games by myself, I want them to feel like they have someone out there that understands [them],” Darling shares, getting visibly emotional. “And it’s gonna be fun. They can totally be themselves, dress up like a nerd, and play all the video games they want. And [that G4] is their home.”
G4 was always about building and providing a community where gaming was legitimized and championed. Now, on the precipice of a new era, G4 has done the work to build another place for gamers—it’s up to them to show up.
