Thread by @textfiles

You've created, co-produced, hosted, written, and edited a television show about video games. You cover them, the lifestyle of gaming, the joy of them and to give news and opinion on them.

But G4 doesn't exist. eSports is a typo, not an industry.

It's 1994.

You're 12.

Such it is with "Video Games and More", created by J.J. Styles, who hosted 30+ shows during the 1990s, gaining his footing and doing the show at regular intervals throughout the decade.

It helps if you understand Public Access TV in the 1970s-onward in the US. Cable Companies were given a monopoly in towns and counties and part of the negotiation was anyone could apply to have a show on one of the channels on the cable show. There's a massive set of these shows.

It was here that J.J. Styles would hang out at the local television studio of Tucson Community Cable Corporation (TCCC), later Access Tucson. He got certified on the equipment, took classes on it, and could operate the camera/editing equipment, at 10 years old.

Thus we have VIDEO GAMES AND MORE. I'm sure we can find video-game TV shows before 1994, and other examples of gaming cultural items of similar stripe, but this is a rather striking early example of gamer lifestyle television, including the same green-screen game-streaming look.

I assure you this is all much more difficult than it might initially look. Green-screen and cameras aimed at televisions and the whole thing being mixed together coherently.

Years ago, JJ put many of the tapes on Youtube, where they've sat for 5 years with minimal people noticing it. Let's change that.

youtube.com/channel/UCtiq7…

JJ is now working with me to re-rip the SVHS originals and they'll be uploaded in full resolution to Internet Archive.

In the meantime, see game livestreaming nearly two decades before it became a thing.