There's something missing...

I am an Air Force brat. The bad part about this is that I was stuck overseas for eight years wanting desperately to get back to my homeland. Then again, I got here and realized that it wasn't all that great. Yet, I did get to live through one of the most entertaining and sarcastic television shows that I have seen in my life.

Gamesmaster, a show that ran for a full seven seasons, was a sarcastic and witty approach at video gaming. The show began when console gaming wasn't even that big of a deal in life. In fact, when I began watching (I missed a season), the Megadrive was the big topic.

The personality from this series came from a young Scottish man named Dominik Diamond. At first, he just hosted the show, but by the end of the seventh season, he made the series his own. The show was the standard thirty minutes, with three gaming challenges each show. If you won, you were presented with a Gamesmaster golden joystick. If you lost, you were insulted by Diamond, and sent off in shame.

There were tips for games and special "features" which involved gaming somehow. The features were pretty fun to watch, and included a little bit of technology, and also Diamond getting comfortable or remaining uncomfortable in his new game related surrounding. There was even a nice shot at the censors one episode where Diamond displayed his humor with the "offense meter" at the bottom of the screen, which gradually increased with every shameful of near-obscene phrase he uttered. What began as a Saturday morning style show, transformed into a teen and adult oriented joke. Good stuff.

My question, is why don't we have anything like that now? One of the last challenges in this series was based on Super Mario 64, so you know that console gaming still hadn't gained control of our culture. What sort of challenges could we see now? Die hard Capcom fans taking on vulgar SNK fans in a Capcom vs. SNK melee? Beat Resident Evil by the end of the show? Three players with one minute each to get the highest body count in GTA3?

I smell success here. Certainly if slow robots ramming each other aimlessly while being sponsored by a team of three people wearing those box-black birth control glasses can gain two series and several seasons of play and replay, we can at least test the waters for a show like this. We get so many party games, and the only homage to it we found on the screen was J.D. Roth and Pee-Wee Herman making an attempt to bridge the media forms. I don't think so.

Bruce Campbell doesn't do much these days, right? Surely he would be more than happy to ditch the conventions and gain a license to rip egotistical gamers to shreds. He already has, what, two games released and a third on the way? Gamers would be watching the show, so that's instant advertisement revenue right there. Companies would pay a little under the table fee to get their game in a challenge, I'm sure. This is a gold mine waiting to be discovered.

Folks, I think we're missing something here. The one television show that gamers would watch, and it doesn't even exist.