Written by John Scalzo  on September 14, 2005

Special: Five ideas to make G4 a more geek friendly place

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G4. The video game channel that features shows about Professional Drift Racing, "women you can't have" showing off rice rockets and reruns of a buddy cop show that was canceled after one season. You know that channel, it's an embarrassment to geeks and game fans everywhere and it's done it's best to stomp on the legacy of the very fun TechTV. With Turner Broadcasting taking those first baby steps towards creating an "Internet only broadband video game channel" maybe it's time to take another look at what makes G4 tick.

I've long toyed with the idea of creating a feature based on my experiences watching 24 hours of G4. But I value my sanity (and my fiance) too much to take on that kind of challenge. After all, Morgan Spurlock only got fat. So instead I've decided to do my part to make G4 less embarrassing. Here's my pitch G4. Embrace the geeks. We watch your channel in spite of the fact it's embarrassing. How many of us do you think would watch if you actually had programs we wanted to see?

And no, we don't want to watch a fashion show that tries to decide who is the hottest "video game vixen". We are grownups. Personally I'd rather watch shows like this...

Tap Into Super Geekdom - Buy up the broadcast rights to Red Vs Blue, Mega64, the PAX show and other fan created programming like it. DVDs of these video game centered shows are flying off the Internet store shelves as fast as they can be produced and their creators are big stars on the geek stage. They're funny and they're about video games. That should be more than enough to make them worth the little monetary investment (comparatively speaking) necessary.

Video Game Shows and Movies (AKA Video Game Theater) - A quick search of the IMDB returns 110 hits for the keyword "based-on-video-game". That's over twenty years of hideous saturday morning cartoons, stupid movies that often destroy the feeling of what made the game great and more anime than most otaku can go through in a lifetime. Show it all. We'll eat it up. The Super Mario. Bros. Super Show, Captain N, The Wizard, Mortal Kombat: Conquest, all of it. This stuff is ridiculous, but highly entertaining if you're in the right mindset. And nostalgic. People love nostalgia.

Amateur Hour - This one might be a little self serving, but there are a lot of talented mid-range sites out there. Us, netjak, Game Girl Advance, GameCritics, Kotaku, Gaming Age. Give them a digital camera. Give them an editor. And then give them 30 minutes of screentime and see what happens.

The Video Game Reporters - I can't really take credit for this one. I read it on the great Video Game Ombudsman site and well, I think it's the greatest idea ever, so it needs to be repeated. This one is pretty self explanatory. It's a video game take-off of ESPN's popular Sunday morning staple The Sports Reporters. Four video game writers go in and only one comes out. But before that they debate the video game issues of the day back and forth and back again for thirty minutes.

The Penny Arcade Cartoon - This one's easy. Call up Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins and give them the fifteen minute Adult Swim treatment. Place no restrictions on what they can say or do. Then, just for good measure drive a dump truck full of money up to their front doors. Hell, pair it with a special fifteen minutes of Cinematech to let the PA crew show whatever games they think are most worthy of your gaming dollar. We know what Tycho and Gabe are like, they have opinions that make mortal men weep. Seeing them on TV might cause a few panic attacks, but it would be great television.

Now let me tell you something about geeks: if we want something, we will find a way to get it. Burt Rutan put up untold millions to build his own personal spaceship because he believes in the idea of personal space travel that much. Anime was strongarmed into this country by dedicated fans who would import the (very pricey) Japanese video cassettes and subtitle them into English themselves. And once upon a time TechTV was beamed across this country by geeks who really wanted to watch a channel dedicated to them.

Four years ago, I was a Junior at the Rochester Institute of Technology. We are a community of 15,000 geeks. Every last one of us. Student athletes would go back to their dorms after practice and code until the wee hours of the morning. At the time, no cable company in the Rochester area offered TechTV on any of their subcriber tiers. But RIT knew the student body wanted it, so they made a special deal with TechTV to have it piped into the student housing for all. This came about in no small part because of what happened the year before.

The year before a guy I got to know hooked up his parent's digital cable box in New Jersey (which received TechTV) up to his computer and streamed TechTV programming onto it. This video stream was then pumped across the state to his PC at RIT and then transferred to the television with a switcher box. TechTV where there was no TechTV before.

This is the legacy you have inherited G4. We want to love a channel devoted to video games. It's just that's nobody's devoted a channel to video games yet. You might say G4 is about video games, but aside from X-Play, Judgment Day, Icons and various other fleeting moments, I don't see it. This is my pitch G4. Five ideas that could bring the geeks (and maybe a little respect) back to your channel.

After you bought out TechTV it put G4 in 50 million homes. There's probably at least one geek in each of those homes. We're waiting for a real video game channel.