kajinking said:
Ok I have to ask, WTF is G4? I know they were a channel but all I ever heard about them was that they played all that ninja stuff, I never knew they did anything with videogames.
G4 was originally supposed to focus on a few things, gaming being one of them, but by design or as a response, gaming was pretty much the only focus. I'm not sure if G4 was always owned by Viacom or if that happened later or maybe even after the merger, but it's owned them for some time now-- this is relevant partly because they also own Spike and Comedy Central. I hardly watched it before the big merger so I know this stuff from reading Wikipedia and chatting with people who did watch it back then.
TechTV started as ZDTV at the end of the 90s with a broad technology focus and was passed around between owners and companies and networks, keeping that broad focus. They had all kinds of shows that were good or at least interesting, if I get into what they were I might be here all day. X-Play started on ZDTV as Gamespot TV, with Adam Sessler and someone else hosting, and after (I think) two seasons it cut its ties to Gamespot and was renamed Extended Play. The other guy left around that time, and after that Adam hosted the show by himself. At some point Kate Botello was brought on as a co-host, and then around 2001 she left (this is about when I started watching). It was renamed X-Play in 2003, and around then they brought on Morgan Webb, who had been doing odd jobs on The Screen Savers.
In the mid-2000s, G4 bought TechTV and within a few months the two channels became one, G4TechTV. They slowly dropped shows that had come from G4 and TechTV, and TechTV wound up giving up more shows than G4, but after a while it didn't matter, because G4TechTV was renamed G4, and then almost all of the rest of the shows from the original channels were cancelled, with a few showing reruns for years afterward. Around that time, The Screen Savers (with host Kevin Rose) was renamed Attack of the Show, and started getting remodeled. As they pared down the content further they started replacing it with things like Ninja Warrior and Cheaters and COPS, and they showed Lost and Heroes for a minute there, and they started showing movies, going from cheap geeky ones to cheap old ones to less-cheap old ones to cheap new ones. They did try their hand at original programming, and a little bit of it was even pretty good, if irrelevant to what the channel used to be, but none of it was that successful.
By the late 2000s, all that was left of either of the old channels were an AotS that had been remodeled beyond recognition and X-Play.
I didn't mean for that to be that long, but there you go.
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