G4 TV

» see g4tv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

g4 was a us cable channel and cable in turkey did not carry it. i learned what attack of the show was from youtube clips someone in a forum kept linking, years after the show had already started running. the era between 2002 and 2014 had a small list of english-language tv channels that translated to international audiences via fan torrent communities, and g4 was on it for a window in the middle.

the channel was comcast's attempt to put gaming and tech culture on a cable lineup somewhere between mtv and discovery. it launched on april 24 2002 with a 12-to-34 demographic. two years later comcast absorbed techtv, the ziff davis tech channel, and the merged product was called g4techtv for a year before they dropped the second word. that is when it became the channel that the people in the forum clips watched.

attack of the show and x-play were the two shows that lasted long enough to define what g4 was for. one was a daily variety hour with kevin pereira and olivia munn running through internet bits. the other was a video game review show with adam sessler explaining why the new mario sucked. they both got cancelled in october 2012 and the channel never recovered. by 2014 the channel had become a place where ninja warrior dubs played on loop.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the techtv merger was the cultural inflection. techtv had the screen savers and leo laporte. g4 had cheat codes and dating-show concepts. the combined channel for a few years in the mid-2000s was the closest us cable came to a daily show about being on the internet, and a generation of people who later became kotaku writers and twitch streamers grew up watching it.

~ how it actually ended ~

nbcuniversal pulled the plug on december 31 2014 after years of audience decline and carrier dropouts. comcast announced a revival in july 2020, with the original kevin pereira back as a host. the relaunch went live on november 16 2021 and lasted exactly twelve months before being shut down again on november 18 2022. the official reason was low viewership against high operational cost. the unofficial reason was that the cable model g4 was built for had stopped existing.

~ the funny part ~

most of g4's good clips live on youtube now, uploaded by fans who recorded them off tivo years ago. the channel survived as a folder on a hard drive. the second death produced almost no obituaries because most of the audience that would have written them had already moved to twitch.

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