Some of you may know that I work at 1UP.com now producing a program called The 1UP Show. Basically, it's the beginning of an exploration of ideas I've had over the last few years, exploring them right here on GGA, and made possible now by the involvement of my friend and colleague Ryan O'Donnell. Before we got hired at Ziff Davis--and we were hired within ten minutes of eachother, funny enough--we had often sat on Ryan's balcony sketching out our ideas, dreaming of wacky things, including a puppet show about games. Yeah, that one didn't work out. Yet.

At 1UP, we got the chance to essentially do what we wanted. We knew we wanted to cover videogames on video, but we weren't sure how to proceed, since Ryan didn't like my puppets. Just kidding. We knew what we liked, and what we didn't. We tried to do a roundtable show early on, but we found it dull as dishwater--so dull that the format actually obscured the interesting conversation and the personalities.

The first time we tried to do something completely different was the one-off "Gaming to the Max" which was the video segment to complement Jeremy Parish's week-long SNES Retro/Active feature, a time warp in which we treated SNES games like current products. Yeah, it was really silly and, looking back on it, really flawed, but given our time constraints and the fact that we aren't actors the project schematic was too ambitious. We definitely learned from that.

For me, the biggest obstacle to "Gaming to the Max" was that I had written a script. It was not the best script, because I'm not a comedy writer. Ryan helped on it, but he's not a comedy writer, either. And neither Skip Pfister nor I could memorize our lines. You also have to remember that we did this on extra time outside of our full-time jobs as Reviews Editor and News Editor, respectively. Ryan was full-time video, but then, there was a lot of other video work to be done. We realized that scripts require first of all, better script writers than we are, more time for revisions and additions, and people in front of the camera who can act. Sure, I did high school drama, but it's been a while. I have to applaud Skip for being a willing test subject for our first attempt.

So we went back to the drawing board, and thought about what our strengths were and what we found most fun. At the time, if you remember, we hadn't seen the Xbox 360 yet (wow, that seems so long ago now.) A lot of our daily conversations revolved around speculating on what the thing would look like, what it would contain, and so forth. Some of us were excited, some skeptical, some downright curmudgeonly, but our conversations were impassioned. Here, we thought, was natural drama! Here, it's built-in narrative. We don't need a script, just some topics and some people to talk about them.

But we still needed to add just that touch of something else, that something that would gently push it over the edge into the territory of the absurd, because we wanted to tread that line between fiction and reality. I'm not sure how exactly we came to the conclusion that it couldn't be a straight "reality" show, but we wanted to inject a little whimsey. After all, on video, it's your world and you can make it what you want! Why not make it fun?

Ryan and I share a lot of the same taste in media: and for this show, we thought a lot about television since that is the closest analog. Sports Night, The West Wing, Arrested Development, The Office, sometimes Family Guy, old Simpsons... these are shows that we really loved. For the very first episode, we drew inspiration from the work of Aaron Sorkin--in fact we built the first scenes to be an homage to The West Wing: the extended shots, all that walking and talking. I pretended I was CJ and we took it from there. The end, when Che steals EGM's Xbox 360, really expressed in a rather silly fashion our real desire to play with a machine that was reserved for print publications. I think a lot of gamers felt that way! And thus, The 1UP Show was born.

But I wrote a script again, and because the shots were complicated, it took a while to film, and it disrupted the normal workings of the office. I'm sure a lot of people were annoyed by our shenanigans. We still had work to do streamlining our process and refining our ideas. We changed the titles. We threw out the scripts and trusted in our gut instincts. Che Chou signed on to the project as a mentor, a guide, and the guy who sweet-talked PR into letting us cover the stuff we wanted to cover. He became the central character on the show, which was a boon Ryan and I didn't count on. He really helped to solidify the tone and tenor of the show in the early stages, when it was most important, and gave it some legit cred. We wove in narrative threads based on what was really happening in the office. We wrote music. A theme song added a punchy twist. Little by little, it's coming together.

I won't go into a blow-by-blow description of what we've learned with each episode, because that's boring, but also because we are still learning and still experimenting and yes, still failing too. Every day we have at least ten new ideas, some serious, some wacky, some not very good. We've gotten some new folks on the video team and lost one (bye, Che.) But the point is not that every show we do is perfect; rather, it's the feeling that we're doing something fresh and new, something we haven't seen before, something that's incredibly challenging, and something that I hope communicates our feelings about videogames, why we love them and hate them.

But on a larger scale, if I may be so bold to presume it, I hope that we can help further media in some way. I hope that our modest little show can inspire and prod others to show us other ways of talking about videogames, or really, about the world in general. I hope we can join in on conversations around the world in a positive way. I hope we can continue to learn and to expand the scope of the show to include puppets one day. Or maybe not. I'll save that for The Jane Show.