I was leafing through some of my gaming memorabilia the other day, when I came across something peculiar: a VHS tape adorned by Sonic the Hedgehog’s smarmy visage from the Sonic Adventure era, with the word FUSE slapped across the top.
The memories came flooding back of this little tape, but only now am I looking back and realizing just how important a curiosity it was and is.
It’s like an issue of EGM put to film meets a news program, right down to the anchors showing you in to the top stories. We see the launch of Sonic Adventure in Tokyo, we’re walked through some secret cheats thanks to the ever-enigmatic co-host Code Boy, we get an interview with someone who did music for a Crystal Dynamics game…it’s actually pretty interesting stuff. (Forgive my lackluster description, I’m going entirely from memory; I don’t have any working VHS players at the moment to review)
The first episode launched in 1998, and Fuse lasted all the way through…one episode.
(There was also a British version focusing just on N64 and PSX games, and some kind chap uploaded it here for your enjoyment.)
The side of the tape proudly reads, “The video game magazine of the future!” They played their hand and bet that the future of video game journalism lay in the realm of full-motion video rather than play-by-play magazines. How’d that turn out?
www.gamespot.com
www.ign.com
www.youtube.com
Well I’ll be right damned.
You know, other than the final issue of Nintendo Power which I bought for posterity’s sake, I honestly don’t remember the last time I bought a paper-bound video game magazine. In the 90s and early 00s, the mags were almost like a way for me to live vicariously through their pages and get info on the games that the kid-me knew I wouldn’t be able to experience firsthand anytime soon, and as a way for me to connect with the “gaming community” at the time.
Instead, now I tend to get my video game news from online sources, and I don’t pay a dime. Don’t get me wrong, that has nothing to do with the divide between physical and digital media; many of you know that I take all my music, movies and games in physical format where applicable. But in this very specific instance, there came a point where the magazines just couldn’t cut it any more: what measure are static images and plain text when stacked up against the glory of full-motion video giving us essential context to what is fundamentally an audio-visual art form?
But never ask for whom the bell tolls. Even though Fuse prophesied the future of ‘game-talk’ as well as one could back in 1998, they wouldn’t be sharing in that future. So what went sideways?
Well, for one thing…it was a videocassette. In 1998. It would be a hard life for analog formats in a world of optical media, so it might have helped if they had put some of that futurist prediction towards making DVDs instead.
But I remember when I first got this tape as a kid, I watched it religiously. It was really awesome for me to see a show like this. I remember also liking Video & Arcade Top 10, a show that focused mainly on video games in the 90s. The Wizard was before my time as a gamer, but I can just imagine the kids who sat through that movie’s sort-of plot and getting their first glimpse of Super Mario Bros. 3. This being in the pre-internet world, our game info was largely limited to what the magazines decided to tell us.
Earlier in the 90s, I came into possession of a Yoshi’s Island promo VHS. It blew my mind: it was a mini-documentary about a game! You had the developers explaining mode 7 scaling, Yoshi’s transformations and the variety of play, all accompanied by appropriate video from the game itself. I think that was the first time I really understood the potential of game journalism that magazines just couldn’t match.
Same story with the Banjo-Kazooie VHS I came upon later in the decade, but with less developer interviews and more an excellently cheesy announcer talking about each world. This stuff had potential!
Go on, have a blast from the past. You ready for some Yoshi, sir?
If Fuse had survived beyond the first episode, I probably would have dutifully bought every one. But there may have been another factor at play here. It was systematic and organized, each segment of the show planned out and rigorously static. That’s just how TV shows work; they have to follow a cohesive narrative in some form.
But with the internet, player control is king. We hop between reviews, bounce around the occasional Youtube walkthrough to get a feel for the game, we go at our own pace and absorb exactly as much information as we want.
So it might be most accurate to call Fuse an appropriate sign of the times, a middle ground between the rigid game journalism of the 90s and the free-form variant we see today. It’s interesting to see how much the concept of talking about games has evolved right alongside the games themselves, and things like Fuse might just be the missing link in that regard. And don’t go thinking that we’ve reached some sort of end-point: I’m sure it will continue to evolve, and from here, who knows where we’ll go?