Get a behind-the-scenes look at the "Video Zone" in this Nick Arcade documentary
Aux Features nickelodeon
Of all the shows that made up Nickelodeon’s original early-90s programming block, perhaps none was more ambitious than Nick Arcade. Combining the elements of classic game shows with groundbreaking video technology, Nick Arcade offered contestants the chance to play inside a virtual world that, at the time, at least, dazzled adolescent viewers at home. How the creators managed to pull this off is the focus of a new documentary short from YouTubers Wrestling With Gaming.
As Nick Arcade co-creators Karim Miteff and James Bethea explain, the show’s success was due to a piece of software known as the Mandala. This was the technology that converted excitable pre-teens into interactive sprites that could interact with coins, switches, and enemies in the “Video Zone.” Looking back, these tense video game showdowns seem about as advanced as the technology used by your local weatherman, but at the time it was pretty cutting-edge stuff.
Ultimately, the blue screen magic behind the one was really just one part of what made Nick Arcade so special. Hyper-energetic host Phil Moore kept things entertaining during the most mundane trivia competitions. The “Video Challenge” segments, meanwhile, featured titles from Nintendo, Sega, and Neo Geo, which seems almost unimaginable in today’s climate of corporate competition. Even the losers got to go home with a comfortable pair of British Knights.
A relic of a bygone era that was still way ahead of its time, Nick Arcade remains firmly imprinted on the minds of TV viewers of a certain age. Given the massive increase in gaming-related entertainment, streaming, and virtual reality in the past five years, it seems like only a matter of time before we get some sort of a reboot.
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8 Comments
All fathers forced their kids to collect baseball cards in the 90s. I’d swear if you asked any kid that collected baseball cards in the 90s why they started they’d have no idea. They just can recall some vague moment in their past when they went from having no baseball cars to having them. It was like they were just there all of a sudden.
For a minute there in the 2000s, you could watch this, Legends, GUTS, Figure it Out, Picture Perfect and Double Dare on a little cable channel called Nick GAS. It was a helluva throwback, and rewatching it only clarified how dastardly hard the final round was in some of these games. Kids got wiped straight the fuck out by the Video Zone and the Temple – though for my money, the hardest was still a non-Nick game show, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. I don’t think I ever saw a single kid win the final round in that one.
I saw kids win that final round a few times. usually when it was a map of America but there were a few international maps kids got.
When I played that computer game in school we all got almanacs to refer to and it was honestly a pretty good teaching method. I can’t imagine middle school era me knowing all that without any help.
The almanac was an intentional part of the video game. It’s teaching you about basic research. The game show was more like a Geography Bee.
Haha yes I have VIVID memories of scouring through the almanacs playing that game.
Nick GAS was the perfect after-bar watch for myself and my roommates at the time. Such a perfect channel.
Amazing that they managed to pull it off with the Mandala software, given its propensity for corrupted memory.