TechTV Scrapbook: Adam Sessler – Experiment Week DTNS 5084

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0:38Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Meet Amazon Ads rising star Daryl Spencer, who set out to redefine men's self-care with his brand Crown Skin. Amazon Ads helped him grow. I walked away from big tech to build a luxury brand in a category that no one was paying attention to.

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2:16New episodes drop every weekday wherever you get your podcasts. Tune into Morning Brew Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to DTNS Experiment Week. Yes, it is back again all this week. We are preempting our regular programming to try out some new show ideas, explore cross-show opportunities, give you some exclusive content we wouldn't do at other times of the year. So after you listen, please let us know what you think. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. On with today's experiment.

3:00When Tech TV launched in August of 1998, ZDTV was positioned as a 24-hour cable network devoted to computers, technology, and internet. Now, part of that mission was video games, and one of those important spin-out benefits from the network was a show called GameSpot TV, which eventually became Extended Play and then X-Play. And I'm not sure if there was a fourth name after G4 acquired the network. But I have with me one of the people, foundational people, not just for the show, but for the network as a whole, Adam Sessler. Welcome to the show. Hey, how are you doing, Roger? Good. It's been a long time now, so we've worked on and off at various ventures.

3:45But I first met Adam at ZDTV, and I will tell you, when I first met Adam, the network was still being built. I remember the sets still having plastic covering a lot of the sets because they were still building them. They were building the boxing ring that went into that set that you inhabited for, what, two, three years? The boxing ring got phased out quickly, thank God. But yeah, the strange back alley flame, that look, I think that went on through the tech TV name change until we were kind of booted out of the studio itself, which was probably 2000, 2001. And then we were shooting out there.

4:35But the one thing is GameSpot TV didn't launch with the network. Oh, it didn't? Yeah, yeah. In fact, I wasn't working there when the network launched because I've put the story together over decades now. Wow, that makes my knees hurt. So this is a great place to start. How did you get involved with ZDTV? Yeah, this is – I cannot tell you how many people have asked me, how can I get a job like yours? Or what advice do you have for me as a youth trying to forge my path? And this doesn't inspire anybody. A series of amazing coincidences occurred. I was not that much of a gamer. I was not even aware that ZDTV existed.

5:24I was aware of the Soul Dad O 'Brien show, the site that was on MSNBC. It was MSNBC. Yeah, it was MSNBC. So two things happened. One, before I knew of anything, there was supposed to be a host for the show. He was a former MTV VJ. If you look it up, you'll figure out who it is. I'm not going to say who it was. They couldn't go forward with him because he had done some adult entertainment because he had kind of a Dirk Diggler type of special quality to it. I'll just leave it at that. And so they had to hold off on launching the show and then had to quickly look for a male host. Now, I was working at a bank.

6:07even though I was an English major. I had no aptitude for this job, but I was hanging out with a lot of people. I think for those who are younger and don't know, San Francisco in that part of the 90s was like one of the hippest places you could be. And it was vibrant. It was social. People just knew each other. The term bohemian immediately comes to mind if you were to describe that period of time. If you've never seen the movie with Mike Myers, not the killer from Halloween, but the comedian called So I Married an Axe Murderer. The opening scene kind of describes the zeitgeist of the city at the time.

6:43Yeah, yeah. So it was a lively place. You just knew tons of people. That was just how it kind of worked. And of my crew of close friends, there was a woman who was dating a guy whose roommate worked at GameSpot. He was, I don't believe the EIC, but the managing editor. His name was Trent. and he knew me through this connection from a cable access comedy show I was doing with these friends and he thought oh this guy might you know be able to bring some of the tv thing to the the table so let's have him audition and so my friend said oh go audition I got there I remember I was in the lobby of the studio uh because our studio and the offices were not in the same location in order to save money uh and everyone seemed to know each other except for me and i was like i don't know but then lo and behold the person who was directing the audition her name was julie or julia also happened to be the woman who ran the public access station in san francisco that her show appeared on so she knew me julie hendrix yeah hi julie hendrix yes yeah so uh So I go into the audition.

8:02There's Prompter. I see Prompter. I've never read Prompter before, but I had a lot of theatrical background, so it wasn't that shocking. So I just kind of went for it, and it worked really well. And then the floor director kind of went like this because he didn't understand what he was being asked to ask of me. And he goes, would you mind river dancing? and I knew what he meant which is there was a sketch that we had done on our public access show where I was Michael Flatley, famous of Riverdance and it was supposed to be Michael Flatley teaching a community college class of Riverdancing and all I did was just kind of hold my arms really rigid to my side and kick as high as I could and so that's what I did and I was told because I did that without any pause, I got the gig Wow.

8:52So it's because you were able to do an impression of Michael Flatley. Yeah. River dancing, softcore, gay porn. And yeah, that was my path to employment. The best part was I actually was lying about that job, about the GameSpot TV job for months at the bank. I just kept taking Friday off because we were shooting on Fridays because I didn't know if it was going to work out. And so I didn't want to give up the job that I had. And so I was moonlighting in a very complicated way. Because when you work on TV, it's with the intention that people will see you. And eventually people started to suss out that I might have been doing a second job.

9:37So you were moonlighting, but during the day. Now, let me say this. You had a very, very memorable story about your first day and missing your bus and then running after said bus that was supposed to take you to the studio. Yeah, because 6 o 'clock, it was the 6 a.m. call time. I lived in the Lower Haight. Once again, the Lower Haight as it exists now in San Francisco actually hasn't changed that much. Back then, it was dicey. It was dicey at all times. at 6 o 'clock in the morning, well, really 5 o 'clock, because that's when I had to get up. It was double dicey. And so I would try to get to the bus stop, but wait at the bus stop for as little as time as possible so I didn't start to draw attention from kind of the denizens that had not realized that the sun was coming up.

10:30And yeah, I missed my bus, and I tried to chase that thing down, and I just wanted them. I remember trying to scream at them, but I have to be on television uh because i thought the television would open doors for me like that like like buses waiting extra you know to indulge me that didn't happen until la but uh yeah were you involved with any sort of the uh developing the the concept of what the show was like what kind of segments you would do what kind of like how would you would do with the reviews the kind of relationships you would build with software publishers and like the kind of angle with all that?

11:10So not at the very beginning. See, that was the other reason that I was still working at the bank is I wanted out of that bank so badly. Like it was just dead end right before I got the GameSpot TV job. Like I was actually considering taking accounting classes because like when you're 21, 22 and you're really young you don't realize that life there's a lot of life in front of you you you so you kind of can convince yourself the job you have is the job you're going to keep for the rest of your life so i needed out and so i refused to sign my contract saying that i would host the show unless they gave me a full-time gig where i could produce the show uh and that took about three four months of you know kind of convincing them i think they just needed to find the money i think peter needed to find the money.

11:59And so it finally worked out. And I had to first learn television, which was a somewhat steep learning curve. But I think the one part that was kind of neat is that there was no template for gaming television. There was one other show that was on, and that was Electric Playground, Tommy Tallarico and Victor's show, which was produced out of Canada. So it was kind of, I had to learn the basics of television while creating an absolutely unprecedented form of television. Because the focus had to be on the games, on what, you know, we would call it B-roll. You know, that's the common term for stuff that isn't the host talking.

12:44And it's called B-roll because it's not supposed to be as important as your A-roll, which is your host, your live action, like the important stuff. But the B-roll is actually the most important element when you're doing TV about games because that's what people are tuning in for, the part that's just kind of representative of what you're talking about. They really weren't there to see me. They were probably there to see all of my co-hosts way more than they were to see me. But first and foremost, they were there to see the games. And figuring out just how long you could let one clip of video game go before you had to cut to something else was one of those things I definitely contributed to.

13:25But at the time, in terms of the most basic content, it was previews. It was news. It was reviews. I was stuck on doing the previews because I think that the presumption was I could do the least amount of damage doing that. reviews on the other hand as i was to learn you know for all the successive years or that's the gold that's why people tune in and that drives about a third of internet arguments and so uh it was it was a while before i did that now when you were there initially i'm assuming the format or the or the style of the show changed how quickly did that happen was it like these aren't working and within the first few months they like changed things around or was it more of a slow drawn out process uh things changed pretty fast in the beginning uh i think in no small part because what zv tv we were in how many homes like 15 million 40 million okay we were 40 million once we were on what's when we were on the direct tv dish direct tv uh but in terms of like getting good solid placement uh on on on certain cable outlets it was you know we were very big in alabama that i remember screensavers you guys i think like a quarter of the calls were coming out of alabama but uh so because there weren't a ton of eyes on us and remember uh game spot tv was weekly it was on the weekends so we were we were kind of small fry uh and so that boxing ring which we started with, which I think the purpose of it was to – I don't remember why.

15:08I remember, and correct me if I'm wrong. The gentleman's name was John. Oh, yeah, yeah, John. There was a third host. Yeah. So this, for anyone who doesn't remember, GameSpot TV originally started with three hosts. It was Adam, you. It was John. And he was going to law school or something at the time. I think that was the thing. He was in business school. Oh, business. He was in business school. He had that business school quality. And then we had Lauren Fielder. Yes, Lauren Fielder, who actually came from GameSpot, the website. And so for all of you out there, I think one of the most interesting things is from the beginning, I mean, the most qualified people I interacted with on a daily basis, that's most qualified in terms of knowledge about video games were women.

16:01And it's which if you know anything about games journalism and the video game industry as a whole is absolutely contrary to how it typically works. And I remember you guys sort of the way you're describing, you're handing off the hosting duties depending on which segment. Now, over time, you lost the boxing ring. And I think John. I think John and the boxing ring went at the same time. There was also, what, it's been 25 years. There was something of a power struggle for leadership of the show. That did not involve me, but between two people. And what the show started at was representative of one producer's vision.

16:46And it quickly shifted over to another producer's vision. That was a little more mainstream TV magazine. I think at the end of the day was more viable just given the very, very limited budget and resources that we had. And also the biggest problem is when you're doing gaming television, you're absolutely at the mercy of what the game industry is doing. There's very little you can kind of do on your own. so it's not like where movies used to be where there's a new movie coming out every week that's not like games were not coming out with that kind of easy cadence at the end of the year there's a lot and I would say in the late spring there's a lot and then you have to figure out how to get through those leaner times and so having a less rigid structure to the show but having a more clear cut types of segments made the show much easier to produce now we're at at the at the at the start of extended play you were you were a managing editor i believe uh what was it no i was a segment producer which i now know was an outrageously cool thing to be called like that was a serious title to have within the world of television and bear in mind that world of television was quickly coming to a close you know because local tv was getting absolutely eaten alive by cable networks and and then and things out there But a segment producer was something you got after about 10 years worth of work.

18:17You would start out as a PA and associate producer. I did not know this. I just produced segments. So one of the things I know about producing the show is that it involves a lot of pre-production. How much of that was like, wow, this is so amazing? Or man, I never realized you had to do all this before you got in front of the camera to record something.

18:49There was a lot of work. I don't think the – I kind of knew there was going to be a lot. It wasn't just TV magic. But the banality of it, I wasn't prepared for. It kind of goes back to like just the idea of B-roll. and just having to collect so much footage just for maybe a 90-second segment. I would have to play a game, assuming there was a game that I could play to get the footage from. I would say that if you wanted 90 seconds, you wanted at least two hours worth of playtime of recording you, of just raw footage of you playing, to get 90 seconds worth of clips that were interesting looking.

19:33and that was kind of the hard work. I know nobody else out there was like, oh my God, you had to play games. But trust me, playing an unfinished PC game and then trying to record it with equipment that was available in 1998, I mean, that was the other thing. Trying to get images off of a computer and onto digital videotape was one of the most secure. It was horrifying. I mean, especially because broadcast – remember, we're not dealing with HD TV. We're dealing with the old school like NTSC. You needed some really clever workarounds to get it recorded. And this is the thing. Unlike video game consoles, which are default NTSC devices, PCs run at a different resolution.

20:23So you had to set the games at – it was so crazy. So what did a typical workday for you look like? Did you just walk into the office, sit down, punch out a bunch of emails, go to the capture station, play games, get your two hours of video, and then sit back at your desk, grab lunch, write scripts, and then go down to the studio to record? Or was it like – You know, that's a – yes and no. Remember, we only recorded once a week and so rarely in the studio. uh so like we we you know we recorded early friday mornings uh but the rest of the week was getting all those segments so you know you would record me on those friday mornings of going hello welcome to game spot tv oh wow daikatana is coming out we got some new footage of daikatana let's check it out and then the thing that would happen after the flames came up because that was our transition because it was the 90s with extreme and flames uh that stuff was really the bulk of the show so the rest of the week was putting that together which was playing the game writing the script uh recording doing the vo for the script uh going into the edit bay with an editor and taking those chunks of gameplay and then trying to slap it on to my vo and marrying it all together so that you had a two to three minute piece of content that you were going to be tossing to on that Friday or at the very least in the finished product of the show.

21:58And that really was the bulk of the work. It was whereas for you guys on screensavers, like you built up, you worked hard, and then you had kind of the catharsis of this live production where anything could happen day every day. And ours was always kind of this, it was the exact opposite. You kind of strained and killed yourself during the week for this kind of whimper of a recording session.

22:29Well, you had a particular image on camera. Now, was that something that was you normally, or was that something that the producers decided to cultivate for you? No, that was me. I mean, you'd have to understand I had a mixture of the worst imposter syndrome because I did not deserve this job as far as I was concerned. Just like I didn't deserve the banking job. It was like, at that point, I think I believed so deeply in some sort of lord of chaos who just had been beneficent and just arranged things where I got this job where I would meet people like Jeff Gertzman or Lauren Fielder, my co-host and like I was I knew that they had every reason to question my integrity and I quickly realized how not nasty but just like what the world of the video game audience was like where if you showed that like if you did not make a claim for your status writing about video games people would just eat you alive and so it was it was I was always cognizant of that while also being incredibly cocky because I was a 20-year-old dude in San Francisco in the 90s who was on TV, even though nobody – no one could get it in San Francisco.

23:48So it was the most useless, like, you know, moderate fame that one could ever have.

23:56But so I had these sort of two things competing, and so I leaned on sort of what was a more accelerated version of my own persona, which was self-effacing, but also just sort of observational comedy for everything. And I think as a result, that's sort of what became X-Play so many years later, and why we were always comfortable with creating a show that was very appealing to the core gamer, but could actually be enjoyed by someone that wasn't that into video games either, with all of that humor, because that was the way I started out. I needed to understand this crazy world that I was getting into with terms like frame rate and jaggies and collision detection and hitboxes.

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27:26Did you I mean what did you Were there moments that stand out to you From your time doing the show That really just kind of hit you in the forehead It's like wow people watch my show Or I am I am an iconic Person in this space Like people turn to me because I have the information They're looking for um it probably was years before that happened uh but i do remember it was before it was while we were tech tv uh went to star wars celebration i believe if it wasn't that it was gen con both at the time were being held in indianapolis at their new convention Center, went there and I couldn't go more than five feet without somebody saying Adam Sessler, Adam Sessler, Adam Sessler.

28:20And that had never happened before. And it was kind of neat. I was like, oh, hold on. Something's working here. And that was really cool because it really, it was tough. I don't know how you felt about it, Roger, but it was somewhat tough back when we first started because everyone was working so hard at zd tv tech tv but there was no sense of reaction from our immediate world you went out on the week under in the evenings and they're like what's it called tech tv zd tv it just there it had very limited pull as time went on and the internet dot com thing started to grow at least within that world we had some some currency but outside of that it was it was it was kind of nothing you had to go to vegas actually that's the other time the ces oh yes there was a ces we went to and we were on the we were on cable in vegas in like the low teens and that is just gold like to get that kind of placement and with the rum jungle at the mandalay bay like every time i walked in there the dj got on the mic it was like adam sister in the house and i got free drinks people are like who are you and that was yeah that was magical did you ever feel or a sense of uh um i know you mentioned imposter syndrome but do you ever feel that you had this persona that you had to up that you had to maintain when you were interfacing with the public but then like when you got home it's like man you know like i hate i hate video games or man all i want to do is just like sit here and read the newspaper or the big one for me was the understandable mistake that people had that uh kate and i or morgan and i or lauren and i reviewed all those games because it was our voice on those reviews but of course we didn't you know originally we were taking the reviews from game spot because because Zip Davis owned both.

30:30And so we were just sort of using their effort and reviews for our content. Once we had the breakaway with Tech TV, we had to take that on, which was, whew, that was a lot of work. And it became easier as time went on. But obviously there was other people who were like, say, specialists in MMOs. I didn't play MMOs. How can I have to play as many games as I can so I'm not going to play MMOs? but everyone thought they could engage with me on a discussion of World of Warcraft at a very deep level because that's how I was being presented on the show, and I was absolutely all thumbs when it came to something like that.

31:10So at the end of the day, I had to learn to – it was exhausting sometimes to maintain that image without breaking that illusion, but I think it was only at certain events say like a Star Wars celebration at Gen Con Comic Con or an E3 where I just had to go hide afterwards because I was just having to be the most on person that there ever was but day to day I was able to survive I was no international sex symbol I can definitely tell you that no unlike you roger unlike you i you know what i was a hum i was just a humble producer that sometimes stood in front of the camera i you know what it's interesting you brought up a interesting fact you had three not counting uh john you had three co-hosts or four no three so there was also blair herder at the very very end so yeah three to four so three to four what was was was the shift precipitated by your co-host desiring to move on from the project or they felt like the show needed a different direction or was it some combination of the two or is it just that's how it worked out kate was able to choose like it was it was it was her choice to move on uh lauren when the split happened with tech tv uh it was something i don't know the particulars of it you might know i got the sense it was a weird split i wouldn't say it was it was angry or anything like that but there was a lot of i'm gonna take my toys and walk over here uh type attitude uh so lauren couldn't be on the show anymore um yeah and um morgan was brought on because they knew there had to be another host because they decided to just keep me after kate left because it was cheaper.

33:09Everything at that era was just cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. But then when they decided to go X-Play, they knew that it had to be carried by two people. There had to be a man and a woman. And so they brought her on. I worked with Lauren well after Tech TV moved on to G4 and they moved down to LA. But I was over at CNET working for GameSpot Live at the time. And she came on and she helped us out with one E3 back in 2025. Not 2025. Really? Oh, okay. That's still, yeah. That's cool. And I was struck that she still remembered a lot of her time back at GameSpot TV. She had very positive things to say about the whole thing.

33:53And I've always felt this way about the screenshivers and call for help. But do you feel that there was maybe a familial aspect or a kind of camaraderie in the production group that you had with that show? Oh, yeah. I mean, I would say with the entire network, like I have deeply fond memories of the ZDTV, Tech TV era. Like it was young people who worked really hard and some of the most educated people I ever worked with who were trying to do something different. and I look a lot of what screensavers I would say was was definitely sort of at the the tip of the spear on this but it permeated to so many shows on the network we were kind of fumbling in the dark creating the logic that YouTube now functions under or other types of streaming Twitch things like that that idea of a far more immediate connection with the audience where you're not at this remove up on a pedestal, but there's something interactive.

34:59But the idea that sort of the process of the show is somewhat predicated on the audience, which, you know, obviously I say that now and that sounds just kind of rudimentary, but that was absolutely unthinkable back then. It was an eye-opening experience for me. I mean, the logic, at least for the help shows, was based on Leo Laporte's experience doing talk radio. Radio, yeah. Does a lot of interaction with the audience in a way that, at the time, broadcast TV couldn't do. We changed the script on that because partially we were cable TV. We were allowed to do things like that. Yes. But were there any experiences that you took away from your time at Tech TV at G4 where you say, like, hey, I know now how to do this.

35:47I can do this on my own, or I can do this with another group where it's not just like being in front of the camera, but how to relate to the audience, how to talk and interface with perhaps like publishers, with producers, with collaborating with other groups of people. I would say the most important thing that happened was 2001. And for those of you out there, what happened with Tech TV is with the creation of Tech TV and Paul Allen's investment in it, came the demand for tech live, one of the most quixotic creations in all of television, which was nine hours of live TV all about technology and treating it like CNN.

36:35But there was just a ridiculous amount of money that was thrown at this issue, whether or not it was wise. And what brought with that was some insanely talented people who wanted to get out of kind of the daily grind of local television, maybe CNN, something like that. And I was suddenly being used a lot more, and I was kind of understanding television production from that far more immediate, like, we've got to get something done for today and how live TV might potentially work. And then as E3 was rolling around that year, I don't remember. I think it was my idea, but maybe one of the people on Tech Live got this bug in my head.

37:17I wanted to try to broadcast one of the press conferences live from E3 because they were going to be announcing both the Xbox and the GameCube. I decided that the GameCube was the better one because people love Nintendo. I had a better relationship with Nintendo at the time. What happened from there was because Nintendo wasn't like, okay, we guess this sounds good. No one had thought about that before. That these things that used to be very private, just the press and maybe some special guests were in those audiences. And they tended to have a funkier, more informal quality. Nintendo's like, okay, maybe we're going to change our act.

38:00And then we discovered that it was being done at the basement of the Biltmore Hotel where we couldn't get a signal out. And so we had to come up with this insane jerry-rigged process to be able to tell them what camera to switch to. We had to do that over a rotary dial phone. But, you know, going out, it was insane. but it was so much fun and i love the like okay we have a crisis we have to fix it i was doing that with ryan vance who was a long time executive producer of the show and it was like suddenly this sense of immediacy and purpose and excitement suddenly hit me and it was i i had the bug before but that was like shooting just raw heroin into my veins and i'm like i want to do more of this Like everything I was just telling you about, like sort of, you know, we would work on all the segments for the show that we would kind of have this less than exciting, you know, session to create the week show.

38:56Suddenly I was like I was getting the money shot of television right there doing it live. And it was that experience that, you know, became that seminal E3 coverage that we did over at G4 that, you know, not only did that sort of change me and change G4 and change tech TV, but all those game companies suddenly changed the way that they presented themselves to become more television friendly. Those trailers took on way more thought and production and expense because they were going to be blasted out in this kind of like curtain raising experience. And it all started with, I think, me feeling kind of idle and wanting to just try to do something different.

39:44And we did that press conference. Now, you mentioned Nintendo E3. you have been witness to a lot of kind of seminal events in the video gaming environment. I mean, you, you were there for the launch of Sega's last hardware release, which was the Dreamcast. I remember like you and your entire crew, like, yeah, we're going to stand in line. I think it was at Best Buy or something. Guys, I love, we're going to stand in line and film us doing that as if it's exciting, where it should be. We're important enough that we don't have to stand in line, but. But, I mean, did you ever feel that you were sort of riding along the coattails of video game history?

40:29Because there were a lot of important things. I mean, Microsoft got into the home video game business for the first time with the Xbox. There were things that we now take for granted with a lot of the way we play. For example, now we just assume all our game consoles will have a hard drive internet, you know, broadband internet connection. We will have an interface that will allow us to connect online over to our friends. All that stuff was brand new, rudimentary, was just out of the box. You know, Dreamcast tried to start it. It wasn't as successful as, say, Microsoft was and then Sony. but did you ever feel like, man, this is like watching, I mean, not to be too over the top with this, but like I'm watching like the first moon landing of video game history just being next to it.

41:22I don't think I ever thought that in the moment, but wow, in retrospect, I mean, the one thing I know now is so much, and this isn't just technologically, Technologically, but culturally, that video games has been sort of leading the charge for good or ill. I can assure you, you know, like where VR, you know, it was going to start with games. You know, and I actually still believe that we're going to see like VR is going to become commonplace, not in games, but in types of surgery, things like that. that's out there but it has to start with games first because that's how you subsidize it you turn it into a commercial property culturally I hate to say it but you know Gamergate the horrible sort of hate campaign that occurred in 2014 that was I think for people that went through that that was a precursor of the interesting conservative environment we currently find ourselves in you see a lot of these bellwethers in games that you don't realize it as much until after the fact.

42:34But it was regardless, even though it was still in the world of games, it was exciting because, you know, we kind of knew that games were on the ascent. Movies and television were on the descent. And so there was that sense that even though it was only within this world of video games, we knew that world of video games was expanding. It was only getting bigger. I think these days, it's actually, it's struggling as an industry, because I think it finally hit its ceiling in terms of that. It is now that ubiquitous. But to be part of that ascent, you kind of knew it, but you didn't know what it all meant until years later.

43:20were there any trends in that video gaming space that you expected or saw like hey this is going to be big but didn't actually work out or the converse where this is a dumb idea and it totally blew up it's like well i you know i totally didn't expect this uh motion controls that was supposed to be the end all be all you'll feel like you're in the game yeah that's dead uh i was also really excited for that to die because uh in fact one thing i would say about the gaming press in general at least myself is and this is because of the tv i tended to be very conservative minded and skeptical about every new innovation because every new innovation was about to make our job harder because it involved like okay how are we supposed to reveal a game with motion controls because now we can't go full screen to just the gameplay we now have to go picture and picture and have some poor intern dancing around like a like a blithering idiot trying to like i have a star wars i have a lightsaber um so that was definitely something that didn't work out uh mobile gaming i gotta say i didn't think it would take off like it did i was and granted i was i was wishing for that too because the last thing we wanted to do was suddenly have to review mobile games it turned out mobile games are such a different audience that there was no overlap.

44:46But it wasn't until Angry Birds that I thought, Apple doesn't really like this stuff that much. I don't know if people are going to gravitate towards it. And I was completely wrong. I was right that traditional games, as we know them on consoles, were never going to translate well to a mobile device. Do you think there was anything you did at Tech TV that you wish other networks would have continued to do, like some aspect of your kind of production or perhaps a take you had on reviews or maybe just like the general zeitgeist of what you were sharing with the audience? In terms of the greater television, I don't know what there's – there were things I wish the gaming press was paying closer attention to, to what we were doing, which was we were – This episode is brought to you by Capital One.

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46:56Trying to popularize it and educate the audience at the same time. So we were, you know, it's that balancing act of do you talk to the hardcore? And a lot of people do believe, and there's good reason for this, that if you talk to the hardcore, you're never going to get any casual people. It's like walking into a room and everyone's talking Latin. Like, you know, if you don't know games and you're suddenly around a bunch of gamers, it's weird and alienating and probably smelly. Whereas if you go really casual, you're never going to have those hardcore. And once again, with that bridge of the comedy, I think that kind of eased both groups in.

47:37And that also meant that we couldn't take ourselves too, too, too seriously. And I think that that's mentally healthier. If you look at video games today, I mean, look, it is a multi-billion dollar industry and stuff, but it's always where the culture wars are being fought. It's very unpleasant, is what I would say. I stay away from all of that stuff now. And I think while there's important things that need to be said through video games, that also abandoning that sense of let's not take ourselves too seriously doesn't get that message across any better than if you don't. I think the other – this was – I don't like tooting my own horn, but I'm going to toot my horn right here.

48:25The one thing that was like kind of my rule for X-Play when we started writing for it is do not write for teenagers. They will come. that I don't recall myself when I was a teenager ever wanting to ingest stuff for teens. I thought I was a small adult, and so I gravitated towards adult content. I think that's the best way that you want to talk to a younger audience, is you write for adults, and they will quickly learn what is going on, because they don't want to be asked to leave the table and go sit at the kids' table again. And that to not patronize your audience, that that's it's just that's that's very true for the Internet.

49:13And I think a lot of TV might have survived if they had paid attention to that. But, you know, the Internet and it's still true now. You go look at TikTok, you look at a campaign like Mom Donnie's. That was I think TikTok played such an important role for that because he comes across as sincere and that he gets the audience. And that's what video these days really is asking of you. Whereas if you're in an old style of presentation, it seems canned, it seems insincere, and you lose your audience immediately. Your experience as a tech TV, I left an indelible mark on you as it did everyone else that worked there.

49:55That's scars, scars, scars. I mean, I've often described it as sort of a second university experience because I went in as a career, but I also learned so much because I was working with a lot of people my age, my peers, people I went to school with. Do you still keep in regular contact with any of those people that you've worked with before, whether it was at ZDTV, TechTV, G4? I mean, it's a lot of the kind of core crew of X-Play that was in San Francisco that made the move down to L.A. One day, I keep on saying I'm going to write the memoir, but Roger, you kind of know that the end of tech TV was unpleasant.

50:44And G4, even for those of us that went there, regarded it as some kind of conquering power. It was like we were the Visigoths and they were the Romans. and it was and trust me G4 did nothing to make us to like dispel that notion they did horrible things it was really was awful and that transplant going down there watching the screensaver people and the unscrewed people get absolutely just jacked made us very tight like we kind of linked arms and we're like somehow we're going to see our way through this very confusing, very unstable and deeply unprofessional experience. And as a result, they just became family to me.

51:31And so I do – and like family, it's not like I'm in touch with them every day, but when I'm in touch with them, we're just starting out from where we left each other. I mean, that's heartwarming. I mean, did you find your G4 experience wildly different than the one you had at Tech TV? Was the atmosphere dramatic shift, dramatic enough where you said, this sort of feels like Kansas, but not really? I would say there were two G4 experiences. There was the initial one, which was under the original leadership of the company, which while owned – I can't remember if it was owned exclusively by Comcast or if there was some kind of strange arrangement.

52:16It was more like a satellite office of other Comcast properties. That was similar to tech TV in which there were no traditional TV rules that we had to work under. And so it was still the transition and the culture of L.A. The minute you're doing television in L.A., everything changes. Like, it's just that all of a sudden I was a very small fish in the biggest pod imaginable. And that you suddenly are trying to make yourself look as big a fish as possible. you don't get any fun of, not Eden, because no one's going to bother with you. But then there was the part where we really became part of Comcast and became part of like real TV.

53:00That ended with the acquisition of NBC, who took over, took one look at us and got rid of us. That was, what came with that was the kind of support suddenly with PR, with marketing and things like that, where suddenly it was a taste of the real thing for all the good and ill that came with that. I would say 80 % ill, but there's 20 % good. It was very, very, very different. That's probably the most indelible mark. It's the one, I'm trying to think of the best way to put it, When you suddenly don't have it, it's that era that I notice.

53:50I'm not getting offered free things at the same rate. And I'm not talking games and money from Microsoft. I mean just walking into bars, walking into restaurants, things like that. Now, when you look back at your entire experience and you compare it to what you've done online through the internet, whether it's been like revision three or whatever. Yeah, yeah. What are the lessons that you've learned that you can say are easily transposable from one to the other? You mentioned earlier, don't talk down to the audience, don't patronize them. Is there an approach? Is there like, you need to be sincere at all times.

54:31You need to be a legitimate, authentic person. When you describe, when you play these games, when you give them to the audience that they can say, yeah, I totally believe you because you're someone I see as my peer. Yeah, there's a lot. And the second half of that, you know, sort of that sincerity and coming across as a real person, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have performance skills. The way that I think it works and the best people who are out there, it's kind of like John Coltrane. you know jazz greats it sounds like John Coltrane is you know for a love supreme is just making it up right there in the spot but that's the art he knows exactly what he's doing for the duration of that performance he knows every note that's about to come but it sounds like it's happening right there in the moment that's what makes it so electric for the audience that's what the best people are doing online and there's very very few of them um you know i play a lot of video games still and i'm old i don't sometimes feel like figuring out like what i'm doing wrong when i'm fighting a boss in an elden ring uh and so i'll go look for a video and i have to turn the the vo off it's just like that that's not how you do it uh you know yes you're being your authentic self but you need to have a more refined, authentic version of yourself.

56:07You need to – not everyone can do it, and you kind of have to have a demented love of language, love of talking, and that kind of weird brain that can synthesize a bunch of things and turn it into a coherent sentence right there. And the person that can balance the two of those, that's the person. Who was the guy that they eventually purchased over at Rev3, that Discovery? Really, really popular YouTuber. Nice guy. Nice guy. Yeah. He was not source-fed. Yeah. I think it was the source-fed guy. I just can't think of his name. But anyway, he is an excellent example of that. and Phil DeFranco. Phil DeFranco.

57:00Excellent, excellent. Anthony Carboni is another one. Just has that quality that is, you know, they are themselves but extra. And that's, I think that we've, well, because the YouTubes and the TikToks of the world, they don't really care about the quality. They care about the quantity because that's what they slap ads against and stop chasing that algorithm for success. That's what knew G4 when they revived it. That's what they were trying to do, and it doesn't really work. I would say if you really want to make it work, you've got to figure out how to be authentic and also be incredibly practiced, incredibly whatever, polished in that moment, as I can't come up with the word.

57:49What are you doing now?

57:56Very little. I do want to write a book. After Rev3, I did the consulting thing for, you know, everyone does that. And then eventually I actually, I founded an AI company that it was not producing AI. This is before the AI everything, but I wanted to, it was kind of my mea culpa to the game industry, where I wanted to figure out if there was a way to aggregate all the conversations that were happening about video games and be able to break them down by topic per game, and then also teach an AI that could actually gauge the sentiment. so many game companies are, and not just game companies but other entities out there are so susceptible to the all caps guys and the organized astroturfing hate mobs and they will change their policies there's something happening right now in games where some adult content is getting pulled from Steam and Itch.io over like one of these mobs yeah, and one of the things is, it's because once they start happening, you can't, your brain goes, if one person is saying it to me, that must mean they represent 100 ,000 people.

59:15And we really don't know that to be a fact. And I wanted to answer that question. And so the AI part was training an AI to understand how people talk about video games, which means a lot of profanity and a lot of profanity that could be a positive or a negative. Also, only within the realm of video games with the term headshot actually denote something good rather than something horrible. And so we had to create a very specific AI that could ingest tons of Twitter, tons of Reddit, and then go, okay, with regard to your game, they're talking about these topics. They think this is really good and this is really bad.

59:51And we did it virtually real time. So we could tell even during a press conference when they were losing the audience and when they had them. did that for a few years as with all companies there was drama but eventually it got purchased and it's allowed me to kind of slow my life down to a crawl where I talk about writing a memoir probably about a lot of the stuff we talked about on this I want to take notes that's a good story for the book I mean you are filled with amazing stories You, along with Scott Harry, have some of the wildest stories I've heard from them. If people wanted to follow you or perhaps just kind of see what you've been doing or follow any of your work, where should they head to?

1:00:43Well, the only social media that I have a presence on – oh, I am a little bit on TikTok. Mainly it's Blue Sky at Adam Sessler. Nothing surprising. I do have some old stuff on Substack. But actually, depending on when you're watching this, I might have some new stuff. I think I'm going to try out some chapters of said memoir on the old substack and see what people do with it. So it's a blog that's called Not Your Monkey. Yeah. I mean, that's – I actually like that title. Adam, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. It's been fun. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, just catching up and just finding out everything you know about that world of kind of doing game coverage from the other side of the camera.

1:01:28And for the rest of you listening, thank you so much for listening. This is it for this episode of Tech TV Scrapbook. I'd like to thank Adam Sussler again for taking the time out of his schedule to be on today's show. If you have any comments, questions, or anything else about today's show, email me at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. And until next time, I'll see you on the next episode of Tech TV Scrapbook.

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