In the early 80s, when I was just a little Gen-X gamer, I was excited to see a new game show that had started in syndication. It was called Starcade, and it was just what an arcade gaming fan like me was looking for. Parts were structured like a basic trivia game show, where the host would ask a question and one of the two players would buzz in to answer. The more important parts of the game show centered around the five featured arcade games for the day. Each player would accumulate as many points as they could in the games over the course of the three rounds. The winner would advance to the bonus round, where they would attempt to beat a high score within a limited time. If they could, they won the big prize, which quite often was a full-sized arcade machine. It was a daytime game show designed to speak to kids like me.
Nick Arcade Title
Shortly after I started college, the kids’ cable network Nickelodeon premiered a game with a similar premise. Called Nick Arcade, the game was the perfect melding of the “kids game show” aesthetic that Nickelodeon had established with games like Double Dare, Finders Keepers, and Get the Picture, and the home arcade scene, which had moved into fourth-generation systems. It really seemed like a worthy successor to the classic Starcade game show, with a modern (for the time) twist. Needless to say, even though I was a few years older than the target audience at that point, I was hooked from day one.
Two teams of two players each competed during the game. Each round started with a face-off game, a simple two-player video game in which each player attempted to achieve the highest score within 30 seconds. The first season featured a variety of pong-style and shooting-gallery games, while the second season mixed in a side-scrolling racing game, with players on foot, on ATVs, or on jet skis. The winner’s team was given control of the game board. This was an overview map split into squares. The players controlled “Mikey”, a mascot-style character, usually dressed in an outfit that reflected the map’s location (a neighborhood, an alien planet, the Old West, etc.). Landing on a square would reveal what was underneath. They would fall into one of three categories: Points, Puzzles, or Prizes (as host Phil Moore would state at the beginning of the game). The squares could also reveal the enemy on the map, causing the team to lose its turn. Or they could reveal a Video Challenge.
Nick Arcade Games
This was one of the two core draws for the show. The team that triggered the Video Challenge would move over to a section of the studio with a number of home console games set up. The games would change from time to time, with a number of them being recently released titles. While there were always SNES and Genesis games, other options often included the TurboGrafx-16, the Neo Geo AES, and even the original 8-bit NES. The team would choose one player to play the game. The other would write down how many of their existing points they were willing to risk on the outcome of the challenge. It was up to the player to successfully complete the challenge in 30 seconds. Quite often, the players would be dropped into a later level of the game, so even if they were familiar with the game, they may still be playing something they hadn’t played before. If the player beats the challenge, the team gets the points risked. If they lose the challenge, they lose those points from their current score.
After two rounds of gameplay, the team with the most points moves on to face the Game Wizard for the day in The Video Zone. This was the other core draw for the game. The Video Zone actually placed players inside the video game using a combination of blue-screen technology and technology developed for the gameshow. It consisted of three levels that had to be completed within 60 seconds. Each of the first two levels was played by a single player from the team. These were usually some sort of flying or driving side-scrolling level, with the player staying stationary as the background, enemies, and items to collect came at them. They would generally have to jump and duck things coming at them. Assuming they complete their levels before the time expires, both players would then move on to the final level to face the Game Wizard.
Nick Arcade Final Level
The boss characters were Merlock, Scorchia, and Mongo. While each Game Wizard did have a unique design for their final level, the method for beating them was essentially the same. The players would have to climb up and down ladders, avoid traps and projectiles from the boss, and attempt to touch four floating orbs on the screen. If they managed to do so within the 60 seconds, they would win the grand prize.
The Video Zone levels were a particular challenge, not only physically for the competitors but also because they couldn’t directly see what they were doing. Sort of like the weatherman with the green screen has to look at a separate monitor to know what he’s pointing at on the map, the kids had to look at monitors on the set to see what they were interacting with on screen. While most would quickly get the hang of it, some kids just couldn’t translate it, and you could see the frustration.
Nick Arcade ran for two seasons and 84 episodes on Nickelodeon. After its cancellation, it played in reruns on the channel for many years, and moved to Nick GAS in 1999, where it stayed until 2007, when the channel was retired.
Nick Arcade Face-Off
It is interesting to note that major publishers like Capcom, Sega, SNK, and Nintendo had their products shown side by side, in direct competition, in a manner that would never fly in the corporate world today. Modern video game companies hold a tight rein over how their products relate to competitors’ products. On Nick Arcade, they took a much looser view of this. The way the show was set up meant that, although the same games would appear on multiple episodes, a particular game might go for many episodes before it was ever played, if at all. There were no corporate mandates for a certain amount of screen time for their games.
The production is also interesting given its use of the Commodore Amiga computer system. Video Toaster-equipped Amigas had become embedded in the production workflow at Nickelodeon Studios by that time, with their use in many programs. The face-off games at the beginning of each round were played on an Amiga. In the second season, some of the face-off games were actually developed by popular Amiga publisher Psygnosis. The Amiga was also used for the Video Zone. The graphics were generated on an Amiga, and a specialized Amiga was used for hit detection for each human player. As a huge Amiga fan, I found this a fun behind-the-scenes tidbit.
Though it’s long since disappeared from broadcast, episodes can be purchased on Amazon Prime Video, and if you look hard enough, you can find episodes on YouTube and Internet Archive. Give it a watch. It’s a great window into the state of gaming in the early 90s.
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