2024 is the year that Classic Game Room celebrates its 25th anniversary.
Well, it’s more accurate to say that twenty five years ago, Classic Game Room was born… to say that there is any celebrating of the occasion would be a bit of a fib… at least, on the part of Classic Game Room.
For what it’s worth, Mark Bussler – host and creator of CGR – is still around. He still has a CGR website that still talks about CGR and showcases CGR content. But he’s more focused on this music-making and publishing ventures, which make more money than the CGR videos do… fair enough from a business standpoint… but still sad to see in the long term.
I’ve been wanting to do a thing on CGR’s 25th anniversary… and truth be told, I had started on this a while back after having watched the CGR 20th anniversary video release that seldom few people know about because it’s a paid collection of CGR reviews – some of which may or may not have made it to the CGR Forever streams that were a thing for a while. I actually started writing this piece earlier this year, with the intent of finishing it and posting it last month. Other stuff came up and this was ultimately forgotten about, but I suddenly remembered that this was a thing and… well, I have thoughts on Classic Game Room, the journey of the show, my enjoyment of it, and well… other such things like possible futures or lack thereof.
Needless to say, I’m going to bounce around all over the place in this supposed narrative. I’m also going to be quite salty in some regards, which may result in some choice words being used that I would otherwise refrain from using. If you don’t mind any of that stuff… well, do dive in.
1999 saw the debut of the Game Room, one of the earliest video game review shows on the Internets. It ran for about a year before the dot-com bubble burst and their host sight, From USA Live, went out of business and killed the Game Room. Years later, Game Room host turned DVD documentary filmmaker Mark Bussler reposts a few Game Room shows on Youtube, which are well received enough to encourage Bussler to get back on the saddle with a new version of the show dubbed Classic Game Room HD, the HD standing for Heavy Duty. The show gained popularity due to Bussler’s dry humor and more journalistic approach to game reviews, which served as a stark contrast to the plethora of gimmicky angry reviewer types that dominated the airwaves at the time.
Eventually, the show got popular enough that Bussler moved operations to a much bigger building, brought in more people to run the spin off channel, CGR Undertow. As the operation got bigger, so did the issues. Whether it’d be dealing with Youtube’s often faulty Content ID issues due to videos being taken down as well as videos being stolen outright, Classic Game Room began to suffer. The quality of content began to stagnant or regress, there were attempts to leave Youtube that would later be aborted, there was the pushing of Bussler’s other projects – comic books, t-shirt lines, and other things. All of these were shots that threatened to take down the once revered Classic Game Room channel.
Then came the move to Patreon, where video content was hidden behind a paywall to a less than thrilled reaction. Even less well received was the retooling of the show to Classic Game Room 2085, which would be hosted for a time on Amazon Prime as part of the subscription service. All of this culminated in Bussler’s last attempt at making CGR a thing with CGR Infinity before he decided to abandon video production altogether and go into book publishing and music making… but not before releasing one final set of reviews to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Classic Game Room.
What I’ve just stated is a very abbreviated history of Classic Game Room, just to get you up to speed since that’s not the focus of today’s post. But if you want to dig a little deeper, there’s an excellent near-hour-long video by Xenon Xyanide that does a far better job of covering the whole rise and fall better than I ever could, so here’s the link to watch that if you haven’t already.
Like most people, my first encounter with Classic Game Room (the series, I mean – never met or spoken with the guy) was in the late-2000s, when the show had seen a revival under the Classic Game Room HD banner. The channel had been uploading not only vintage episodes of the old Game Room run from 1999-2000, which had their own special charm that people liked, but Mark was doing fresh new reviews. This was more subdued Mark and less zany Mark that you’d get in the later years, but the wit was still there. Believe it or not, the less zany, more subdued “monotone” Mark reviews were actually my favorite of the bunch. Don’t get me wrong; I like most of the CGR stuff – even the recent stuff – but Mark with the somewhat professional sounding, smooth-toned voiceover resonated with me a bit. It lifted my spirits a bit – seeing something that was different from the usual gaming dreck that was popping up around that time.
To give you folks further context, the late 2000s was when you had the whole angry reviewer cycle in full swing. It seemed like every new review show that popped up wanted to be the next Angry Nintendo Nerd or whatever the case may be, and so you had derivatives and knockoffs of that general format. Some were good, others were not, most are pretty much forgotten by this point, but all pretty much got their inspiration from the same source. As someone who had considered doing the video thing for a while, part of me wondered if this is the route I needed to take – to be fake angry at old games and pretend to be a moron playing these things because that seemed to be the way to go. And it wasn’t just games, either. You had guys like Doug Walker popping up and doing the same thing, but with movies. It painted a pretty grim picture to anyone who just wanted to make videos talking about old games without needing a gimmick or going in a certain slant that ran against their own feelings on the matter.
And yet, here was Classic Game Room HD. Fancy equipment behind the wheel, higher end production values, the man having been a seasoned producer of numerous documentaries, but the style of review that he presented – calm, soothing, sincere – talking about these older games like cherished memories, speaking of their value today in terms of enjoyment, celebrating the good old days rather than crap on them for the sake of online entertainment. He wasn’t loud, obnoxious, or playing a gimmick. He was just being himself. And I believed him. And this thing ended up getting some legs, which opened my eyes a bit… because it showed that you didn’t need to be a gimmick to have a place online. Sometimes, it’s okay to just be yourself.
So yes, I can safely say that Classic Game Room was the thing that pushed me to finally do video stuff. Success is another story, but it’s a thing that I enjoy doing and fills a void of sorts… but that’s not the point of this whole spiel that I started on a couple years ago and seemingly abandoned until just a few short days ago.
What initially started this write-up a couple years ago was my purchasing of the CGR 20th anniversary special, which is a compilation of new Classic Game Room video reviews – some of which have been spotlighted in the brief instance CGR did their Forever Streams. This doesn’t have any bleeping, so you get all the flavor of an uncensored Classic Game Room. The review content itself is consistent with latter-day Classic Game Room reviews, but does not have an overlapping narrative like some of his feature-length reviews for things like MUSHA and Herzog Zwei. They’re just a collection of seemingly random reviews on a bunch of random stuff that builds up to the eventual main event – a review of the Pac-Man Plus arcade machine, which has been dubbed REDACTED on the playlist of the purchase page. For anyone hoping for something more than that, you’ll be disappointed, but for those wanting more Classic Game Room, this collection was pretty much business as usual. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But what was significant about this set was that, for the longest time, this would be the final set of Classic Game Room reviews that would ever be produced, as Mark shifted his business ventures towards publishing and music, which proved to be bigger successes for his fortunes. What would be the final epitaph of a long-running internet review show loved by many would be held behind a paywall that not as many people would get to see… and that’s not even counting the occasional updates to his Patreon page that I tried once or twice and found to be not quite worth the effort. Maybe I expect more when I’m paying for stuff instead of just more of the same. Maybe I was hoping that behind all the bitter contempt at modern social media, a spark of the old Mark could be found… but that proved to not be the case.
So I was content in merely watching his old videos. I remain subscribed to his old CGR channel even when it underwent a million different name changes – it was the easiest way to watch the videos from the Youtube app on non-computer devices. I kept the subscription when the channel was nothing but spam for t-shirt designs I’d never buy – I’m more plain in my clothing choices. And then some time later year, I see a random upload of a Ninja Golf review that I thought… maybe it’s an old review we haven’t seen before, but no… turns out it’s a new review made that year.
Bless that Atari 50 collection… not only is it a fine document of Atari’s history, but it also spark interest in Mark to give this Classic Game Room thing another shot in video form. It truly is the greatest creation of the modern Atari.
There were a handful of new videos here and there… but there were also Best Of Compilations, including stuff that’s been seen before and also stuff that’s only been featured in stuff like the CGR Feature Reviews or CGR 20th compilations – stuff you can otherwise purchase from the website. And then when 2024 rolled around, we got Classic Game Room 2085 Season 2. It was the return of Classic Game Room that everyone was clamoring for… until it wasn’t. Once again, low view counts forced Mark to reconsider the project and redirect towards podcasts before he decided to go back his Omega Ronin music project, which is apparently making him some dough, so good job on that.
And so here we are. Classic Game Room turns 25 in November and apparently, there may or may not be something special planned for the occasion. What that actually entails… who knows at this point? I’m keeping my expectations somewhat low based on past trends. What I do know, however, is that whatever comes of it, it will be a day to be cherished in some form or fashion. Whether new content comes of it or not, Classic Game Room will always be one of the greats to me. It’s a show that I go back to every so often – and given how many internet shows I’ve seen over the years, the number of those I revisit these days are very low – and it’s a show that still holds up after all this time. It’s still the show about celebrating the classics of yesteryear and in that regard, it still holds up as one of the best.
So here’s to 25 years of CGR. And hopefully many more to come.
dtm666 