This old story came up in a conversation recently, and after a bit of investigation I discovered I apparently never told it here. That surprises me a little, but, what better time to correct the oversight?

So... gosh... 20 years ago, I lived in California, and one day I was watching a lame gee-whiz-the-future-is-approaching program on cable. This is a genre that seems mostly to have disappeared now, but was really common in the '90s; I think the former parent company of Mythbusters, Beyond Television, is called that because it originally made a show of that kind called Beyond 2000. Anyway. The show I was watching was not Beyond 2000, it was a competing (and somewhat worse) product called c|net central, because media people in the '90s had a complex relationship with capital letters. Why I was watching it, I'm no longer sure. Possibly it was just that the only other person I knew in California was busy that day.

Anyway, the segment I was watching was about multiplayer computer gaming. In early 1997, this consisted of staying at work after hours and using the LAN to play Quake deathmatches. So the chipper young anchor person—it might even have been a young Ryan Seacrest—was talking about people staying at work after hours and using the LAN to play Quake deathmatches, and the accompanying video was captured footage from, you gussed it, a Quake deathmatch.

And evidently no one at c|net had actually watched the footage at any point before it went onto the air, because after a few seconds one of the players got a kill, and across the top of the screen the system message MEATBEATER FRAGGED FUCKMONGER popped up. I may have spat a beverage at this point.

Basic cable, middle of the afternoon. Top job, guys!

c|net central is not on the air any more. I'm not pointing to a causal relationship here. I'm just mentioning it. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.