Gaming History You Should Know – Nick Arcade May 3, 2020

It’s Sunday and that means it’s time for a new look at Gaming History You Should Know! Any child of the 90s who had access to the cable service remembers the channel Nickelodeon. In the early 90s, that station was in the beginning of its reneissance period with the launch of animated shows like Doug, Rugrats and Ren and Stimpy, sitcoms like Salute Your Shorts, Hey Dude, and Welcome Freshmen, and game shows like Double Dare, Guts and the show we are going to be featuring today. Needless to say, when I was growing up, my television was glued on the station.

By the year 1992, the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis was on top of the Console market and Nickelodeon was interested in capturing some of the gaming magic. However, this was Nick, they weren’t satisfied with doing the minimum. Instead of producing a show about upcoming games, they produced a high-tech gaming competition that put the winners inside the virtual world decades before that kind of thing became available to the general public. The show was called Nick Arcade.

I know we’ve featured Nick Arcade in this segment one time before, but that was part of a larger segment that looked at a bunch of gaming-related children’s programming. Today, we’re going to focus only on that show, and we are going to do it from a new perspective. Wrestling with Gaming, developed this incredible documentary about the show.

A bit of a follow up from last week’s article. Did you know that there have apparently been a bunch of video game related theme park rides? This was news to me. Maybe in the future we’ll highlight others. Until then, stay safe out there.