The Show Where Nobody Pretended Not to Care

GIGA was a German gaming TV channel—imagine a local answer to G4, but with forum arguments running in a sidebar while hosts murdered controllers on camera—and for a certain kind of teenager it occupied the same psychological territory as a second home. You watched six-hour specials about Warcraft III that you didn’t even fully care about. You contributed forum takes about why Lara Croft had sold out and why Goombas possessed more genuine soul than their armored counterparts. The social contacts you avoided were the ones that would have cut into this time. The tradeoff felt obviously correct.

When GIGA shut down, the grief was outsized and entirely sincere. That feeling of watching something you love collapse and take a chunk of your identity with it—you know it’s coming, it doesn’t help. Where do you go now for a six-hour retrospective on a Tuesday? What happens to the forum war between n00bWARRIOR and IlseKannNilse when the server goes dark? The answer is that it ends, and something you thought was permanent turns out to have been temporary the whole time, which is genuinely one of the worst feelings there is.

Then Game One arrived on MTV Germany and brought Budi and Simon back, and a handful of the old familiar faces alongside them—Nils, Eddy, Etienne—with the same energy GIGA had, now running on better equipment. The charm that used to come in GIGA’s signature green was still intact. Sitting there watching them play badly at things, argue about games, curse at each other with the ease of people who’ve been in the same room for years, you get something that TV gaming shows almost never manage: the feeling of being surrounded by your people. Nobody here is deploying ironic distance. Nobody is performing cool. They care. You care. That’s the whole thing.

I don’t know what it says about me that a gaming channel was where I felt most at home as a teenager. Actually I do know, and I’m fine with it.