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Cybermania '94: An extremely '90s video game awards show.

Added 2020-12-09 01:54:39 +0000 UTC

It’s that time of the year again. The Game Awards, a show that’s ostensibly about giving awards to the biggest games of the year, peppered with occasional celebrity guest talent and reveals for hot new games. A continuation of the Spike Video Game Awards from years past, it’s been more as a spectacle than a genuine award show.

I really don’t enjoy these shows, especially during the Spike era, where at one point they literally gave an award to the person actually hosting the event. I wrote about some of the more notable moments of the awards show back in 2012 – updated in 2019 – that you can read about here if you wanna see how I felt about them, and how I feel about The Game Awards now.

So instead, I’m gonna head back into the past. To look into the days when video games were still considered a technical marvel and not a billion-dollar industry. An awards show that was an embodiment of the 1990s: Cybermania ‘94.

(yep, this is totally '90s as hell, alright. I mean, when you get pop artist Peter Max to do it, what do you expect?)

Airing on TBS in late 1994 (natch) and filmed at Universal Studios Hollywood, this award show was the prototype to the future Spike VGAs and Game Awards. In 1994, video games were starting to gain more traction in the United States, especially in the era of 3D graphics and full motion video. We were at the peak of the multimedia trend of the mid-90s at this point, and it shows.

(it's like they went "who are the two most affordable and oddball actors we can afford here?")

Our hosts for this event are actors Leslie Nielsen and Jonathan Taylor Thomas. A rather bizarre combo to be sure, which was probably bolstered on the difference of age between the two actors.

Both of them were still fairly popular – Nielsen had recently starred in The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, and JTT was on one of the biggest sitcoms of the ‘90s, Home Improvement– but the two couldn’t be a worse choice. Nielsen’s age means he’s clumsily talking about future technology as if he’s impersonating Phil Donahue like in The Naked Gun 33 1/3, and Taylor Thomas has the problem of just being awkward and inexperienced next to Nielsen. Granted, it’s probably better than David Spade or Joel McHale, but not by much.

(Can this style make a comeback, please?)

We start Cybermania ‘94 with The Gate to the Mind’s Eye, the third in a series of computer-generated videos that were fairly popular in the late 80s and early 90s. Afterwards, the show starts in earnest with Nielsen and Taylor Thomas standing in front of a computer as a Hillary Clinton impersonator tries to turn it on, Nielsen realizing it’s not plugged in, plugging in the power and having the computer explode in front of the “first lady of the United States,” giving her a cartoonish explosive face. This intro segment is a strong indicator of what the show has to offer.

(I mean, this is neat and all, but isn't this meant to be about video games?)

In-between award segments, there’s a handful of moments throughout the special called “Cyberstories” that highlight a lot of the future technology that was being featured in everything from video games to film. This seems a bit out of place, considering Cybermania is structured to be a video game awards show. Cutting away to interviews about the computer graphics for The Mask seem a bit awkward.

(Hope this dude went into the witness protection program after the broadcast.)

This is more apparent in one of the Cyberstories, as they cut away to talk about hacker culture, where a bunch of hacker dudes under online pseudonyms such as “Emmanuel Goldstein” and “Dr. Who” talk a bit about the whole hacker scene, which seems rather out of place compared to the rest of the show.

It’s like the show’s producer wanted this event to be about all of the technology, even if it didn’t fit in context with the rest of the show. This is probably the low point of the whole broadcast, and not surprisingly, it’s at the halfway point.

(Shawn Thompson tried to make a joke here about NBA Jam getting sequels like "NHL Marmalade." No wonder The Newz has been mostly forgotten, if that's the kind of humor that was on offer.)

Throughout Cybermania ‘94, there’s occasional bits to where they cut to somewhere on location and do something tangentially related to video games with bystanders either play games or mug towards the camera.

The first one of these had actor Shawn Thompson of the short-lived sketch comedy show The Newz talking with random kids about Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam while occasionally giving cheat codes. Another one involved a SimCity LAN match between Santa Barbara mayor Hal Conklin and noted child prodigy Michael Kearney. One last segment had Andie Karvalis ask random kids what they thought who would win this year’s Best Game.

(I mean, this is probably better than his starring role in Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard...)

One of the bigger surprises was seeing a relatively unknown Will Arnett among a bunch of gamers in Paramus, NJ as he shouted out hot tips for Double Dragon V, the forgotten and pretty bad fighting game. I doubt he made a huge mistake appearing on this, but he must’ve had some connections because Arnett was pretty much a nobody by the time this special aired. At least he had more claims to fame compared to Andie Karvalis.

(Shelley Duvall's here? Sure, why not)

Speaking of celebrity talent, there’s a relative who’s-who of ‘90s stars here: Hilary Swank, Matthew Perry, Lark Voorhies, Rene Auberjonois. At one point, they have wrestlers William Regal (here as “Lord Steven Regal”) and Brian Pillman to do a bit where they wrestle on stage to advertise WCW Superbrawl. Even Charles Fleischer, the voice of Roger Rabbit, presents an award. Granted, he’s doing a really bad comedy routine about dirty jokes in binary before presenting Best Comedy Game. I expected there would be some amount of star power with this event, but who they did get is rather impressive.

(It's as if the producers asked him to basically pretend he's Frank Drebin throughout. He did do more than that, guys.)

The rest of the event is fairly straightforward: It often starts with a gag with either Nielsen or Taylor Thomas, an award with guests from your favorite 1990s TV shows and movies, and either remote segments giving random cheat codes or the aforementioned Cyberstories.

Since the show was taped at Universal Studios Hollywood, they naturally get in a few references to Universal properties throughout, such as a segment where Nielsen basically turns into Frank Drebin from The Naked Gun, meets a guy dressed like Doc Brown in Back to the Future Part II and eventually gets into a gunfight on the now-defunct Wild Wild Wild West Stunt Show, all set to a spy theme that’s supposed to sound like the theme to The Naked Gun. It’s a bit out of place, and really stops the show dead in its tracks, especially since Taylor Thomas then randomly gives cheat codes to Mortal Kombat II on the SNES afterwards.

(That awful CD-i golf game starring Eugene Levy was up for an award. I guess "strooooke limit" is sorta funny?)

As for the awards themselves, well.. they’re a bit all over the place. There’s a category for “Best action-adventure” and has some of the notables you’d expect like Doom, yet oddly there’s FMV games like Critical Path and, even stranger, Super Street Fighter II.

There’s a lot of particularly bizarre games nominated for awards, and even times where there’s an award for “Best Handheld Game,” but footage from their console versions are used instead. Indeed, some of the awards combine educational multimedia affairs with actual games, which doesn’t really make sense. It’s kinda hard to take your award show seriously when you can’t keep things like that straight, y’know.

(I will say that them using Apple Newtons as the envelopes for this is a nice touch, even though the Newton was a massive flop.)

Since this was made in the early days of the internet, naturally Cybermania ‘94 talks about the internet multiple times, and one of the awards could be voted on if you had Prodigy, one of the biggest ISPs of the time. If you didn’t, you could spend a few bucks voting on them via 1-900 numbers instead.

(To think these days all those ISPs that existed in the mid-to-late '90s are all gone. Even AOL.)

There was even moments where some of the celebrity guests could talk on Prodigy during the event, which was pretty neat. As someone who had Prodigy for about a month before switching to America Online, I remember these kind of live chats during TV broadcasts. Nowadays we'd just do it all through Twitch.

(not the biggest get for musical act, but it's better than Aerosmith, who just got the bassist to do a video thanking them for being recognized by the event.)

Naturally, it isn’t an award show without a musical number, and we get an electronic tune from Herbie Hancock, complete with such 90s video effects. Naturally he presents the Best Musical Game award, which features a lot of ‘90s interactive games featuring notable musicians like Peter Gabriel and Prince. Honestly, those games deserve to be talked about more, there’s not enough coverage of that multimedia boom of the mid ‘90s.

(Only in the '90s. I kinda miss this stuff.)

Cybermania ‘94 as a whole just screams early-to-mid ‘90s in terms of its production. Dutch angles, frequent color changes, occasional video effects like dithering and slow motion, to even random out-of-context clips from movies peppered in for flavor. As someone who grew up during this period, seeing this gives me a blast of nostalgia that I didn’t know I even wanted. I’m honestly amazed this didn’t make a comeback in the last decade, it just seems like a good time as any to go back to those days of ridiculous, superfluous video production.

After finishing the results of the SimCity match, we finally get the award for Best Game as voted by Prodigy members and 1-900 callers. Roll credits. That’s Cybermania ‘94 in a nutshell: Lots of sketches that don’t really land, awards that don’t make a lot of sense, occasional cheat codes that seem out of place, and random stuff about technology while gawking at computer-generated movies. In a sense, it feels no different than the other video game award shows I’ve seen. The more things change, the more they stay the same, basically.

(Oh, and this event was sponsored by the Double Dragon movie, which I heard is pretty bad. I mean, unless you wanna see Robert Patrick in something that’s not Terminator 2, or see a pre-Iron Chef America Mark Decascos kick butt.)

Despite some of the bad sketches and questionable awards,I found Cybermania ‘94 to be a nice blast from the past. It’s a dumb little show that I’m glad that it existed. Certainly more enjoyable than the pageantry of the current Game Awards, that’s for certain.

If you wanna watch the thing yourself, the entirety of Cybermania ‘94 is up on YouTube for the time being, courtesy of LearntoCounter, recorded from a repeat broadcast from later that evening. It’s definitely worth watching, just to see how unabashedly ‘90s it all is. I know it’s the 2020s and nostalgia cycles usually only go back about two decades, but I want the ‘90s video aesthetic of weird angles and oddball video effects to make a comeback, damn it.

As far as I know, despite them proudly saying this is the “first year,” I’m pretty sure there was no Cybermania ‘95, at least of what I could find online. It wouldn’t be until the Spike VGAs and Gfouria a few years later did video game award shows appear on TV again. While it’s not an amazing show, Cybermania has a charm that the current game award shows just don’t have. I’ll take 100 Cybermania events over another Game Awards where Josef Fares embarrasses himself, honestly. At least Geoff Keighley didn’t have his hands on this o-

(THERE HE IS AGAIN)

Wait, he did. God damn it, is Geoff Keighley involved in every god damn video game awards show?!

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Since Cybermania doesn’t have a Wikipedia article, here’s a list of the awards and their respective winners if you’re curious. Otherwise you can it watch it yourself if you wanna find out without spoiling them. I’m not gonna stop you either way. Winners are in bold.

Best Action-Adventure

Doom
Megarace
Return to Zork
Jump Raven
Critical Path
Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers
Tomcat Alley
Super Metroid

Best CD-ROM Game

Myst
The 7th Guest
Megarace
Return to Zork
Escape from Cyber City

Best Portable Game

Disney’s Aladdin
Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3
Home Alone
Donkey Kong ‘94
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

(Note: For Aladdin and Home Alone, they used footage of the SNES versions, rather than the Game Boy/Game Gear versions. Members of Sega go up to accept the award, despite the footage came from the SNES version, which was developed by Capcom. This was more of a mess than the narrator confusing Wario with Mario in his description of Wario Land.)