Who was the first gamer?

He won every tournament he attended over a five-year period, a feat that earned him the nickname “the Michael Jordan of the video game world”. Zot the Avenger is in his own world. On screen, the 12-year-old boy with long hair behaves like a cheeky, slightly clumsy teenager, wearing an upside-down baseball cap and a loose-fitting t-shirt. Zot, with a consistent and practiced cadence and a carefully cultivated air of confidence, is here to talk to you about fighting games on their show, video games and more.

The games are projected on a screen behind it, which includes the revealing blur of a camera pointing at a CRT television. While launching Street Fighter II as Balrog, he receives his first live call with a thick beige corded phone. Video Games and More was born in 1993, long before the idea of the Internet as a utility became widespread. My main hopes with video games and much more were to go on the air and say, “Hey guys, I've been doing something that's really cool, and I think there are other people who could enjoy it and who might not know it, and I'm going to tell you about it,” he explains.

The first two episodes of Video Games and More were shot in a cafe across the street from the television station, where there was a live broadcast that people could use. Styles now describes them as a kind of prequel to the 37-episode series. I think it was at the end of '93, because that was more or less when the Buffalo Bills were playing the Cowboys in the Superbowl, he reflects (it was close to Super Bowl XXVII it was January 31, 1999). But when we did the studio show for the first time, we played EA Sports NHL '93 for Sega Genesis and Mortal Kombat Genesis, and I talk badly all the time.

The voluntary target of that talk was his friend Jason Kingman. I was working on her show, directing it, and I said, “Look, you have to help me co-host my show, because I don't want to do it alone,” Styles recalls. It's too much pressure for a 12-year-old child. The great power of Zot also came with great responsibility, since there were still rules on public access, even though the FCC didn't do much about indecency and profanity on cable television.

Thanks to adult games like Mortal Kombat, video games from the 90s were a much discussed topic. Even though he was still a small child, he was still a producer, Styles says. And I could be held responsible for anything I post. It describes another local producer, Lou Perfidio, a shock athlete who called himself the Great Satan.

Perfidio allowed parts of the bodies of women with live piercings to air and committed the biggest sin of drinking alcohol on his show. The program was quickly ejected from the air. In past lives, Alexis has been a music journalist, owner of a West Hollywood gym and professional television observer. You can find his work on other sites such as The Verge, The Washington Post, Eurogamer and Tor.