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Cybermania '94: The Ultimate Gamer Awards was the first televised video game awards show. The two-hour show was broadcast on TBS on November 5, 1994. Out of twelve award categories, Mortal Kombat won Best Overall Game.

Format

Cybermania '94 was produced by TBS and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. It was staged in the Universal Amphitheatre and broadcast live on TBS on November 5, 1994. The broadcast ran for two hours with Leslie Nielsen and Jonathan Taylor Thomas as hosts. William Shatner narrated the nominee announcements. Awards in twelve categories were handed out by a range of lesser-known celebrities, interlaced with acts like jugglers and dancers performing to music by Herbie Hancock, as well as comedic bits about the gaming scene. The Best Overall Game, determined via televoting, was Mortal Kombat.

Awards

Reception

The broadcast drew in 1.1% of US households. Journalistic reception was largely negative. Bill Kunkel, writing for Electronic Games, criticized the show for low production value, including missing details for games (such as platform, developer, and publisher), no names for people who collected awards, missed cues, poor writing, and bad performances. He noted that, as a video game journalist, he never "had to endure anything like TBS' horrendous Cybermania '94, the first televised attempt to integrate electronic games and the tired TV award show format". Chris Nashawaty for Entertainment Weekly described the ceremony as "a low-rent whack at the MTV Video Music Awards without the faintest whiff of Oscar's legitimacy". In 2022, Time Extension contacted several of the show's winners, of whom several reported that they had not known the show was televised.

Legacy

Cybermania '94 was the first televised video game awards show. A teenage Geoff Keighley was part of the production as the "interactive products specialist", writing Shatner's narrations. He said that being at an event with the creators behind popular games like Doom and Myst left a big impression on him. Keighley went on to work on the annually hosted award shows of G4 (G-Phoria) and Spike TV (Spike Video Game Awards) until 2013. He then created The Game Awards, which he hosts.

References

1. ^ Martens, Todd (December 5, 2017). "Geoff Keighley's lifelong obsession to create a video game Oscars". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on August 23, 2023. Retrieved August 23, 2023.
2. ^ Yarwood, Jack (December 8, 2022). "Before The Game Awards, There Was Cybermania '94". Time Extension. Archived from the original on August 23, 2023. Retrieved August 23, 2023.
3. ^ Nashawaty, Chris (November 25, 1994). "Cybermania '94: The Ultimate Gamer Awards". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on August 23, 2023. Retrieved August 23, 2023.
4. ^ Kunkel, Bill (January 1995). "The Kunkel Report: TBS & The Sonic Hedgehog". Electronic Games. Vol. 2, no. 11. Decker Publications. p. 144. Retrieved August 24, 2023 – via Internet Archive.

• 1994 television specials
• Video game awards
• TBS (American TV channel) original programming