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Ask the AV Club -- Part II

Another week, another question answered in the one and only Ask the AV Club section. I asked fellow gamer and former Houstonian Kyle about this show, but it didn't ring any bells. So, I pitched the question to his fellow co-workers.

Back in the early '90s, there was a game show centered on video games. I remember a lot about it except its name. The bulk of the show had three rounds of trivia questions and answers. The final round had the two finalists square off playing the same video game. The host looked very similar to Billie Joe Armstrong, and knew a lot about video games. As a matter of fact, there was a segment where members of the audience tried to stump him. He rarely was stumped. Does this ring any bells?

Eric

The A.V. Club's Donna Bowman isn't stumped, either:

Ah, television. Is there any cultural movement that you can't attempt to co-opt and turn into a painfully square half-hour? (Current example: Shows on 24-hour news networks about blogs.)

You've flashed back to Video Power, a syndicated game show that premiered in 1990 and ran for almost two years. According to The Encyclopedia Of TV Game Shows, the show pitted four pre-adolescents against each other in rounds of arcade competition and questions about video games. The bonus round for the winner was a kind of Supermarket Sweep affair, where the contestant had 30 seconds to pile as many games in his cart as possible; if he grabbed the secret game, he got a special prize.

And yes, there was a "stump the host" segment at the show's opening, where host Stivi Paskoski (using the nom-de-game "Johnny Arcade") demonstrated his mastery of video-game trivia. And yes, Eric, a bigger Stivi Paskoski fan than yourself has already snapped up stivipaskoski.com and used it to list the actor's many small roles on Law & Order.

Comments

donnadb said…
Hey, glad I could help! I highly recommend the reference work I used to find this answer, The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows. Reference books rule! Thanks for reading the site and participating in the fun and games.

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