Man, computers were so simple when I was a kid. Windows XP cd free from an uncle. Games from that heavy-smoker guy that listens to Breaking Benjamin. Plug in a sound card, now you have sound. Turn on the monitor, now you have an image (donāt keep the speakers too close). Get an internet card, Romtelecom isnāt available in your area, try again later.
And later, arrived it didā¦
In the the beginning, there were web-loggers. They were particularly valuable in non-english countries, because they were translating the headlines too. Here in Romania, there was ZonaIT.
Not the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. thing, but itās still in Eastern Europe.
By 2006, the little weblog grew into a weekly gaming&tech TV show, Zon@ it. Fast paced, always in a rush and ending every review with āfind the full review on the websiteā. (It seemed abandoned, at the time.) Eventually I found their old reviews and Top 7 videos on youtube in 2012-ish, they had Iām Shipping Up To Boston - Dropkick Murphys as their intro. Iād link those, but theyāre now set to private. Iāve found a few fan recordings, and you can hear the music in the āTop 5 disastrous game launches the bible mentioned in the Apocalypseā section below, at 13:05. But before thatā¦
Roll that intro!
Retrospectives are nice and all, but Rossās Game Dungeon wonāt tell you about how Hellgate London used to charge people multiple times and sometimes log you into another personās account. Also, Iām always happy to see old media showing nothing but scorn for always-online DRM and personal data tracking. It doesnāt even really feel like nostalgia, it just feels right, along with seeing light, fast, arcade games on mobileā¦ on a phone with no SD card or audio jack. The more things changeā¦ the less surprising it is to hear from the guys who lay tiles and wooden floors talk about SEO.
I picked a more recent episode because itās uncut and has the intro in HD.
Now bear with me as I try to review a review show. So, it was structured a bit like LTT, as in there were different people behind the scenes doing the various segments, with the host voicing the final script. Itās not unusual for him to say āIāll let Andrei talk about thatā then the same guy keeps talking lol. Andrei Ene was writing fast and with contempt for the industry ~and grammar~, a bit like Zero Punctuation but with OutOfTen scores for the individual headings of a review. This was the most controversial section among the audienceā¦ grading down Just Cause 2 for having a bad story or Battlefield for campaign woes. For my taste, these are the most ātimelessā parts of the show, easily accessible on their YouTube channel until a couple years ago. The Lab501 team was handling hardware and getting medals in overclocking competitions. They had researchers from Kaspersky to talk security, Microsoft reps for the business and servers stuff, and I forgot who was on photo/video.
A while ago there were rumors about the national TV station hiring for a new IT&C Show, and the reactions were generally āWho is this for?ā
Me. Itās for me. For the people that only got a small taste of the web through Java Feature-phones or by carrying boxen up the stairs when a cousin went abroad. For the villages that donāt have internet, and for the people that need to hear that somewhere, out there, beyond the clouds of barbecue smoke and manele, thereās cool nu-metal and electronic music. Soā¦ for time travelers? None of that has been the case for over 15 years at this point. Iām a bit nostalgic about it, mākay. They were the only ones showing āthe mainstreamā that a dirty word like āgamesā meant interactive art and not gambling. (oh how I wish that was still the case, between then and now gambling has infested both gaming and every street corner in this country. In retaliation, the gambling dens got infested by school children).
I think I also caught on TV something from G4TV, it was shown on MTV IIRC. Beyond those 2, anything gaming on TV was glossed over as fast as possible, maybe with the sales numbers for āThe Creed of the Assassinsā mentioned once a year. Big event if there was a Need for Speed ad on Eurosport.
COD montage on national TV, to announce a tournament. 2008 is still in the future istg
Or, more appropriately for what everyone was actually playing, a Counter strike 1.6 montage
2008 was definitely in the future. Holy shit I want those today, especially that folding e-ink thing.
So old good, new bad?
Vampires in Jeans.
Old bad. Or, at least, it got worse as it got older. For the game reviews, one thing that didnāt age well is the āplot analysisā that spelt out the basic premise followed invariably by ābut I donāt want to spoil it :^)ā. Sometimes some insults towards a few characters, but looking back now, after years of hours-long literary video essays, it was a bit of a nothing-burger. One thing I still miss is their flowery translations of English expressions, John becomes Ionescu, killing enemies becomes availabilisation/redundancy/lead poisoning. Jack gets a Beanstalk, and idle NPCs eat sunflower seeds. Imagine my sadness to learn that by the end, they were reprimanding writers for using āfancyā words. Alienating the audience my ass, the writing used to be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious 
More woes were the marketing. The show had weird ads, the network kept changing the airing hours and channels. The timing of their more involved retrospectives was pretty bad. I didnāt have an issue with the host, but Iāve heard complaints.
The tv host from way-back-when is still active on the showās youtube channel, but it is treated as a more ānormalā tech-tuber channel with personal rants, no links to TV left. (oh wow, they even changed the permalink to his name). They started a new gaming channel too, Playground, that I had forgot about until writing this. It seems āfineā, nothing special, they speak clichĆ©-filled romglish just like everybody else nowadays. Let me clarify, I donāt complain about that out of nationalism, but because the translation of tech terms into expressions that my ānormieā compatriots could understand is valuable work that nobody else does. Good luck explaining to your uncle what blockchain-based cloud live service means, on the spot, in a foreign language. They do tech reviews on that channel too, so idk what was the point, maybe to experiment with new hosts? Or to shed down dead subscribers.
Later on, the website āhad associationsā with bootleggy peripherals brands. In more recent years, it was the biggest IT news site left, with writers from pretty much every other site doing ~6-12 months of work before moving on. Tech journalism that meant hiding how Lenovo knowingly sold servers with ā1234ā as password to the government, only to praise Lenovo 6 months later for fixing the issue quickly.
By the end, it was nothing but Google-translated foreign articles, poetically returning to how it all started. Hmm, I talk like it closed down or something. No, itās still there, and theyāre getting better, theyāre sending reporters to big conferences again. Information is a living thing, thatās why people become teachers, not librarians. But I havenāt checked it daily since I started high-school.
Extra pictures and links
windows 7 was supposed to have the middle dock taskbar
thumbnails never change.
Channels that still have old recordings: https://www.youtube.com/@TvManiak88/videos 2008; https://www.youtube.com/@ArealTV/videos; https://www.youtube.com/@BlueMaxBaiaMare/videos; https://www.youtube.com/@nicodan75
https://youtu.be/JfxTy8SaOVQ at the apple store opening: āwe achieved the performance to have a store like youād find in every corner of the truly civilized worldā.
https://youtu.be/gXNkaJng13Q old intro. Not the oldest, but the one Iām most nostalgic for.
https://youtu.be/rYPzsLRDpeU alcatel rep talking in english about wireless internet. I like the little animated ad they have, with a steam deck among the gadgets, at 2:32. Sails manager(sic). They show sending movies and songs to your friends as a selling point, not a crime.
https://youtu.be/r6FGAUt8bKI&t=858 cool phones
https://youtu.be/9SXjqsd9P5o&t=52 lab501 hard drive test
ArenaTV
The next section is the exact opposite of Zona It. Where zona was a big media company shown on national TV, these guys built up a TV station, all about games and tech, on the internet. Where zona had a revolving door of writers, covering the newest shooters, this guy was writing about the oldest RPGs, moving between media homes. And I can call him a writer because he wrote a book 
https://unacomn.itch.io/tale-of-doom
I wish I had more stories from these early days, but in my neck of the woods here in Romania it was all such a blur. Nobody trusted āentrepreneursā, coming out of communism, the only people that could run a business or handle logistics were criminals. Now Iām trying to write about internet media when I didnāt have internet until 10 years after the fact. Some people managed to launch a 24/7 gaming tv station on the internet, ArenaTV. (With some live shows!) That ended with people having to deal with the worst of āforum cultureā, targeted hacking and all. One huge contention point was that the websiteās owner kept insisting on hosting their own server infrastructure. In hindsight we may see the benefits of that, but at the time, the writers were not happy at all to get no salaries for months on end for the sake ofā¦ having less storage? It definitely wasnāt enough to host all the video filesā¦ or the text filesā¦ and the forums were going down often.
āinfluencerā wasnāt a thing yet. I was calling pretty much anyone covering tech a ājournalistā. Theyāre covering cold hard facts, right? Their personality was secondary. At least, it seemed that way at the time, people were demanding objective reviews. 15 years of clean corporate design did a number on what the audience wants.
As for blogs, thereās not much point in me linking romanian blogs full of 404s here, so Iāll link to the channel of one of the writers. Where Zona IT used to translate english news into romanian, unacomn (name drop) used to do lots of āgaming and tech historyā episodes, and has been re-making them in english for years now.
He has been re-making them in English for years now.
Reviews, podcasts, live streams. Thereās a documentary series going over every year in gaming history since the beginning, in 1967.
Years.Game
I could keep writing this thing about gaming media and how I āconsumedā it on a Samsung Bada phone, ābut I donāt want to spoil it :^)ā. Itās in english and I would just quote this video until I find a conclusion. (and I heard thereās demand for gaming commentary these days.) Iāll specifically link the episode talking about his experience in early internet media and live streaming at ArenaTV and how he learned journalistic ethics.
If thereās anything of value in this forum post, itās his channel and this video/ audio.
The coolest thing ever
He mentions a magazine called LEVEL at one point. A magazine made more sense than a TV show for gaming and IT, because they included DVDs. Useful software, demo-discs, and, the legends always included one FULL GAME with every magazine, like Mafia 2 or Need for Speed Shift 2. Those magazines are regarded as precious heirlooms by all the gamers I know. Thereās plenty to write there, but frankly I canāt. Iāve only read a handful, I want to find more archives and go over the attempts to revive it, Nivelul2. Iāll contribute to the Demo Discs section when I find them, if itās still here lol. It will take a while.
Shout-out to https://videotutorial.ro/ , Iāve watched ālike a desperateā.
Useful software
I found this neat little extension to be able to see missing items in playlists. It claims it gets them from The Internet Archive. Sometimes I can paste that link on IA and see the video, sometimes I canāt. Even for videos I already saw on there, sometimes it gives a missing error, but it works when I try again later. Is there a way to tell which videos are available? besides spamming requests and waiting forever.
Filmot Title Restorer 
; More Searches 
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLasJqTymEfehBBmncasZyyJpmBamnzlLE the big playlist of gaming videos from Zonait, 309 of 321 restored
When I see this 
player on the Internet Archive, I can watch the video but I canāt download it? Iāve been recording a couple of them with OBS.
Bonus amogus ą¶
