The Dark History Behind The Game Awards

Thanks guys!

edgy and boney tied me to a chair and forced me to watch MANswers for 71 hours (such an odd number I know just make it 72)

Shoutout to the Burbacks parents for naming their boys after pasta Spag(Eddy) and Riga(Tony)

"Hot girls read cheat codes" is one of the most 00s sentences that has ever been said

I'm a professional game designer and a woman - I joined the industry in 2003. If you thought THIS was bad, you should see the crap I had to put up with at work...or conferences. =(

Usually my coworkers never get close enough to my desk to see what's playing on my phone but luckily today a coworker got right up to my desk just in time for the shirtless women fighting, 10/10 great video guys

Looking back, that kind of culture is definitely a reason why I, a girl who has played video games since gradeschool, actively refused to acknowledge that I liked video games because I didn't feel like the games I liked "counted" because "girls hate video games".

Jesus Christ....this was painful to watch. Aside from the blatant sexism and misogyny of those older awards shows I just think it's sad that our culture created a whole TV network devoted to perpetuating the idea that being a "man" means you should only care about getting drunk, acting stupid, boobs, and getting erections 24/7 like brain damaged teenager. Like.....if those were the only aspects of my identity that I was allowed to predominantly express or was pressured into expressing just to feel like I belonged that would drive me insane. It would be torture.

I feel like spike TV has a huge responsibility for why us female gamers stayed silent on voice chats and picked male avatars and names. Especially in competitive gaming. It’s such a bummer to be told to get back in the kitchen and let my boyfriend use his console. Yes actual things I was told too many times in the last 15 years or so.

You guys have such great chemestry, it feels like you are brothers sometimes.

it's wild to remember how gross 2000s nerd culture could be edit- and also pop culture overall, to be fair

Those early VGA shows are the type of misogyny that bred the “I’m not like other girls” mentality that all of us teenage girls had to go through in the early 2000’s and it was bad for ALL of us.

As a woman gamer who was a teenager in the mid-00's, I can safely say that I felt highly alienated by the male side of gaming. Which was weird because I had male friends who played games, but we never... talked about games together. Manga, school, history, other cultures, life... sure. But if video games were brought up, even though they knew that was primarily what I did at home after school, they were sure to seperate what I liked to play into the category of "chick games". Kingdom Hearts? Fatal Frame? Mario? Dumb baby games for girls. Needs more half-naked women and sports to count. Oh, we both like FF7? Well, girls don't like it in the "same way", so it was different. Me and the other girls who loved video games and anime/manga stuff used to hang out in the same spot for years and talk about all the nerdy/geeky stuff we liked and it wasn't until my senior year that ANY of the guys acknowledged that we existed and legitimately liked video games and that was only after I went way too indepth about the plot of Chrono Trigger during a class debate. Heck, one of my best friends had a boyfriend when we were in our early 20s who refused to believe either of us were "real gamers" until he walked in on us unannounced playing Samurai Warriors 2. He had seen us playing games before, but he thought we were just pretending to impress him. If it wasn't for the internet family I made eons ago in a Final Fantasy forum, I would have thought all male gamers were toxic idiots who thought women only liked shopping and beach vacations.

Holy shit any actual footage was such a tough watch. Thanks.

The fact that the game awards come from the same network as manswers makes more sense than I'd like to admit

I'm so glad y'all mentioned Spike TV giving Madden 2004 its first game of the year award before the show even started. My brother and I were livid when they did that

I was a woman in that era, and yes i learned real quick to never speak because once they knew i was female, they treated me like crap. It was frustrating. I could never get good at multiplayer shooters beecause it was not fun. So i played mostly alone, andthen i played with my husband and then my kids and now we game with our grandkids, and i still stay muted.

I'm a woman who has enjoyed video games for over 30 years. I was a teen around the Spike TV era. That sort of programming certainly contributed to low self-esteem & a negative body image, but I think it also help shape my not-like-other-girls mentality at the time. I'd watch that stuff & think, "That's not me.. I'm not a boring nag! I'm different!" As for feeling excluded, I actively avoided shooters & other online games just so I wouldn't have to deal with harassment. Most guys I knew IRL thought it was cool that I was into gaming, but they'd still explain things to me like a 5-year-old. The space as a whole still has its issues, but it's come a long way in terms of inclusivity.

The fact that Madden was named game of the year in 2003 is by far the funniest thing in this entire video.

I remember unironically watching Manswers on Spike as a tween/teen. I am currently working on a time machine to punch myself in the head.