Victor Lucas is a name you might not know if you’re on the southern side of the Canadian border, but after launching The Electric Playground during the very early days of the World Wide Web, he’s been shaping how we report on and talk about games for nearly 30 years.
The show first came online as a website (ElecPlay.com) in 1995, and Lucas would later lead a newsmagazine-style spinoff of the site for Canadian television beginning in 1997.
Video game news and reviews on television was a bit of a novelty at the time, but The Electric Playground would go on to create the template for a newsmagazine-style show about games during its initial 18-year run and inspired many game journalists to pick up a camera. In addition to its style, the show was responsible for giving Geoff Keighley, creator of The Game Awards, his first on-screen hosting experience. The Electric Playground would spawn a spinoff of its own in 2002 (Reviews on the Run, which aired as Judgment Day in the US), before coming to an end in 2015.
Lucas brought The Electric Playground (which was rebranded as EP Daily in 2008) to YouTube after its cancellation, and he continues to produce new episodes to this day.
All this history is necessary to introduce the momentous next step for The Electric Playground… preservation in the Archives & Special Collections department of the library at the University of Toronto Mississauga. This partnership will include every episode of The Electric Playground and Reviews on the Run, as well as a handful of one-off documentaries, uncut interview footage, and event coverage.
The EP Media records includes approximately 10,000 audiovisual broadcast quality records from 1995 to 2016 containing all the episodes of The Electric Playground, Reviews on the Run, and other spinoff shows and documentaries, alongside the raw audiovisual footage of the shows, interviews with game developers and executives, gameplay recordings, and video game industry promotional materials. The EP Media co-hosts and staff, led by the founder Victor Lucas, travelled around the globe to interview game designers and publishers, review and preview upcoming games, and speak with game fans at major conventions and events. The EP Media records provide a contemporary view into the history of games, the games industry, and gaming cultures.
Lucas shared some more thoughts about the partnership on Twitter, while also confirming that the University won’t just archive this massive collection of video for students, but will be digitizing it as well:
THREAD! EP Archive News!
I am pleased to announce that The Electric Playground has partnered with The University of Toronto Mississagua on an educational initiative to provide UTM’s Game Studies students access to our enormous archive of content dating back to 1995.
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— Victor Lucas (@Victor_Lucas) November 1, 2023
A public forum celebrating the expansion of the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Game Studies program, including the new Electric Playground archive, will be held on campus this Thursday, November 9.