Join the Game Boys as past and future collide for the Elympic Games of 2092. It’s time to party like it’s 2099!
If you grew up with Tetris, Goldeneye, The Sims or Cheez TV, then you’ll instantly recognise their sibling relationship forged in the bright glare of a CRT TV. Or if you watched Wide World of Sports on a Saturday morning, you’ll go into into the draw to win $5000 Cold. Hard. Cash. Plus two tickets to beautiful Hamilton Island courtesy of our friends at Ansett Australia.
This year they’ll bring you all the action live from the Elympics of the XLIX Olympiad. With updates from Windows 3.1 Stadium, Greco Roman Tetris, Synchronised Skyrim. Plus all the drama on and off the desktop presented in their signature “high-tech/lo-fi” style.
This is perhaps one of my favourite shows from a conceptual standpoint. It gave us such a rich framework to imagine this future world and then explore every aspect of it and mine it for comedy. We were able to cover the opening ceremony, the events themselves, volunteer training, medal ceremonies and even a disgraced athlete’s apologetic press conference.
Wide World of Esports takes place in the year 2092, which looks suspiciously like 1992, being performed in 2018, simultaneously taking place in 3 eras at once. We are in an alternate universe in which the entire Olympics has been replaced with video games, but also somehow not advanced past VHS tapes for content delivery.
Along with this level of structural complexity, the show also featured a dramatic step up in the level of pre-production work we embarked on for the purpose of delivering on a gag. So if that meant shooting material in an airline simulator, or filming $80 worth of fast food for disgusting b-roll in the McKFTacoKing commercial, then we committed to it.
Another unexpected outcome of this has been that much of this material has lived on in future shows and productions, far beyond the life of the original show they were made for. The GB24 News brand, originally created for the short-lived web-series the previous year, also made its stage debut included as part of this 2092 universe.
Performance history:
Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2018
Melbourne Fringe Festival 2018
The increase in conceptual and production complexity is also true of the show’s trailer, which levelled up the amount of production and scope to become a self-contained piece. It later resurfaced when we were creating online content during Covid Lockdowns, and during the live Hey Hey shows as material in the ‘ad breaks’.
Show Credits:
Created by Game Boys Comedy
Performed by Eden & Joshua Porter
Lighting, Audio & Video Design by Kinetic Screen
Melbourne Fringe Season produced by Maya Kraj-Krajewski