This is a classic. You can watch the episode here:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcsb6g
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcsbfq
It starts off with Nadine doing poorly in the opening game. It’s hard to tell what’s even happening in this game. Both cursors or whatever are the same colour. Maybe that was part of the problem.
Then you get the intros. They’re always hilariously awkward.
Host: Mark, I understand that you want to be a football player. What’s your favourite position?
Mark: Center.
Host: Would you rather play football or baseball?
Mark: (thinks for a second) Football.
HE JUST FUCKING TOLD YOU THAT HE WANTS TO PLAY FOOTBALL. It’s ridiculous. What the fuck does baseball have to do with anything? The blame for this one falls entirely on Phil Moore.
His teammate Mandy wants to get into IT. She actually did a good job answering the question.
Then it’s the red team.
Phil: Nadine, I understand that you like to watch TV.
Nadine: (embarrassed smile)
Phil: Nadine, what is your favourite show to watch? Say Nickelodeon shows. Say Nickelodeon shows. Say Nickelodeon shows.
Nadine: Ummm…yeah.
Phil: Alright! Good answer!
Her partner is Jed, who likes racing motorcycles. He says that he races them in Indianapolis when he goes there in the summer. I think that the show was filmed in Florida and most of the kids were locals. So maybe Jed’s parents are divorced and he’d spend summers in Indiana or maybe they’d just visit relatives there or something.
I wonder how they chose teams. I’m almost positive that the teammates don’t know each other. They aren’t friends or anything, it’s just two random people put together for the show.
Anyway, I’ve seen this episode numerous times so here’s a spoiler: Jed carries Nadine through this game. He’s pretty sharp. Nadine…less so.
Then they start with the game proper. It’s just dumb. It’s all random bullshit. No strategy. Whoever created this game spent about five minutes on this. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a child who came up with this shit.
5:45 – They win a “rap keyboard” for doing nothing. I wonder what would have happened if they would have moved left, thereby trapping themselves for the next move. I don’t think I’ve seen that before.
6:45 – They win another prize. An electronic basketball hoop. I’m not entirely sure what this is. It’s from a company called SportCraft, who sell a product that’s like one of those full-sized arcade redemption games where you throw the ball through the hoop and try to get a high score. But surely that’s not what this is. Is it? I don’t know.
Actually, maybe it is. It’s only $40 at K-Mart.
7:30 – Video challenge. One player gets to play an “arcade” game, the other gets to watch. Jed volunteers to play. Sexism? Maybe there’s an element of that. But it’s also the sensible choice.
Not many girls were playing video games in 1992. I didn’t know any. There were plenty of guys who weren’t playing video games in 1992. People were just starting to get Nintendos and whatever. Before that, some people had Atari or Coleco or whatever but it’s not something that you’d play for hours every day. Kids were still doing stuff outside and not everybody gave a shit about video games.
I certainly never got a Nintendo. I didn’t give a shit about this. I never asked for one. I had a computer. That was enough for me. And nobody had a computer in those days. But most guys I knew started getting Nintendos and that’s when playing outside became less and less popular.
But girls, no. They weren’t doing this nerd shit.
So Jed chooses that Neo Geo “classic”, Magician Lord. And his task is to score 450 points. It’s totally arbitrary. I don’t think that any thought goes into what score needs to be reached for these games. And do the kids have any idea what the scoring system is like? Have they played these games before? The whole thing is stupid.
So anyway, Jed does basically a perfect run but fails to get 450 points. This is what I mean. It’s bullshit. Show me the person who can get 450 points in this game in 30 seconds. Was this even tested before? And you expect somebody to do this the first time they play the game?
9:15 – So now it’s the other team’s turn. All they have to do is say “right” to move “Mikey” to the goal. But they move him up. WHY? You’d see this shit all the time. The whole premise of the show doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t you just fucking move that stupid character directly to the goal? Take the shortest possible route. But no, people just seem to move him at random. I don’t get it. Are the producers telling them to do this?
Then they lose their turn through some random event. Mandy looks pretty pissed off, rightly so. “Why didn’t you just say ‘right’ so we could have got that 50 points, you fat fuck?”
So then Jed wins the “sudden death” question by answering an easy question about The Wizard of Oz. All of the questions are easy but whatever. It’s a children’s show.
Then it’s round two. It starts with another “face off” video game challenge. Same shitty game they played earlier. Jed looks ready to go. And yeah, he completely shuts out Mandy 175 to 0. On closer inspection, the cursors are different colours but you really have to look.
13:45 – After Phil chastises these dopes for not knowing Mount Rushmore, it’s another video challenge. In the interests of equality, and against his better judgement, Jed elects Nadine to play this time. I have a bad feeling about this. Bet zero, Jed.
Nadine chooses a game called Arcus Odyssey but she just points to it rather than say the title. Either she was shy or she has trouble reading. And I don’t say that as an insult, that’s just the situation.
What the fuck is Arcus Ocyssey? Let me look this up. It’s for the Genesis. An RPG? What? How the fuck are they going to play an RPG? Oh…it’s like Gauntlet, I guess.
Holy shit. Look at this. She never played a video game in her life. She can’t even work the d-pad. She’s just jerking around. I think what she’s doing is repeatedly tapping the d-pad to move. Haha. This is unbelievable.
She got 110 points and then died. She needed 250. Jed wagered 25 points. Not a lot but come on.
15:30 – The other team wins some fucking CD/cassette “recorder”. Presumably, you can only record on cassettes. Like you could play the CD and set the cassette to “record”. That’s useful, actually. You could make bootleg copies of CD’s but on tape.
16:15 – Another video challenge for Jed and Nadine. Jed is going to play Kabuki Quantum Fighter. What the fuck is this? I have to look this up as well.
Oh, I’ve seen this. I think Mike did a stream of it. It’s an NES game and you whip your hair as your attack.
Phil calls this a “hat”, though. He thinks that his hair is a hat.
Anyway, Jed gets to the 1000 points almost immediately even though he didn’t have such a good run. Again, they seemingly pick the point goals at random.
17:30 – They’re at sudden death again. The score is 25 to 125. The winner of this question will get 100 points. So if the other team wins, presumably they’d have another sudden death question.
The question is “What kind of animal is Jerry from Tom & Jerry?” Jed buzzes in, thinks for a short while, says “ca-” but then changes it to “mouse”. They give it to him.
Something of a controversial ending. First of all, I think they gave him too much time to think about it. He should have been ready with an answer immediately. And secondly, he clearly was about to say “cat”.
Don’t feel too bad for Megan and that fat fuck, though. They’re going home with some stylish and comfortable Hush Puppies shoes. And a board game called Hydro Strike that apparently involves real water shooting at the players. Let me look this up.
Oh it’s a bit like Crossfire but a much smaller board. And instead of guns, you use like pinball flippers to try to shoot the ball into the trigger area on the opposing side that squirts the water. Whatever. I can see why this wasn’t popular.
And of course, they also won that little boom box.
So Jed and Nadine are going on to the bonus round. What was Nadine’s contribution? NOTHING! It was all Jed.
The bonus round consists of three games. First, Nadine plays a game. Then Jed plays a game. Then, time-permitting, they both play the final game.
The prize for getting past the first game is a camera. The prize for the second game is a tent, a sleeping bag, and a cooler. The “grand” prize is a trip to Universal Studios.
Aren’t they already in Universal Studios? What a shit prize. And as I said, almost all of these kids are local to the area. They’re not paying for plane fare or any of this shit. Probably not even parking. Just admission tickets, presumably. No extras.
Oh, they also will pay for hotel accommodation in a Marriott. But again, these people are local. Well, maybe they’re not so local that they can just go home every day from Universal Studios. I don’t know how many days this trip is or for how many people.
Anyway, you don’t have to worry about any of this. Nadine…struggles. It’s kind of funny but I have to imagine that it’s difficult. You’re just playing on some stairs in front of a blue screen. You have to look at a monitor to figure out what’s going on. And I don’t know how much, if any, practice these people had before being let loose.
So Nadine fails to get the three coins and when they come out, Jed looks pissed off. Did you really need that shitty little camera and the tent, though? And you’re already in fucking Universal Studios. Do you really want to come back? You’re already too old for this shit. Go somewhere more interesting for your next vacation.
This video used to be on Youtube under the title “Worst Nick Arcade Player Ever” or something. This was about ten years ago. And I watched it and I saw a comment saying, “I wonder what Phil Moore is doing now” So I left a comment saying, “Probably getting fucked in the ass”, which was a reference to the Tourettes Guy series of videos, which were popular at the time.
A few days later, I get a reply to this message saying, “Yeah, right next to you, you faggot” or something like that. I’m not sure if they said “faggot” or not. So I looked this user up.
It was Nadine. She had videos of her singing like gospel music in choirs. She was living in Georgia or somewhere and she was an attractive woman.
So I replied saying that I hope she had fun on the show and the game is probably difficult.
But yeah, she must have enjoyed the experience if she was regularly checking comments on the video and she came to Phil Moore’s defence.
It’s true that she’s probably the worst player to ever appear on the show but I think that there’s perhaps an element of racism to this. Other kids have performed poorly on other shows but Nadine’s performance on Nick Arcade became pretty popular.
She just wasn’t interested in video games. She had other interests. Television, for example. Or maybe she didn’t have any other interests but at some point in her life, she found something that she enjoyed. Praising Jesus through song, for example.
But imagine if Nadine would have started a Youtube channel about video games 15 years after appearing on Nick Arcade, having never played a video game in her life. It would be completely preposterous. What kind of an idiot would do such a thing?