Gaming didn’t just grow up... it took over.

In this episode of Geekstorians, Dave dives into the chaotic, brilliant rise of gaming fandom: from the arcades of the late ’70s and the night Space Invaders caused Tokyo to mint extra coins, to the Atari 2600 bringing pixelated magic into the living room, to the bedroom coders who unknowingly kick-started a creative revolution across the UK and US.

We trace the console culture wars - Nintendo vs Sega, Mario vs Sonic, identity vs identity - and how gaming magazines, tip lines and school-yard myths became the pre-internet backbone of fan knowledge. Then it’s onto LAN parties, MMOs that became entire eras of people’s lives, the WoW meteor strike that reshaped the genre overnight, and the moment consoles finally connected the world through Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and Halo 2’s multiplayer explosion.

Finally, we reach the age of Twitch, YouTube, esports arenas, indie devs, Discord servers and sprawling online communities. A culture that is messy, generous, chaotic, creative, and very much alive.

This is the story of how gamers built one of the most influential fandoms on the planet... one joystick, one cartridge, one guild, one livestream at a time.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

n this episode of Geekstorians, Dave dives into one of the most heated and strangely human conflicts in modern fandom: the battle for canon.

From the moment Star Wars quietly shifted a blaster bolt in 1997, the ground beneath our favourite universes began to move. Suddenly, creators weren’t the only ones shaping continuity. Fans were scrutinising every frame, showrunners were building puzzles inside their storylines, and entire franchises were juggling multiple timelines at once.

We explore the rise of forensic fandom, the chaos of competing continuities, the fury of finales that don’t land, the strange elegance of narrative retcons that do, and why video games blew the old idea of a single canon to pieces. Along the way we revisit Lost, Sherlock, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, The Witcher, Fallout, Baldur’s Gate 3, and more — all to uncover how canon became an ecosystem rather than a single authoritative truth.

And ultimately, we ask:

Why do we care so deeply about what “really happened” in worlds that only exist because we love them?

For more episodes and everything else we do, visit Geektown.co.uk.

For weekly TV news, reviews and release dates, check out Geektown Radio, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Television didn’t always remember. For decades, episodes reset like clockwork, characters lived in cheerful time loops, and anything resembling continuity was considered a liability. Then came a wave of rebellious creators, strange experiments, and a generation of fans armed with VCRs — and everything changed.

In this episode of Geekstorians, Dave rewinds to the era when TV grew up. From Hill Street Blues quietly teaching networks how to tell long-form stories, to Star Trek: The Next Generation bending the rules, to Twin Peaks turning mystery into obsession, and The X-Files training audiences to become detectives, this was the decade television learned to think in arcs.

We dive into J. Michael Straczynski’s audacious five-year blueprint for Babylon 5, and how it helped invent the modern showrunner/fandom feedback loop. Then it’s on to Buffy the Vampire Slayer — the series that rewrote the emotional architecture of genre TV and launched a writer’s room that would shape the next twenty years of storytelling.

After that comes the rise of cable: Angel, Stargate SG-1, Carnivàle, and the 2005 Doctor Who revival becoming proof that genre could be ambitious, sincere, and mainstream. And finally, the 2000s network scramble — the adrenaline of 24, the puzzle-box frenzy of Lost, the heartbreak of Firefly, the ambition of Battlestar Galactica, and the improbable triumph of Fringe.

All of it leads to the blueprint that streaming would later inherit — and occasionally break — as binge culture transformed how we watched, talked, and obsessed.

This is the story of how geek TV conquered the schedule, reshaped fandom, and taught the world that continuity isn’t a burden… it’s a promise.

Geekstorians is written and hosted by Dave from Geektown. For more TV, film and gaming news, visit Geektown.co.uk, or listen to our sister show Geektown Radio.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.