MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
The BBC has commissioned a brand new monthly Radio 1 show dedicated to video games.
The programme – simply called The Radio 1 Gaming Show – is currently set to start on Friday March 11th and will be presented by games media personality Julia Hardy.
The show is aimed at ‘young gamers across the UK’. Each episode will focus on a specific title, but will also
feature games previews, exclusive first looks at new titles, and catch-ups with new releases in development.
It follows a special gaming show, which aired on Monday, December 28th on Radio 1, and was also presented by Hardy.
Radio One has wanted to do video games for a very long time,” the BBC’s head of visual radio Joe Harland told MCV.
But games are a very difficult thing to get right, particularly when you are a radio station and the audience can’t see what’s happening. Now Radio 1 has an iPlayer channel on your TV, on all your devices. So we have our platform, we’ve got a presenter in Julia Hardy, who is brilliant and great at all the different disciplines of broadcasting that we need her to do, and has significant expertise.”
He continued: The young gaming audience wants programmes about individual titles. You want to make specific programmes about specific titles, creating content for specific types of gamer. What we don’t want to do is go out and say ‘this is a show for literally every gamer’, because I don’t think it’s possible to do something so broad. What we’re doing is a monthly programme that can excite specific types of gamer.”
