A fan has just uploaded every episode of Button Mashing (old Gamespot show) to Youtube

Here`s the Youtube playlist. I was sure most of these were lost to time, so this is great. It`s a show with Rich Gallup, Jeff, Ryan, Brad, Greg Kasavin etc.

via Reddit

Well, there goes my Sunday...

Ah those were the days... back when videogames were real.

Awesome, I used to love this show! It's the first show featuring the guys that I watched.

There were 22 episodes?! I thought they only made 6 of these.... They were great.

@forteexe21: They took a multi-year long hiatus from the series, IIRC. I also only saw those first 6 episodes.

When I say button you say mashing!

I kid you not but while taking a break from revising today I started looking into old GameSpot video features and reviews.

I came read the concept for this and made a note to look into getting hold of the entire run.

This is rad.

Thanks for posting this! I was going to make a thread, but it was enough effort posting all of these on youtube anyway :P

The original run of Button Mashing happened in 2004 and is covered in the first 6 episodes. Nearly two years later, they restarted the show and it would continue from 2006 to 2007. I have some other miscellaneous GS videos that I found, and I'll try to get those uploaded as well.

If you want to know some highlights of the Button Mashing Series:

The Intro EVERY EPISODE! - Pimp Rich Gallup, a young & naive Alex Navarro, Rapper Jeff Gertsmann, Ryan Davis doing a little dance, and of course Midnight Brown"

Pilot Episode A - featuring Brad "Burns" Shoemaker, Ryan Davis, Alex "Doesn't Age At All" Navarro, and Greg "SF2 God" Kasavin

Episode 1 - Tor Thorsen embarrassing himself and all of Mother-Russia

Episode 2 - Alex showing off his Mario Kart skills

Episode 3 - Jeff showing off his SF2 skills

Ep. 6 - Santa Rich Gallup, Greg Mueller, Matt "Might as well be a puppy" Rorie, and $25,000

Ep. 7 - The Double Dragon Showdown

Ep. 8 - The infamous "Gamer Girls" episode (I didn't actually have this one, so I've linked to another duder's YT video of it!)

Ep. 9 - Old GS users might recognize Andrew_A who wrote hardware reviews and cool blog posts, and Andrew Sheppard became a pretty big F2P mobile game executive

Ep. 10 - Greg, Jeff, and Ryan MacDonald face off - Jeff plays Blitz against Gamespot co-founder Vince Broady

Ep. 11 - Featuring Special Guest Jack Black - Homer Rabara was at GS until 2013, Justin Porter made the motion graphics for GS until 2012 (and now makes UI for EA :P), and Anthony Errisuriz made motion graphics for GS until 2010.

Ep. 12 - Dave Toister and Aaron "7.5 Good: Ratchet & Clank" Thomas

Ep. 13 - Ryan showing off his skills in some Dragon Ball game

Ep. 15 - Lark Anderson, who still works at CBSi.

Vinny joined GS and started editing the show around here, so many of the videos have some high quality "Vinny Edits" characteristics...

Ep. 16 - SEAN "the man, the myth, the legend" COONCE - Conor Egan also co-founded Slide to Play if I remember correctly.

Ep. 17 - Tyler Winegarner playing Ikaruga - featuring musicman Maxwell August Croy, and former GS regular Stanley Lin

Ep. 18 - Forum Posters Episode - Some of these guys/gals got picked up as actual staffers on GS for a while: Don Francis wrote reviews for a while and Keith/Carolyn Petit was at GS until recently

Ep. 19 - Brian Ekberg and Chris Watters are the two most familiar names in this one, but Joe Dodson wrote reviews on the site also.

Ep. 20 - Rich's last episode :( The audio's fucked, so I'll be fixing that...

Ep. 21 Vinny is the new host! Young Vinny with a full set of hair, but the same old black t-shirt. Shanker was a Sports Editor for a bit.

Ep. 22 The Final Episode... Brad, Ryan, and Alex reunite for the last episode. Ironically, the final Owned segment is a special preview of the four-person multiplayer of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. The day after this video was posted, Jeff would be fired from GS for his review of the game. GameSpot would create another show called "Super Button Mashing," but I was already long gone from the site by then...

Maaaaaan, if you wanted to get me down a hole of early-mid 2000s Gamespot nostalgia, you have accomplished your objective.

Well there goes my afternoon. Thanks to the uploader for this!

@billymaysrip: you are a hero.

Hey kid stop all the downloading!

I forgot all about this i lost my shit on that first episode lmaoo hilarious

@geraltitude: Just lucky that the HDDs I found in my parent's basement hadn't failed after nearly 10 years! There was a really early-model flash SSD that was hidden away in my bedroom and that was completely dead. But the good old HDDs worked pretty well.

I'm in the process of backing up all of the data, and I've been finding more and more old GS stuff. All of the Button Mashing stuff was neatly arranged in one drive, but it seems like I was not as organized with the others, so it might take some time to search through it all. I'm not proud to admit it, but I seem to have pirated A LOT of anime back in the day...

So far I've found:

A lot of Hotspot episodes - all of those have been archived by other duders though

A lot of Today on Gamespot

Random On the Spot episodes - some of these have already been archived, but I'm still looking for that holy-grail episode with Jeff and The Ricker taking over.

Both of the Designer Threads podcasts

Misc. Gamespot UK podcasts

Random GS videos/interviews/reviews - many of which, unfortunately, seem to be the size of a fucking postage stamp.

This was in Rich's days before he became a hockey coach.

The end of the 11th video is hilarious with Jack Black. "sweet sweet Activision".

@billymaysrip: We all pirated a lot of anime back in the day.

I'm so glad these are available again. Thank you so much for saving them initially, finding them and sharing them with the world once more.

I always have such a vivid memory of Alex in that intro for some reason...

@amyggen: There's also a ton of Korn (and replace the k with a p) and bad music too. I was a MLDonkey fiend and frequented a lot of DC hubs with just bad shit in them. I'm not old enough to have Usenet stories, but I've got plenty of IRC and ed2k stories...

I'm also in the process of digitizing all of my family's VHS tapes, ripping old cds/dvds, and digitizing all of my Dad's old record collection. I've also found a bunch of Betamax tapes (including a couple Betacams, which I don't know why we have), Laserdiscs, Floppy disks of varying sizes, a huge box of QICs, a gallon zip-lock bag stuffed with UMDs and MiniDiscs, tapes and cassettes of all different shapes and sizes, and what seems like a million flash cards which have all probably died by now. I know for a fact that a number of those flash cards have different live boot versions of Damn Small Linux, but I still want to know what secrets lie in them...

A lot of the tapes, QICs, and floppy disks are probably just work stuff from my parents - one floppy has my Mom's dissertation :P - but I still want to archive all of it. I have a vhs to dvd converter (it's not great, but it's good enough and most of the vhs tapes are shit anyway), so I've been using that so far, but it's a ton of work. Apparently Walmart has a tape digitizing service? The laserdiscs are going to be a pain, because I don't know any easy means to convert them to a digital format. I'll have to record them using a capture card, hope there's no laser rot, and wait forever for the files to encode (or get a ProcAmp, which might be the easiest option at this point.) Ripping the minidisks and UMDs will also be a chore. In the end, I think it'll be all worth it, and I've been talking to my University's library about donating most of the interesting stuff that's not copy-protected. Some of the things that'd be a lot of work will end up being sent to them.

Doing all of this has made me appreciate all of the work that Drew has to do to archive and digitize those game tapes - it's a ton of work, there's a lot of dumb points of failure, and most importantly it takes forever (so if you fuck up, it'll take another billion years to retry.)

So basically, the GS stuff isn't a priority, but I'll get to it eventually and will try to upload everything in some capacity, hopefully by the end of the year.

Thanks for all of the comments of appreciation! I'll try to make the raw files available - I could stick everything in an AWS S3 bucket, but some of these files are actually pretty big :< I'll figure something out. Might just end up making a torrent of everything.

The Ricker makes an appearance in this episode, starting at the segment around 19:14. The user GBtestarchive has uploaded a ton of On the Spot episodes.

@billymaysrip: Thank you for this

@billymaysrip: Thank you so much for this dude, super nostalgia just straight seeing these again,

@joey: Holy shit, that duder has all of On The Spot - and that indeed is the episode I was writing about! That's so fucking awesome. Now I don't have to archive any of them! I had no idea that channel existed. I'm so excited to watch all of these again. I've looked so long for some of those On The Spot episodes.

On a more sad note, RIP The Ricker :( You'll always be a piece of shit who abandons cars on Jeff's driveway.

Man, I haven't watched these since they came out. Nostalgia.

When I say button you say mashing.

Button!

_________

Button!

_________

While I'm still down the rabbit hole of old Gamespot/Giant Bomb videos, I found the video of the "GameSpot Players' Ball" which features a live episode of Button Mashing:

http://www.gamespot.com/videos/gamespot-players-ball/2300-6180669/

Other highlights include the guys playing some Rock Band.

I am delighted this happened.

My own holy grail would be finding that Carrie E3 2006 blog video in which Jeff, Alex, Carrie, and Jason Ocampo are all getting ready by showing their press badges. I remember watching that one a couple times over. Along with most of Jeff's Points Reports.

Damn, I almost didn't recognize Vinny! This proves that he's always been charming and that a black shirt is most likely a part of his body.

@billymaysrip:Thanks for uploading this and for that great list of description of each episode!

Oh shit, I'll definitely watch some episodes

@joey: That was the show Vinny and Alex were commenting on during a recent Beastcast right? It's always kinda surreal to see an old video working on GS still!

If anyone has a GS video they really want to find, ping me or just comment in this thread. I'll see if I have it.

Also, Episode 20, which I took down cause the audio was fucked, is actually still live on GS. Check it out here: http://www.gamespot.com/videos/20-dirty-dancing/2300-6176896/ I've fixed the audio and will be adding back to the playlist, but it doesn't help to give GS some cash-money.

Edit: Turns out the audio's fucked on the GameSpot version of Episode 20 also! Now my youtube video is going to be relevant, yay!

Edit - Can't seem to find any user videos. Maybe they're on a different HDD? Will keep searching.

Haha, awesome video. Thanks heaps for sharing this with us mate.

Back then I went to GameSpot for hours a day and had no idea they had video content or podcasts. How does that happen?

Thanks a ton for uploading these, I've been going through them all day. Button Mashing was definitely one of my personal highlights from "the golden era" of Gamespot.

It's pretty wild how the final episode says it was aired Nov 29, 2007 - Jeff's Wikipedia page says he was terminated on Nov 28, 2007 (link to the Wikipedia page) - and the final game played on the program was Kane & Lynch. Yowza!

That be so awesome, I don't suppose you have the lost We just got a PS3 stream from 06 do you?

@scottjay01: I'll see. I don't know if I have a lot of the much longer videos/streams. I've been traveling for the last week, so I haven't had much time to try and upload anything.

This is great!

Gonna have to rewatch all these tonight. Hard to believe just how long ago it was.

Oh man, that's awesome. Gonna binge watch these tonight.

Finally made it through the playlist, thanks for uploading these! I didn't start following the crew until they started GB so I missed out on a lot of the old GS stuff.

Also, I think I may have a man crush on young Vinny.