Turns out Red 5, developers of free-to-play MMO shooter Firefall, sneaked out a television station while no one was looking. Till now they’ve been keeping Stage 5 TV quitely tucked away on Youtube but that time of silence is over.
With the launch of their new series Game Changers Red 5 took to the stage at PAX East yesterday to spill the beans on the channels beginnings and plans for the future.
Speaking at PAX yesterday, Red 5’s CEO Mark Kearn said “When we started out we had a problem in that we were an unknown studio, no one had heard about Firefall before, no one believed in triple-A free-to-play games back then, and for us, even with funding, it was hard to get exposure because most of the exposure that you see on gaming network TV is focused on big publishers, consoles, massive titles, and things like this. So we said […] ‘Why don’t we create network quality games programming that really celebrates equally all the efforts throughout the industry, from mobile to social to indie gaming, as well as some of the big releases?’”
The channel Red 5 game up with was Stage 5 TV, a Youtube channel. Red 5 never made an official announcement about the channel’s launch because, they say, they were ramping up to a few larger shows, shows they’re now ready to reveal to the world.
Game Changers is Red 5’s take on Myth Busters and Top Gear. They’ve former American Gladiator Lee Reherman, star of The Guild and member of Team Unicorn Michelle Boyd, and someone called Ryan Welsh(?) and each episode they have them try and proved that you can do in real life what you can do in games. Yeah. I’m looking forward to the rocket jump episode, too.
In this first episode they test out jetpacks:
Red 5 say this roster of shows is set to expand in the future, though they didn’t reveal what those programs might include. Hopefully they’ll bring back Gamesmaster (though, perhaps without the awkward mermaids).