Adam sessler why

Around The Web Provided by Taboola. Create a list ». Top 30 TV Icons. See all related lists ». Do you have a demo reel? Add it to your IMDb page. Find out more at IMDbPro ». How Much Have You Seen? How much of Adam Sessler's work have you seen? Known For.

Lumberjack Man Doug. Starlet Additional Crew. The Arcadian Marco. Show all Hide all Show by Hide Show Actor 4 credits. Hide Show Producer 3 credits. Hide Show Additional Crew 1 credit. Hide Show Soundtrack 1 credit. Hide Show Self 32 credits. Self - Judge. Self - Panelist Self - Host. Show all episodes. Self - Game Break. Show all 18 episodes. It looked like a Cadillac logo. So, following the high school path of many nerds and future stand-up comics, Sessler decided to take the route of class clown.

It worked. Sessler went on to study literature. He wrote a lot of papers. And he played For that single semester, Sessler's grades plummeted. He stayed away from games for the rest of his college years. Unable to find work, he flew home to San Francisco. When a friend of a friend called and offered him a job at a local branch of a giant bank, Sessler took it. He had no other options—and money had become a serious problem.

At work he'd get calls from Bank of America agents trying to get him to pay off his debts. It was a miserable two-and-a-half years for Sessler, who spent a ton of time worrying that he'd be stuck on the finance career track for life.

He started freaking out, worrying that becoming a banker was his destiny. Even as his co-workers warned him not to stick with a job he hated so much, he thought about giving up. He considered taking accounting classes. He found out about a new job through the kind of indirect happenstance that is behind so many big breaks.

One of his colleagues had a boyfriend, who had a friend who told Sessler about GameSpot. GameSpot—then owned by media conglomerate Ziff Davis—was looking for a host for the video game show they planned to start on the new channel ZDTV.

Sessler was interested, although he hadn't kept up with gaming—"I was young, it was the 90s, I was in San Francisco," he told me. At the audition, when the casting director asked Sessler what games he played, he answered: Resident Evil 2 , and But in what Sessler calls "probably the best coincidence in the world," it turned out the main audition director was also the woman who ran the public access station, and she loved his show.

She'd found one sketch, in which Sessler does his best impresion of Irish dancer Michael Flatley, and she thought it was hilarious. Sessler was standing there, thinking he had no chance after a gaffe like that. One of the directors looks at him and says "Um This should not have happened. Sessler's first show aired on July 4, He and his co-host, Lauren Fielder, would produce and air 30 minutes of television every week.

They'd preview games, review games, and bring on GameSpot editors like Jeff Gerstmann now head of the gaming website Giant Bomb and Greg Kasavin now a writer at Bastion creator SuperGiant Games to talk about what they were doing on the site. It was GameSpot TV , after all. The setup was strange, Sessler recalls. The hosts spoke in front of a silhouette of a chained link fence, flanked by TV screens full of flames—"It gave the sense that we were giving reviews at a back alley with burning trash cans," Sessler says—and most of what they did just echoed GameSpot's editorial coverage.

In the first few years, Sessler guesses they were only reaching something like 10, people per episode. I remember one: someone saying if I got raped and murdered in a New York alley, justice would be done. But Sessler started to learn how to produce good television, and he started building up his video game chops with the likes of Banjo Kazooie and Spyro.

They snagged some pretty solid guests, too. It was almost a naive point in time. The big game that we thought was going to be big that year was Sin. On April 20, , when two students shot up Columbine High School and murdered 13 people, the country immediately looked for some sort of explanation. For many, the scapegoat was video games: both shooters were fans of games like Doom and Wolfenstein. And it changed the way Sessler and his team approached gaming.

I remember I was eating a burger when I saw that comment—and how that burger just changed its flavor. Word came from up high that they couldn't show people shooting people in games anymore—not an easy task if you want to put on a TV show about video games.

They had to find clever ways to talk about games without talking about one of the biggest elements of gaming. A year later, he gave it a new name: TechTV. Best known as the co-founder of Microsoft, Allen had a new vision for the shows on this network: nine hours of live technology broadcasting, every single day.

GameSpot TV became Extended Play , and there was a ton of turnover as the team tried to master live television. Extended Play stuck around until , when, in an attempt to figure out how to make money off shows about video games, TechTV hired a new executive to head up programming, Greg Brannan. Brannan, a friend and mentor of Sessler's who passed away last mont h, decided to give the show a total makeover.

They brought in a new co-host, Morgan Webb. They moved it to a later timeslot. They renamed it X-Play. The goal: cut out the kiddie stuff, and make it feel like a late-night talk show about video games, along the lines of Conan or Leno. It wasn't as But at this point, Sessler thought the show would be a disaster. They hadn't renewed his contract and he was working on a month by month basis, so every day he worried that he might suddenly lose his job.

I thought we were making fools of ourselves. Then he got a call from one of the producers. We blew up. We had blown out almost anything that had happened on the network before," Sessler said.

They had to come up with a new color for us. Sessler looks fondly back at this era of X-Play , when it felt like they could do no wrong. Even when they got complaints from fans who didn't like their sketches, people were watching the show. They had room to be creative. He doesn't want it anymore: he's losing money. It's like, we're finally doing what we want to do, and that lasts about a year.

By the same time the following year, Sessler and his team knew G4 was taking over. And when G4 took over, they gutted X-Play and laid off a ton of staff. I wouldn't say handled well," Sessler said. I think that's something that, had it been handled better, a lot of things may have been different. X-Play fans weren't too pleased, either. And because the show's set lights had burned into the LCD monitors, imprinting a slight outline of a TechTV logo that you could see when they ran game footage, fans thought the X-Play team was subtly crying for help.

They weren't. G4 wanted them to relocate to Los Angeles, too. In late , not long after Sessler met the woman who would go on to become his wife, he had to move down to southern California. She stayed in San Francisco. On weekends, he'd fly out to be with her, then fly back to L. Then there was the musical. They were then moved out of their Santa Monica studio and dumped in the Comcast building, home of the company's other channels, like the pop culture junkies at E!.

The groups were interspersed throughout the same office, and the people at E! Sessler and his team were very loud, for example. Suddenly, things felt different. There was more tension. More drama. There was much more at stake now than there had been before.

On top of that, streaming video had just become a thing: services like YouTube were making it possible for anyone to dump trailers or run video reviews at any time.