Geoff Keighley

Geoff Keighley is a Canadian video game journalist and television presenter. His work spans online, print and TV outlets. He was most known for hosting the video game show GameTrailers TV, and for co-hosting the now-defunct G4tv.com.

Keighley is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Kotaku,^[1] etc. As of January 2008, besides hosting GTTV, Keighley can still be seen as a correspondent on another G4 show, The Electric Playground, and his work can be read in monthly columns on the GameFly website. Keighley was the executive producer of the Spike Video Game Awards. Keighley was the executive producer of The Game Awards that was first shown in December 2014.^[2]

On June 15 Keighley hosted YouTube's live coverage of E3 2015, it was viewed a total of eight million times in its live 12-hour run.^[3] It was continued the next year.

In September 2016, Keighley premiered a weekly show titled LIVE With YouTube Gaming. The first season is set to run until late November.

Presenting

In addition to GTTV, Keighley has been involved in many other video game-related project on television. On Comcast's G4 network, he appeared as the network's lead anchor for its E3 press conference coverage, interviewing CEOs from companies like Sony and Electronic Arts. For MTV he created the concept and produced (with LivePlanet) "Gears of War: Race to E3” and “Gears of War: Race to Launch,” two specials that took viewers inside the development of the hit Xbox 360 game from Microsoft. And in 2007, the Discovery Channel aired a five-hour documentary on releases including those of such companies as World of Wonder Productions, based on a treatment by Keighley, who also served as consulting producer. Geoff has also hosted and co-produced a number of video game launch specials for Spike TV, including "Madden NFL 08 Kickoff" featuring a performance by Ozzy Osbourne and "Halo 3: Launched!" featuring a performance by Linkin Park. He was also interviewed on what became a controversial Fox News' segment on Mass Effect, and was later praised by gamers online for being the only one on the show who had actually played the game.^[4][5][6]

Keighley is known for writing reviews and previews and going behind the scenes of the game industry for in-depth business profiles and lengthy feature pieces. In a July 2008 interview on The Jace Hall Show, Keighley spoke about the importance of this process, stating "There's such a lack of investigative journalism. I wish I had more time to do more, sort of, investigation. Really dig into some of these bigger issues, so I could look at like, the 'Red Ring of Death' problem. That's never really been properly reported about, like what really happens."^[7] However, he has faced criticism from some quarters for his willingness to positively present games to maintain exclusives, regardless of their actual quality, and to accept industry PR at face value in an October 2012 column published in Eurogamer.^[8]

The Game Awards

Geoff was involved with Spike's Video Game Awards for many years until its final show in 2013. In 2014, Geoff created his own awards show, The Game Awards.^[9]

Controversy

In a column on Eurogamer, former journalist Robert Florence accused Keighley and others of often being in bed with the video game industry.^[8] The controversial piece was met with criticism and several changes were made by its editor Tom Bramwell due to legal action.^{[10][11][12][13]}

References

External links

• Official website
• Geoff Keighley at the Internet Movie Database