CO-OP Show fans may have seen this announcement already, but here's the part where we spill our guts on all the details. Can we change formats and do a weekly live show? Yes, we have the technology! Can we do it without screwing up for the world to see? Almost certainly no. That's the theme of this announcement video -- watch it after the break, and then read on for how you can be a part of the new show, CO-OP Live!

First off, you may wonder about what's going to happen to your CO-OP iTunes subscription (you've got one of those, right?). Well, nothing. CO-OP Live will go right into the same CO-OP feed you've been using. While we'll record the show live, once we're done we'll re-compress and upload it as per usual, and those of you unable to watch the shenanigans (oh, we'll have shenanigans) as they happen will still get the full show later Tuesday night. The same series of download links will also be available.

Big thanks to Dylan Kenney for the new theme song we're going to be using starting next Tuesday! He's a fantastically talented musician, and his music fits the soul of our new show and the new/old logo perfectly! Why is this logo new/old instead of just new? Because it's what indie game designer Phil Fish originally came up with wa-hay back in the day when we were first slapping our show and our business together! He's also the creator of the upcoming game Fez.

Some folks thought this original CO-OP logo wasn't "gamer" enough, but we've always had a soft spot in our collective heart for it, and with the launch of a show that will hopefully involve you as much as it does us, it felt more fitting. CO-OP Live should eventually become truly, er, cooperative. We couldn't have gotten this far without you and now it's time to bring you into the act.

Make sure to follow coop_live on Twitter; we'll use that during certain parts of the show to talk directly with you. Revision3 apparently has some kind of live chat-room software that could possibly be up by next Tuesday, so keep an eye out for that as well on the Revision3 CO-OP page, though I don't have the details yet as to how/if it's going to work.

Essentially, the new show will go like this: we're going to shoot and mix game review/preview coverage, interviews, and -- a first for us -- game demo segments, live on the show. We'll have as many guests on as we can, and once a conversation is over, we'll bring in you, the audience, for your thoughts.

Now's your chance to tell Ryan and me that we're idiots for not liking Demon's Souls! And you can make fun of us to our virtual faces for making extremely hyperbolic claims or malformed sentences, as we're not going to be able to edit them out like we normally do. What, you thought we only edited around gameplay footage? Oh ho ho, if only you knew the kind of shit that's hit the cutting room floor! Well, I guess now you will.

We have a lot of plans for other kinds of segments, and most of them would have been impossible in the original CO-OP format (can you say musical guest?). Still, we want conversations, not talking heads. Criticism, not just score run-downs, and we want to shoot the show in a way that isn't just static cameras locked to some people in the center of the screen. Our goal is to make the Area 5 mark on the live format and apply as much of our style to it as we can, even though we'll be on a regular set instead of shooting guerilla-style about San Francisco.

But that's not to say that pre-edited work is going away! We hope that the live format saves us enough time so that we can go back to making Area 5 Snacks and other shorts. We'll have to work up to that, though, so please be patient with us as we smooth out the kinks in our live show and really spit-polish it to that sheen that we've all come to expect in our more traditional work.

So what about CO-OP, non-Live? Technically, CO-OP is a separate IP, and we're signing a separate contract with Revision3 for CO-OP Live. That means it could come back. Will it? Not soon, no, unless someone wants to sign a deal with us to do it again (and we're still very open to that possibility). Our work with the new, resurgent, so-cutting-edge-that-it-practically-bleeds Electronic Gaming Monthly will be the most immediate place you'll have to see our edited stuff. So far all we've done for EGM is gameplay clips, but that's going to change, and soon. You're going to like what we/they have in store :)

Our hope, though, is that CO-OP Live will be even more important to your gaming entertainment life than even CO-OP was! So come back every week. Chat with us directly, and let us know how we can improve the show. Our new format is going to make us more versatile than ever and more able to quickly adapt to changes and suggestions, and while we're definitely going to need your patience while we get things running smoothly (we think it'll take us several shows), we'll also need your help to make CO-OP Live its very best!