My first encounters with GSN were from my first tape trade in 1996, when I got the premiere, finale, and a handful of the New Year's specials of Match Game, along with Password Plus and Super Password episodes (PW+ premiere, the "I was married to him for too long" ep. with Lucy and Dick Martin; two random SP's but including one where someone makes the exact same goof made on the PW+ premiere). I got by with tape trades to fulfill my game show fix for a while, but did think of how nice it would be to have this little network some of these old memories came from. Well a year later, our cable company was previewing some potential new channels (Sci-Fi and the Golf Channel were among the other candidates, with the former I was reunited with MST3K unexpectedly one evening too!) and had a vote on them. Sure enough, GSN was one of the choices too so I had my VCR working overtime capturing as much as I could from the couple of days they were showing it. I forget who won the vote, but shortly after all the channels ended up on our system anyway. Needless to say, I was in heaven...everything seemed just right at that time too (from the variety to little scheduling nuances like having Wheel at 11 am eastern, the slot the daytime version usually was in on NBC when I was growing up).
Little did I know that months later would come the so-called Dark Period...as we know now, it wasn't THAT bad but started some trends that would never leave the channel (repeating shows for instance). GSN has since had ups and downs but never reached that time when I first got it, IMO. And the scary thing is it was EVEN BETTER before 1997...the Club AM and etc. days.
Question...when did they first get TPIR? I know they did have clips of it in promos from when they started, but that disappeared soon. That is one advantage that came later.