One of my favorite hobby horses is how video games, an industry that generates more revenue than the movie and music industries combined, is largely ignored by the old media. To me, this has been a baffling exercise in willful blindness, something akin to when theater ignored the arrival of motion pictures, much to their long-term chagrin. The arrival of the video game industry has proven to be a watershed event, one that would transform the world of entertainment forevermore. How did this happen? At long last, someone has acknowledged the Donkey Kong gorilla in the room and attempted to answer that question by chronicling the rise of this new entertainment goliath. Deposit a token to watch Netflix's new docu-series about the rise of video games, High Score.
High Score is an enjoyably breezy series that begins to answer that question by introducing the viewer to the eclectic mix of brainy individuals who saw the potential for bloops, bleeps, and pixels to create an entirely new medium of entertainment, one where the player would be the star of the show. The usual suspects are covered in High Score's six episodes, from the "Godfather of Video Games" Nolan Bushnell, the man who would found Atari, perhaps to most iconic video game brand of all time, to John Romero of Doom fame, a game that would use the more powerful hardware of the early 1990s to create a new sub-genre, the first-person shooter, and the resultant controversy about increasing violence in video games that dogs it to this day. While High Score keeps the focus on these pivotal pioneers of the video game industry, it is also careful to not ignore the lifeblood of the genre, its many passionate fans. Standout devotees get their due, too, such as Chris Tang, the 1994 Sega World Championship winner (notable for being the first-ever global e-sports contest), as well as Rebecca Heineman, winner of the first Space Invaders U.S. national championship and subsequent industry mover and shaker (she would found Interplay Productions, amongst other game studios). All in all, High Score paints a complete picture of the industry, from its titans to its devotees.
Adding to the enjoyment of the series is the pitch-perfect narration of Charles Martinet, who also happens to be the voice of the iconic video game character Mario in the Super Mario video game series. Not too serious, not too fanboyish, his bouncy narration is exactly what this documentary needed.
In addition to Martinet's enjoyable narration, High Score features some amusing animated segments. Rendered in the fashion of classic 16-bit graphics, these interstitial animations provide some colorful levity to the various topics discussed by the show. Add in a jaunty musical track, one seemingly right out of a lighthearted adventure video game, as you have a slickly-produced documentary that is as informative as it is entertaining.
My only complaint about High Score is its brevity. As mentioned above, the series runs for six forty-odd minute episodes, bringing the fabulously sprightly story of video games only into the early 1990s, right about when the internet was becoming a thing. I suspect this brevity resulted in some interesting subjects not being covered, such as the nasty 8-Bit War between the Atari 800 series and the Commodore 64, a brutal conflict that left we veterans forever scarred and embittered. As someone who spent many years covering video games, both professionally and personally (see one of my old video game blogs here), I found myself craving more episodes about the inside stories of the hardware, personalities, and, of course, games found in this ever-evolving but always fascinating realm of electronic entertainment. Such an engaging series about this multifaceted industry and hobby deserves far more than six episodes!
This being Netflix, I suspect that if the ratings are there, we can expect High Score to make a return with some additional episodes in a new season. I certainly hope so! As a proud Gen Xer, I will be a gamer until the day I am no more. I have always seen video games as the next evolutionary step of entertainment, one that is gradually achieving the lofty goal of transforming the consumer of entertainment from a passive spectator to an active participant in the creation of a uniquely personal story. This is something that no movie or television show will be able to match for quite some time given the inherent limitations of those two mediums.
What is more, video games are already achieving something far more grandiose: a shared, global culture that transcends nation, race, and even gender (a once lopsidedly male hobby is now comprised of ~40% females in the United States). I suspect this is why I am particularly fond of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. As I wrote in my magnificent review of the movie,
Perhaps the most enduring cultural accomplishment of that decade was the rise of video games. From a niche hobby of Radio Shack nerds to a ubiquitous presence in contemporary culture, it was the eighties that nourished the fledgling video game efforts of the seventies into what is now an $80 billion dollar industry. Fittingly, Ready Player One kept our love of video games front and center. While the cinematic treatment of RPO did remove key references to the classic video games of the eighties, Ernest Cline's love for video game history nonetheless shines through the film, especially at the movie's finale where the Atari 2600 classic Adventure steals the spotlight. Again, I found it striking how differently Gen Xers and Millenials approach video games from their Baby Boomer elders. Unlike the unrelenting fear and derision that is often de rigueur for Baby Boomer cynics (when was the last time you heard a positive story about video games from the dinosaur media?), RPO presents a much more grounded view of this electronic world where, yes, excess can lead to a detachment from the real world, but also one where it can serve to unite people in a shared culture that transcends nationality, gender, and race. In other words, unlike the sixties regressive, clan-like social attitudes, gaming culture (in all its borderless forms) could well prove to be the great unifier and refuge of man, hence the "Oasis," a fitting sobriquet for RPO's virtual world that proves to be such an important escape from the downtrodden real world. As Wade says, Halliday, founder of Gregarious Games, "showed us we go could go somewhere without going anywhere." That's a pretty good summation of the allure of video games!
Boy, I'm smart! 😄
If you haven't given Netflix's High Score a watch, do so now. Whether you are a grizzled veteran of the cyber battlefields of gaming, or a complete newb (as we like to say) curious about the hype surrounding every new generation of console, High Score provides an entertaining introduction to the history of video games, albeit an all-too-brief one.
Recommended.
Score: B+
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