High Score: L'âge d'or du gaming

There is so many monumental things that happened in video game history and you spend half an episode on a game called Gay Blade that nobody had ever heard, nobody played, the code is gone... how is this relevant to video game history. Putting Myamoto and this guy in the same realm of changing history is a freaking joke. I don't need to be explained how the gay scene was in San Francisco in the 80's how is this relevant to a video game documentary.

Lying about the fact that this black men invented and came up with the idea of a game cartrige is incredibly dishonest.

Did we really need like 4 long interviews with ex video game champions.

When they were actually talking about the video game revolutions and genius ideas, it was very entertaining. But there are so many stuff in there included only for diversity sake and just fit weird in the pacing.

I am enjoying this documentary. But Netflix and the writers are misrepresenting history in order to shoehorn racial diversity into the documentary. The section I take issue with is with Jerry Lawson, a black man who is stated to be the "inventor" of the game cartridge. The documentary states that before Lawson became involved, it had "never been done before." This is just flat out wrong. The swappable ROM cartridge concept was invented by Wallace Kirschner and Lawrence Haskel. Lawson worked on the Channel F game console, the first of its type, but swappable game cartridges had already been invented before he came along. So while it's certain he played a role in the development of an actual marketable, sellable product that used cartridges, it was not his invention, and unfair to the actual inventors to deprive them of their credit. While I have no problem with Netflix very obviously choosing diverse individuals (transgender, black etc) to fit their well-known diversity mandates, it is NOT cool to twist the facts just to make the narrative work.

Enjoyable, but I think there's a ton of missing info they could have used to give a more profound view of things. The show is basically guided by the personal experiences of some people in the industry, and it ends with 16-bits consoles.

For being arguably the most popular hobby since the invention of the television, there are scant few comprehensive documentaries about video games and their rich, immense history. You could easily identify 20 hours of solid historical content for this medium and still leave another 20 hours on the cutting room floor. That is why it is so disappointing that this series spends so much of its precious time on inane crap that you won't care about watching and clear "woke" diversity stuff. Between old clips of 1980s Nintendo gaming tournaments and a major portion of the episode being devoted to a gay video game that absolutely nobody has heard of, this series wastes way too much time on nonsense.

Rather than tell you what is in the series, let me give you a tiny sampling of what is not in it

Every other Atari 2600 era console besides the Atari 2600 Commodore (C64, Amiga) The Dreamcast Fallout The Playstation God games (e.g. Populous, Sim City) Bethesda's RPGs Early experiments with virtual reality Starcraft Age of Empires Thief, MGS, and the rise of stealth The rise of MMORGs like Everquest

Also, anything after the year 2000, which includes: Grand Theft Auto III and the rise of the open world game, The Nintendo Wii, the entry of Microsoft into the console market, the death and rebirth of PC gaming, the rise of user-made content, the explosion in popularity of E3 and its decline, Halo, the list goes on.

What is in here is still surprisingly fluffy and uninteresting compared to some of the other documentaries out there. If you want, for instance, to see an excellent documentary on the early arcade and Atari 2600 era, I highly recommend World 1-1, a great film produced by a couple of amateurs on a shoestring budget that came from crowdfunding.

The documentary has its strengths with showing the people that actually made the game and give some background to the games we loved to play as kids. The bit annoying part is that the documentary is trying too hard to be inclusive on diversity, including people on project just for the purpose of diversity, not for technological or creative break-throughs. Annoying too is that they half-jokingly make E.T. responsible for bringing down the video console industry in 1983. My personal bet is that Commodore 64 and sharing games on floppy had a huge influence on that.