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High score, Netflix’s new documentary series about the early days of video games, is filled with fascinating characters, glittering arcade cabinets, stunning pixel animations, flashy graphics, loosely woven threads, and an incredible feeling that video games are simply the best. Like another recent blockbuster documentary series, ESPN The last dance, it delivers hit after hit of nostalgia for the 80s and 90s, a potent and, lately, particularly welcome drug. But also like this documentary, it is unlikely that it will transform the viewer’s perception of its central subject. It’s a show obsessed with the love of games, without understanding them.
Each of the High scoreThe six episodes (all of which premieres on Netflix Wednesday) are a rough account of a specific period or genre in early gaming culture, told through a series of nested character profiles. Because of this character focus, each episode is less the story of a particular era in the game and more a collection of stories of notable personalities associated with that era, linked with the help of narrator Charles Martinet, the voice. of Mario himself, who ties it all together in a happy arc.
Sometimes it works well. In the best episode of the series, “Role Players”, we follow some of the characters that game connoisseurs can expect: the charming King’s Quest designers Roberta and Ken Williams, pioneers of graphical adventure games in the early 1980s, and eccentric creator of the 1981 open-world RPG Latest, Richard Garriott. But the episode also features less expected detours, including one in the studio of Yoshitaka Amano, the legendary illustrator of the first installments of Final fantasy. At one point, the story pivots on 1992 developer Ryan Best. Gayblade. Gayblade was among the first queer games, and featured an adventure “to save Empress Nelda from the disgusting right-wing creatures inhabiting the dungeon” and ultimately defeat the final boss Lord Nanahcub. (It’s “Buchanan” backwards, like in Pat.) Unfortunately, Gayblade is now lost in time, but Best’s story is truly moving, and featuring his story, High score Hopefully this will lead to a breakthrough in localizing a copy of the game. It’s a sweet reminder of how ephemeral digital art can be, and it’s one of the many moments in the series that can to remind viewers how diverse the pioneers of the art form were.
But even though “Role Players” succeeds as a series of interwoven character pieces, the early story of the genre remains a patchwork. Focusing on Richard Garriott and Latest, the episode rules out the equally important role-playing game Witchcraft, which came out the same year. And as exciting as seeing Amano watercolor a sketch of Terra de Final Fantasy VI, High score does not go down in history the way Final fantasyThe creators were working from a pattern defined by Yuji Horii’s earlier Dragon quest series, which had its own featured illustrator at Akira Toriyama. Or how Dragon quest was directly influenced by Horii’s encounter with Witchcraft in San Francisco in the early 1980s. Facing the complexity of this chain of international influence, High scoreThe story of history could be not only more precise but richer. Instead, he’s happy to hang out with the characters he has on hand. Thankfully, other documentaries have chronicled the RPG’s early days more fully.
This character-centric approach probably arose out of High scoreGreat Big Story production house pedigree. Great Big Story is an independent web spinoff from CNN originally designed to produce short documentary content suitable for YouTube (read: suitable for advertisers). Their series are short, punchy, elegant and satisfying. Great Big Story co-founder Chris Berend once described his editorial vision as “fundamentally optimistic, but not naive or sunny.” But translating Great Big Story’s abbreviated optimistic approach into six over 40-minute episodes, that optimism starts to sound easy, especially in the face of the intense amount of production design used to underpin everything.
This is especially glaring when the series asks its subjects to participate in its artful reenactments. Sometimes that just involves playing games for the camera in a dark room as strobe lights ripple over them. Other times, it means full, scripted skits. Probably the worst of these comes from the second episode, which spends inordinate amounts of time following the extremely mundane story of Shaun Bloom, a former teenage Nintendo gaming advisor (essentially a call center employee tasked with giving advice for Nintendo games.). At one point, Bloom stars in a fake training video for said counseling service, featuring a Ron Duguay-style mule, ripped jeans, hokey script, and fake ’80s VHS video effects. The cumulative effect of this Bloom’s sketch and story is nothing more than reminding us that Nintendo Game Advisors were one thing.
And above all High score wishes to relive the youth of gaming. As far as it’s a story, it’s the story of game consumption – the story of what it was like to unbox that Atari at Christmas, to experience the rivalry between Nintendo and Sega in the 90s, to discuss violence in video games while you are playing Mortal combat with friends. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that kind of approach, but I wish the show would try to break through more often, rather than retread it. After all, these events have all happened over the past few decades, well in the living memory of many adult gamers.
It’s a shame, because the series is at its best when it focuses less on what it was like to see these games come out, and more on what it was to design them. In the first episode we watch Space invaders Creator Tomohiro Nishikado flips through his original design journals, seeing his sketches of what would become the iconic pixelated aliens. In the final strong episode, we also get a development history of Condemn and the birth of the competitive first-person shooter, as well as the history of the first 3D games.
High score worth watching for many of its individual parts, but these parts don’t match up to much whole.
In our current year, there is no point in a documentary series telling us that the world’s greatest entertainment medium is cool and fun. And while High score worth watching for many of its individual parts, these parts do not form much of a whole. By focusing largely on how it felt to make and consume these products at the time, High score largely avoids modern parallels, and thus avoids the difficult questions that these parallels raise. The optimism inherent in the Great Big Story approach means he’s not interested in exploring how the origins of video games and Silicon Valley attitudes toward work could possibly help us. bring to our current working environment in video games. Nor is he interested in examining how fan culture and console hawkishness helped spark the toxicity that plagues much of the gaming discourse. It might be too much to expect these kinds of questions on a show designed as a long whiff of nostalgia, but it can’t help but feel like a missed opportunity for a show with this level of budget and expense. sourcing not to try something more difficult. Like the games he adores, High score is a fun way to pass the time, but you can’t help but feel like it’s on easy mode.
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