High Score

The six-part docuseries delves into the golden age of video games, when legends — including Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Doom — were brought to life, followed by the likes of Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Sonic the Hedgehog and John Madden Football.

Six hour-long episodes, -surprised they dropped on a Wednesday. I've watched the first episode and it's great fun, -very much in the vein of "The Toys That Made Us".

Watched the first two episodes so far, good stuff. Born in 84 so I didn't quite experience the real early stuff like Space Invaders and all that. Also didn't realize the Nintendo championship like in the movie The Wizard was a real thing. The modding stuff was interesting too. Gonna watch episode 3 now.

I am THE demo of for this series as I grew up with Intellivision/Atari, and into the 90's with Nintendo/Sega and eventually Playstation. Will they mention the Commodore 64 in one of the episodes?

Series like this is the reason that Netflix is the only streaming service I feel is worth the price. They are literally the HBO of this era as I can always find something to watch because they are constantly putting out new/great stuff. Every other streaming service usually has 1 or 2 things that sell it and they aren't worth the price.

This sounds good. Thanks for the heads up OP!

Just finished E4. Really good limited series. Nice seeing Roberta and Ken Williams talk about how they started.

Just finished the run. Interesting that in ends in both an overview of the series, and a one-minute origin of Atari, which suggests a slate of future episodes.

It was decent but I expected a little more out of it. I wish there was far less of the reenactment stuff. We didn't need 5-10 minutes of the ex Nintendo game counselor wearing a fake mullet and pretending to be working there again. We didn't need 5-10 minutes of Richard Garriott dressing up and pretending to play D&D with himself. Also not sure how you spend 30 minutes talking about making the original Sonic the Hedgehog and not once even mention Yuji Naka's name.

Yeah, this brings back the memories and has some cool info, but it's not crushing it like The Toys That Made Us did for me. Re-enacting scenes with pixelated cartoons is wearing thin on me.

Yeah, agreed about the cartoons. They're very annoying.

Wish they could have got Miyamoto, but he’s so important to Nintendo that he’s apparently barred from talking about his personal life for fear that other people will get ideas for games from anything he says. So I assume that would apply to his design sketches or any insights

I appreciate getting to see all the random people, and some of whom I recognized due to subscribing to Nintendo Power, like Gail Tilden. The book “Game Over” goes into the DK lawsuit and a lot of Nintendo’s early days so it was cool to see some of that. Then there’s the randos I never heard about like those DND/RPG people. Still haven’t gotten to the Sonic ep.

Watched the first episode last night and thought it was pretty good. The structure was a bit odd, like it was about Space Invaders and expansion kits and Pac-Man and Channel F and ET, without a clear path or chronology between them.

Turns out a friend of a friend of mine made this. He said it was pretty brutal getting it made.

This doesn't surprise me, people who don't even play video games know who Miyamoto is.

Tell them that if they make another series, they should ditch the annoying animated sequences. They seem to be getting worse with each episode.

Looking forward to the next episode. DOOM!!!

Finish watching all episode and really enjoyed it. Next segment probably focus on the rise of Sony's Playstation and X-box.

Wouldn't listen to me at all but If I had to guess, he probably hated putting those sequences in as well. Funny I watched the entire thing a couple of hours before finding out who made it.

Also, not sure whoever knew this but Charles Martinet (the narrator) is the voice of Mario and a bunch of other Nintendo and other game characters.

Edit: Looks like they massively oversimplified the congressional hearings too. They didn’t show that Nintendo and Sega kept going after each other within those hearings, and instead cut to Howard Lincoln (of Nintendo, without identifying him) talking about Night Trap, implying he was part of Congress. He was also quoted on film in those hearings, saying that Night Trap would never be on a Nintendo system, which would have made the later reveal about it being on the Switch even funnier.


As a random aside, Howard Lincoln was the model for the boy to the right of the fire in this Norman Rockwell painting

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scoutmaster


Sega also “fired back” at Nintendo during those hearings and pulled out the Super Scope bazooka thing and said Nintendo also promotes violence

I guess I'm in the minority in actually kind of liking those 8bit animated shorts. A clever way to tell the story. I guess I'm a bit torn overall with the series. On one hand I liked that they told some of the lesser known stories. But on the other hand the people who they focused on in some of the episodes in great detail left me scratching my head. They weren't big players at all which is okay but they missed some huge aspects of the story. This definitely wasn't a complete documentary on video games. It was just very odd what they chose to focus on. While having a lot of screen time they didn't hit a lot of highlights of video game history. Either way still loved watching any kind of documentary on video games.

Any insight on what made the process so brutal?

I noticed and was surprised by his "documentary" voice. He's normally a very animated guy. And they didn't even mention it in the series.

Once again when it comes to esoteric documentaries, individuals on YouTube do a far superior job actually covering the information in depth.

Just finished this and I really liked it. I hope there's a second season. Cause there's so much more they could've covered.
I'd like to see episodes on:
Ever quest and MMO'S
Wii and motion control.
Pinball
Virtual Reality
modern day Esports
Sega Saturn and Dreamcast
Atari Jaguar
Arcades in Japan
PC modding

I don't know how popular theyd be but id love to see some deep dives into Developer studios like Bethesda , Naughty Dog, Rockstar etc etc .

How didn't you know they were working on it? Seems strange.

Curious to that as well. Then again I know noting about putting together something like this. My quarterly business reports really suck to put together and that is just basically a bunch of data. So I guess I can see it.

Could be his main friend didn't know or didn't talk about it or was told not to talk about until its released.

I was sort of mixed on the series. I feel it was kind of all over the place, and there were things I sort of expected to at least get a cursory mention that weren't addressed.

I thought they'd go into Pitfall, especially since the ambitious sequel was sort of a last gasp by Atari. When the Sega guy talked about the need to reach teen boys through sports games, I figured they'd bring up some of the huge Nintendo sports games (Tecmo Bowl, Double Dribble come to mind) that all boys I knew had. What about King's Quest? I would have loved to hear more about that series. It was huge in its time. I think I only played the first two, but I played through both a bunch of times. I thought the Night Trap episode was a missed opportunity to talk about a lot of other mature games (Leisure Suit Larry, Narc, Splatterhouse). I thought we'd get more about Super Mario Brothers 2, how different it was and the reaction.

There were a lot of missed opportunities. And while I liked the segment on Gay Blade, it ultimately felt like it went nowhere, especially considering how much time was spent on it.

You would love this documentary on Tetris from about 2007 or around then. They went pretty in depth, and included footage after a successful court case of the creator of Tetris and an American developer driving around to Madonna's "Holiday" in celebration. The Tetris guy said he was freaking out at the recklessness.