High Score

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.

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.

There are some fantastic interviews and enactments with actually legendary people like Richard Garriott and Roberta Hall among others, whose influence have shaped a whole industry to this day which impacted billions of lives. Then it moves onto some nobody who did something nobody cared about who talks about how he was oppressed by some long gone bigots. Seriously, it's mind boggling how they cannot just keep talking about games and creators without inserting totally irrelevant stuff. It's a massive disservice to many people who literally ceated history and I get why many didn't take the time to talk as it dilutes the experience. Just cut some 10-15 minutes each episode and there is a decent enough, even if lacking documentary.

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.