High score, Netflix’s new documentary series on the early history of video games, is full of captivating characters, flickering arcade cabinets, beautiful pixel animations, flashy graphics, loose-fitting yarns, and an aw-shucks feeling that video games are simply the best. Like another recent hit documentary, ESPNs The Last Dance, it delivers hit after hit of the 1980s and 90s nostalgia, a powerful and, recently, especially welcome drug. But even like that documentary, it is likely to transform the perception of the view of its central subject. It is a show obsessed with loving games, not understanding them.
Every fan High scoreThe six episodes (all of which premiere on Netflix on Wednesday) are a rough account of a specific period as a genre in early gaming culture, told via a series of interlocking character profiles. Because of this focus on character, each episode is less the story of a particular era in gaming and more a collection of stories of notable personalities associated with that era, along with the help of narrator Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario himself, which ties it all up in a cheerful bow.
Sometimes this works well. In the best episode of the show, “Role Players”, we follow some of the figures that gaming connoisseurs can expect: the charming King’s Quest designers Roberta and Ken Williams, who pioneered graphic adventure games in the early 1980s, and the eccentric creator of the 1981 Open World RPG Ultima, Richard Garriott. But the episode also received some less-than-expected coverage, including one in the studio of Yoshitaka Amano, the legendary illustrator for the early installations of Final Fantasy. At one point, the story turns to Ryan Best, developer of 1992’s GayBlade. GayBlade was one of the first queer games, and presented an adventure “to rescue Empress Nelda from the disgusting judge creatures that inhabited the dungeon” and eventually take down final boss Lord Nanahcub. (That’s “Buchanan” backwards, as in Pat.) Sad, GayBlade is now lost in time, but Best’s story is really moving, and by presenting his story, High score will hopefully drive a breakthrough in locating a copy of the game. It’s a soft reminder of how ephemeral digital art can be, and it’s one of several moments in the series that viewers may remember how diverse the pioneers of the art form actually were.
But even if “Role Players” succeeds as a series of interesting characters, the early history of the genre leaves a patchwork. By concentrating on Richard Garriott and Ultima, the episode sidelines the equally important role-playing game Wizardry, which was released the same year. And as exciting as it is to see Amano watercolor a sketch of Terra from Final Fantasy VI, High score does not come into the story of how Final FantasyThe makers worked from a template previously created by Yuji Horii Dragon Quest series, which had its own star illustrator in Akira Toriyama. Or how Dragon Quest was directly affected by Horii’s encounter with Wizardry in San Francisco in the early 1980s. By dealing with the complexity of this international chain of influence, High scoreThe story could not only be more accurate, but richer. Instead, it’s happy to just hang out with the characters it has on hand. Fortunately, other documentaries have a better understanding of the early history of the RPG.
This character-centric approach probably grew out of it High scorehis family tree of production house Great Big Story. Great Big Story is an independent web-native spinoff from CNN originally designed to produce short YouTube-friendly (read: advertiser-friendly) documentary content. Their series are short, punchy, stylish, and satisfying. Great Big Story co-founder Chris Berend once described his editorial staff as “fundamentally optimistic, but not naive or sunny.” But when translating Great Big Story’s optimistic short-form approach to six 40-plus-minute episodes, that optimism begins to look decent, especially against the intense amount of production design used to back it all up.
This is very touching as the series asks its subjects to take part in their gimmicky remake. Sometimes this is just about playing games for the camera in a dark room as stumbling lights ripple across them. Other times, it means complete script with script. The worst of these is probably from the second episode, which spends an incredible amount of time following the very everyday story of Shaun Bloom, a former teenage Nintendo game advisor (basically an employee of the call-in center mission to issue tips for Nintendo games). At one point, Bloom starred in a fake training video for said escort service, complete with a Ron Duguay – esque mullet, ripped jeans, a hockey script, and faux ’80s VHS video effects. The cumulative effect of this shit and Bloom’s storyline is nothing more than to remind us that Nintendo game advisors were a thing.
And above all High score is interested in reviving the youth of gaming. Insofar as it is entirely a history, it is the history of consuming games – the story of what it was like to unveil Atari at Christmas, to experience Nintendo and Sega’s 90s rivalry, to debate violence in video games while you played Deadly war with friends. There is nothing inherently wrong with this kind of approach, but I wish the series tried to break ground more often, instead of recreating it. After all, these events have all happened in the past few decades, well within the living memory of many adult gamers.
It’s sad, because the series is at its best when it’s less focused on what it was like to see these games come out, and more on what it was like to design them. In the first episode, we see Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado flips through his original design journals, looking at his sketches for what would become the iconic pixelated aliens. In the strong final episode, we also get a history of the evolution of Doom and the birth of the competitive first-person shooter, along with the story of early 3D games.
High score is worth looking at for many of their individual parts, but those parts do not add much of a heel.
In our current year, there is no need for a documentary series to tell us that the world’s largest entertainment medium is cool and fun. And that while High score is worth looking at for many of the individual parts, those parts do not add much of a whole. In determining a great deal about how it felt to make and consume these products at the time, High score for the most part avoids modern parallels, and so avoids the hard questions that parallels bring. The optimism inherent in the Great Big Story approach means that it is not interested in exploring how the origins of video games, and Silicon Valley’s attitude toward labor, would eventually bring us to our current video game labor hellscape. It is also not interested in researching how early fan culture and console heat mongering contributed to bringing forward the toxicity that poisons so much of the talk about gaming. Maybe it’s too much to expect these kinds of interviews in a show designed as one long huff of nostalgia, but it can not help feeling like a missed opportunity for a show with this level of budget and sourcing not to try for something more challenging . Like the games it adores, High score is an entertaining way to pass the time, but one can not help it if you feel like it is set to easy mode.
