The documentary series’High Score‘, just released on Netflix, is called, despite its apparently innocuous nature, to arouse some controversy. Its virtues and its problems are so obvious and undeniable that each viewer will have to assess what to expect from a documentary on video games, specifically on its origins. And yet, it is unlikely that even the most surly of critics and the most accommodating of fanboys will not concede to ‘High Score’ which, at the very least, has gotten itself into considerable scrubbing.
The main and most obvious of his problems, from which all the others stem, is that in six episodes of less than 50 minutes each it is impossible to cover the entire history of the video game. Its episodes are slightly thematic, sometimes dealing with historical moments (the pioneers, the Nintendo tsunami in the early eighties, the Nintendo-Sega war), sometimes with technical issues (3D), sometimes with genres (games of role playing, fighting games). Only by reading the theme of each one, the minimally seasoned player – and it is not necessary to be an expert in the medium – will detect gaps.
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Driving games, strategy games, or classic video adventures, videogames from countries other than the United States or Japan, the industry does not mainstream, the arcade classics before ‘Street Fighter II‘, the dozens of successful consoles that are not the usual two or three, the existing portable game since the days of las Game & Watch… we agree that recent phenomena such as the explosion of the internet for online gambling (something is pointed out when talking about ‘DOOM’) or phenomena like ‘Minecraft‘ The ‘Fortnite‘can be left out of the field of study of the series if you want to talk only about classic games (although you should not if you want to talk about games that have opened new avenues for the medium), but the series does not mention even the first PlayStation. Nor, of course, any console that came later.
AND that’s only on the surface: if we delve into each of the episodes, the untreated spaces are clamorous. In the fighting games chapter, they talk about ‘Street Fighter II’ and ‘Mortal Kombat’, yes, but not about their successors or the origins of the genre. And in the RPG, only the first steps of the ‘Ultima’ saga are explained, how the pioneer Roberta Williams created her first game and some notes on ‘Final Fantasy’. It is not because each chapter leaves essential names without mentioning, it is that each of the episodes is a handful of brief shots into the air that prevent the viewer from taking a not already complete, but merely global vision of the subject.
‘High Score’: the good part
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Where is the positives in this new documentary series, then? Precisely in his almost declared position against completism. ‘High Score’ simply wants to throw at the viewer a handful of portraits, of disconnected moments in the long history of video games, to illustrate the great variety of characters, genres and moments that populate it. In that sense, without looking for a utility beyond “(most of) these people are very important to the environment”, production works.
And it works because, barring a couple of creators or players who have no interest beyond the folklore of marketing, most talking busts have things to tell and they do it with grace. It is true that the series insists time and again on talking about the champions of video game tournaments of the eighties and nineties, in stories that are not very interesting – except that of Rebecca Heineman, the first champion of a national video game competition in 1981, and, significantly, co-founder of the mythical Interplay studio-, but there are genuine pioneers among the guests, and it is appreciated if they share where they got their ideas or with what techniques they did it.
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On a fetishistic level, ‘High Score’ offers gifts to fans of retro culture in practically every episode: mainly, an endless number of documents directly brought from the past, from strange recordings for television and not very seen ads to moving images of some little known video games. Some of this material is shown by its own authors, such as original alien designs from ‘Space Invaders’ by Tomohiro Nishikado, planning from ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ by Naoto Ohshima or the demon sketches for ‘DOOM’ by John Romero.
The documentary’s approach is sometimes too complacent with the stories told by its protagonists, who are too generous with their own mythologies. When the creator of ‘Street Fighter II’ talks about his game as the first video game that allowed the confrontation between two players, or Romero says that ‘Wolfenstein 3D’ was the first game in real three dimensions, nobody is in charge of qualifying his words, even as a comment at the bottom. It is logical: many of these designers (especially North Americans) are also professional salespeople of their own, and tend to exaggerate. But a documentary shouldn’t nod and shut up.
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‘High Score’ es an unpretentious gift for those interested, more than in the history or the secret springs of the medium, in its aesthetics and its anecdotes. He knows that the material he deals with can be effortlessly polished, as shown by the animated interludes or the ironic start of the series, with nothing less than the story of the disastrous ‘ET the Extraterrestrial’ for Atari. ‘High Score’ takes advantage of its tricks, but it often falls into its own traps, leaving too many proper names out of its stories (obvious example: John Carmack and Ed Boon, 50% of ‘Doom’ and ‘Mortal Kombat’ respectively, They are mentioned in passing, and all the attention goes to John Romero and John Tobias … why? because they were closer to hand?).
Although the sense of missed opportunity persists at the end of each chapter, it is fair to acknowledge the efforts of ‘High Score’. For example, it tells the fascinating and moving story of Jerry Lawson, African American who designed the Fairchild Channel F and, with it, literally invented the cartridge game, that is to say, the machines that executed different video games. A genuine revolution, beyond winning a ‘Sonic’ tournament from the nineties, and rarely told in detail. It is these moments, when he focuses on them, that make ‘High Score’ win in full (or, for example, with the birth of ‘Ms. Pac-Man’ as a hack of ‘Pac-Man’ or the story of the Long-missing activist RPG ‘GayBlade’). But unfortunately, six episodes later, there is still too much to tell.
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