High Score (Netflix Docuseries)
Claire Brownstone, Contributing Editor
Netflix has been churning out documentaries in recent years, and a new one that released this year will certainly pique the interest of gaming fans. High Score is a documentary series that focuses on the relatively recent history of the video game industry. Created by France Costrel and narrated by Charles Martinet, the voice of Nintendo’s Mario, the series gives an in-depth look at some pivotal points of innovation in gaming. The advantage that this documentary has over other historical series is that the vast majority of the important figures are still alive – meaning they were able to make the documentary almost entirely by interviewing the primary sources of information.
An example of artistic license during an interview with Howard Scott Warshaw.
And they certainly interviewed a deluge of people:creators like Richard Garriott, marketing experts such as Gail Tilden from Nintendo of America, and even company lawyers like John Kirby (and yes, his name was borrowed for the Nintendo character Kirby in honor of his work). Along with these interviews, the documentary relies on pixelated graphic art to depict some of the stories, albeit sometimes with hilarious artistic license. For example, Howard Scott Warshaw, the creator of the infamous game E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, met Steven Spielberg to pitch his idea for the game. Obviously meeting somebody as famous as Spielberg made Howard a little star-struck. So they animated the encounter as if Warshaw was the protagonist in a turn-based RPG and Spielberg was the giant boss at the end of a video game. They also occasionally make use of the participants’ acting to fill in some of the screen time. Most of them, unsurprisingly, are not professional actors. You can tell by the poorly hidden smile on their faces that most feel a little awkward during these moments, but it adds to the lighthearted tone of the documentary.
The writing overall is extremely engaging, aided by the easy delivery of the narrator and the sheer enthusiasm of the interviewees. They’re all eager to share their stories, and it feels like you are in the room with each of them as they divulge their most thrilling details from the early years of gaming. High Score does an excellent job of framing each episode into certain categories, making some connections that seem unlikely. For example, one episode connects Wolfenstein 3D and Star Fox, two seemingly unrelated games. The show reveals that both games almost simultaneously made the jump from 2D to 3D graphics in 1992 and 1993, respectively. Id Software, John Romero’s company, emulated Nintendo’s smooth side-scrolling on the PC, and then made the jump into one of the world’s first 3D first-person shooters. Wolfenstein also served as the basis for Id Software’s next game, Doom, one of the first games to feature online multiplayer.
John Romero, designer of Doom, acting like the actual Doom Guy.
Star Fox’s entry into the third dimension has a similarly strange back story. An 18-year-old programmer from Argonaut Software, Dylan Cuthbert, managed to hack the Gameboy into running a 3D demo. This was without approval, or support, from Nintendo themselves. Nintendo found out about it, and rather than pressing charges, they recruited him to help create a 3D game for their newest console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). There’s a ton of trivia you learn throughout the show, such as the fact that Nintendo as a company has been around a lot longer than you would expect, getting its start in 1889 as a hanafuda playing card company, or that the aforementioned E.T the Extra-Terrestrial game was almost single-handedly responsible for the crash of the video game market in the early 1980s.
The one area where the show could be improved is in the chronology. Often times an episode would start at one point in history, but then go to a previous point in time to explain the events leading up to that point. This skipping around isn’t an issue in itself, since it’s a common writing choice in documentaries, but the show fails to sufficiently mark when they jump to different points in history. As a result, the thread of cause-and-effect is lost at a number of points, leaving the viewer to scratch their heads about what happened when.
The show creators highlight a diverse array of people, including women, people of color, and LGBTQ community members. It’s refreshing that they put the spotlight on those that have been previously overlooked due to prejudice, whether intentional or unintentional. They interview the children of Jerry Lawson, one of the few African-American engineers involved in the video game industry in the 1970s. He was largely responsible for the invention of the game cartridge, allowing for a new system for console gaming which revolutionized the industry. It is surprising, given how foundational his work was to the industry as a whole, that he did not get more recognition while he was alive. They also focus on positive aspects of gaming for minorities and marginalized groups. Multiple interviewees expressed how they felt they could truly be themselves behind a screen, which was vitally important when they were faced with social rejection or exclusion. They touch on the importance of representation in gaming as well, and how much it can mean to somebody to see their likeness in a video game, especially as a protagonist. Gordon Bellamy, who was responsible for ensuring that the Madden NFL series accurately represented the fact that the NFL has a majority of black athletes, explains in an interview that, as a minority, so much energy is spent justifying your existence, seeing a game in which the default setting is your own ethnicity can be a welcome relief.
Overall, High Score is entertaining from beginning to end. It certainly focuses on the positive aspects of the gaming industry, leaving out important issues such as forced overtime (or “crunch”), It’s also not a comprehensive documentary on the entire history of gaming, as it only focuses on a few key moments. All the same, you will almost certainly learn things about the history of gaming that you didn’t know beforehand. If you’re in the mood for a feel-good documentary on games, this show is definitely worth your time.
Interested in more articles about videogame history, why not check out our reviews of Sid Meier’s Memoir! and Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings (Ken Williams’ account of Sierra Online).
