High Score – Limited Series

High Score is a limited series on Netflix that dives deep into the history of classic video games and the companies, inventors, and programmers that created them. Starting way back in the beginning with Space Invaders and Pac-Man and climbing through history all the way to Dungeons & Dragons, Mortal Kombat, and Doom, High Score maps out all the peaks of the industry as well as the times it almost died out. The cool thing about the history of video games, and what makes this docu-series so interesting, is that it’s actually not a very long history. This means we get to hear first-hand from the people that made it all happen: the founder of Atari, the creators of the classic games we love, the winner of the very first national video game competition, and many of them aren’t even old! High Score, which was directed by William Acks, Sam LaCroix, France Costrel, and Melissa Wood, is incredibly informative, absolutely captivating, and truly a treasure trove of interesting facts about the ebbs and flows of the video game industry.

Episode 1: Boom & Bust

Episode 1 of High Score starts with the very inception of video games: with arcade games. It’s the late 1970s and Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Missile Command are raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars for arcades—in quarters! We get interviews with Tomohiro Nishikado, the creator of Space Invaders; Toru Iwatani, the creator of Pac-Man; Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari; Karen and Anderson Lawson, the children of Jerry Lawson, who created the use of the game cartridge for at-home video game consoles. We hear from Rebecca Heineman, the very first winner of the Space Invaders U.S. national championship, and Doug Macrae, Steve Golson, and Mike Horowitz, the trio that came up with the idea of accelerator boards for arcade games, capitalizing on already existing games by enhancing them with new features and challenges. These people laid the foundation for the ginormous industry that generated over $350 BILLION dollars globally in 2023. And it all started with these people, who are still here to tell their story.

Episode 2: Comeback Kid

If Episode 1 was all about Atari, Episode 2 of High Score is all about Nintendo and the redemption it brought to the video game industry after the crash in 1983. Beginning with Nintendo’s arrival in America from Japan through the 1990 Nintendo World Championship we learn about the craze that Nintendo brought back to the American home video game industry. Also including various interviews from key players like Hirokazu Tanaka, who created sound effects for so many of Nintendo’s games, Jeff Hansen, the winner of the Nintendo World Championship, John Kirby, the lawyer who represented Nintendo when they were being sued for copyright infringement by Universal City Studios, and Shaun Bloom, one of Nintendo’s Game Play Counselors. This episode gives a lot of insight into what it was like to play a video game in the 1980s—there was no YouTube to look up cheat codes, there were passionate teenagers answering phones as Game Play Counselors. There were not computers to create new sound effects in an instant, there was Hirokazu Tanaka and his morning walks for inspiration. A really interesting episode that led perfectly into what big craze was coming next: role play games.

Episode 3: Role Players

What would you say if I told you that all the role playing games we know and love—from Webkinz to Dungeons & Dragons—originated from text-adventures? That’s right, before you could take on the persona of a plush stuffed animal or Barbarian, you responded to text prompts and went on adventure entirely through words. Episode 3 walks you through the evolution of adventure games and computer role-playing games, beginning with text-based games like Colossal Cave Adventure all the way through games we play now. Ken and Roberta Williams, the creators of Mystery House, which was the first adventure game with graphics, talk about their invention story. Ryan Best, the developer behind GayBlade, the LGBT-themed role playing game, tells the story of how a game brought a pocket of happiness to a trying time for the gay community. This episode dives deep into the personhood behind video games: with role playing games, there’s a conscience behind the player that’s not there in typical shooter games and other varieties of video games. It fosters community in a really unique way, and it’s very interesting to see just how far we’ve come in such a relatively short amount of time.

Episode 4: This is War

In Episode 4 of High Score, the console war begins. Sega takes on Nintendo for the title of best video game console, and who better to walk viewers through the strategic battle plan than Tom Kalinske, CEO of Sega America. The former Mattelite explained his 5-point plan to outdo Nintendo: 1) lower the price; 2) defeat Mario; 3) more sports; 4) cool for teens; and 5) make fun of Nintendo. As Kalinske takes viewers through each step, we get real life history of how he did it. We meet Hirokazu Yasuhara, the gameplay designer of Sonic, who helped make #2 happen. We meet Joe Ybarra, the producer for John Madden Football, who helped out with #3. Chris Tang, winner of the 1994 Sega World Champtionships shows how #4 is possible. I really appreciated the structure of this episode: here’s what we need to do and here’s how we did it. Nintendo may have beat out Atari, but can Sega take them down?

Episode 5: Fight!

At some point, video games went from collecting gold rings and escaping the grasps of colorful ghosts to fighting and shooting and violence and gore. And a big part of that transition started with Street Fighter. We meet Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda, designers of Street Fighter II, who explain how they came up with their ideas and how they were insured by Kung Fu legends like Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. We also meet John Tobias, the co-creator of the Mortal Kombat series. Episode 4 of High Score covers the fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Combat that brought a revival of arcade games while simultaneously creating the basis for eSports, professional gaming leagues. Of course, you can’t talk about the rise of violent video games without addressing the controversy that they brought on. Viewers see clips of the 1993 Congressional hearings that resulted in the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Most of all, Episode 5 adds more to the discussion of violent video games and whether or not they have harmful effects on the development of the children playing them.

Episode 6: Level Up

The final episode of High Score, we learn about the transition from 2D computer graphics to 3D computer graphics: think Super Mario Bros. versus Mario Cart. This of course, happened with Doom. Doom was revolutionary for the video game industry, and Doom creator John Romero walks viewers through every step of the process he went through to change catapult the state of games forward with the introduction of online multiplayer gaming. We also meet Dylan Cuthbert and Giles Goddard who were the front people on the creation of Star Fox. Perhaps the best part of the episode, though, is the last few minutes, which sum up the entire limited series, a final retrospective by Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, who explains how the industry has been shaped and molded by visionaries, creators, and inventors who completely changed the game.

Overall

I loved this limited series, and if you have any interest at all in video games, this is a must watch. The story that’s told is more than just a comprehensive history of where video games originated, although it is very much that as well. It’s also a look into the creative masterminds that made history. We hear directly from these inventors and designers and developers and producers about how their story came to be one that’s widely known. Their thought process when inventing, who or what they were inspired by, what went wrong and how it changed the final result. More so than that, it’s a look into the gamers’ side of the video game industry, how their lives were molded by the different games they played. It’s an anthropological history of something that barely existed 40 years ago, and is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Needless to say, I was very impressed and highly recommend High Score.