Series Review: "High Score" (2020).

From the producer of 8 Bit Legacy: The Curious History of Video Games comes High Score. This docuseries created by France Costrel. This documseries traces the history of classic video games, featuring insights from the innovators who brought these worlds and characters to life.

Costrel said that she was inspired to create the documentary as, growing up in France but having American friends, "[video games] are a universal language". She had worked as the showrunner for "8-Bit Legacy", a video game documentary for Great Big Story, but recognized it only covered a portion of the history of the industry. She developed a pitch for Netflix, getting help from her colleagues from the show Dark Net and Melissa Wood. Costrel had wanted to shift focus away from the games themselves as most video game documentaries, and instead to the developers behind the games and players to give insights into the creativity on video game development. Costrel decided not to try to tell a full history of video games but limit it to overarching and cohesive stories of certain periods in the industry. Costrel and Wood said it made sense to start at the onset of arcade and console games to bookend one side of their story, and opted to end with the transition into 3D computer graphics as it "make a natural ending, a new kind of stepping stone in the history of gaming". In researching their stories, Costrel said that most of the video game companies were open to working with them to showcase the case, while some of the creators had left the industry and were also ready to share their stories. While Costrel estimated they had material for about twenty hours of content they had to whittle this to the six episodes and focused more on those stories that would be of interest across all types of game players, not just hardcore gamers. One of the games featured in the series was GayBlade by Ryan Best who had created it in the 1990s. As explained in the show, while moving from Hawaii to California, all his own copies of the game were lost, and could not find any other copies elsewhere, which he had explained to the producers during production. The producers had researched online for the game to find any copies to use for the show; near the end of post-production, they had been contacted by the Schwules Museum in Berlin, who was able to supply them with a copy of the game who then returned the copy to Best. The game was added to the Internet Archive and playable there via emulation after its discovery.

The series is a vivid representation of marketing and audiovisual culture in the nineties. A concise, precise and joyful documentary about a mediatic war that shaped the imagination of millions around the globe. An entertaining history lesson about the conflicts between and the rise and fall of the world's video game giants.

Simon says High Score receives: