High Score

High Score may not be the most in-depth or lengthy documentary series you’ll ever see, but the curated interviews from folks with compelling stories and charismatic personalities bring a personal touch. Nostalgia does the rest. And we’re here for it.

If High Score's goal is to be an enjoyable, colorful and whimsical overview, it at least delivers on that with some flair.

High Score is narrowly focused – the US and Japan dominate, as if the rest of video game history never happened, and while Atari’s early consoles and the Nintendo Entertainment System crop up in almost every episode, the Amiga, Spectrum and Commodore 64 are never so much as mentioned. ... But this series does well at explaining what was exciting about this time, and the way that each of the landmark games featured built on the foundations of what came before.

It’s a show obsessed with loving games, not understanding them. ... The series is at its best when it’s focused less on what it was like to see these games come out, and more on what it was like to design them.

These personal and often unexpected stories are easily the highlight of High Score, and they’re occasionally the only thing that saves it from turning into the public school version of a video game history lesson.

Each episode focuses on a few stories/subjects for its running time, but often bounces around them within the episode, leading to a sense that the entire thing isn’t as focused or complete as it should be.

It’s less “here’s what happened,” and more, “hey, remember this?” Given how bad the game industry itself is at preserving and analyzing its own history beyond merely capitalizing on nostalgia, that makes High Score a huge missed opportunity.

Good documentary, The doom and Nintendo episodes are probably the best. This series gets a lot of hate for the "woke" "propaganda" in it, but I'm glad they talked about Jerry Lawson and the channel F, he deserves to be as talked about as Nolan Bushnell and Gunpei Yokoi. Overall a good documentary if you're into video games

Obviously anyone who knows anything about videogame history was not a target audience and while it was entertaining the whole series just had a feeling of a hot mess about it. The RPG episode jumped from Sierra to Ultima to final fantasy to an obscure gender identity game, which I assume was meant to give the series a sense of emotional magnitude? To me it just felt disjointed.

High Score: Putting the Gay in Gamer Woke politics don't belong here. It would be a much higher score without the woke agenda crap.

Middle-aged talking nerd heads reliving the early days of video games, with pseudo-Super Mario graphics added in for fun. The Japanese contribution was especially interesting. Enjoyable from a nostalgia point of view. Be aware that it goes out of its way to include LBGTQ/PoC. It's Netflix after all.

The series has some interesting topics discussed but it feels it needs to force in pointless political narratives that offer very little to the episodes as a whole, and generally feel like a waste of time. We want to talk about a video game tournament, well lets find the one person who is transgender and highlight them. We are talking about RPGs and just showed Amano who is famous among Final Fantasy fans. Let's randomly transition to a gay man during the AIDS pandemic, spouting vitriol against preachers and Republicans. He made this one game that nobody has heard of and it literarily no longer exists, but he says it happened so that's enough to include him. These decisions feel forced and redirect the narrative being built. They also feel completely out of place when surrounded by titans in gaming history. My other gripe is every clip of gameplay shown from games made in the past 20 years, always look like somebody recorded the game being played on a tv or computer. There are obvious lines across the screen and it looks terrible. There's really no excuse for that.