Hacker Cinema
High Score
2020 · TV series · documentary · 1 season
Created by France Costrel
This docuseries traces the history of classic video games, featuring insights from the innovators who brought these worlds and characters to life.
5 positive1 negative8 neutralfrom 14 commenters
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14 comments on Hacker News
This breaks my heart, I will miss Burger Becky, she was the sweetest kindest person and a legendary programmer.
https://www.burgerbecky.com/becky.htm
The first "Boom & Bust" episode of Netflix's series "High Score" series told the story of her winning the first Space Invaders U.S. national championship as a kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Score_(TV_series)
if I remember well, the documentary High Score produced by Netflix had a great section on how he got the part. He also voices the documentary.
Thanks for sharing, really curious to watch the video now. What I’m wondering before I do, though, is whether this isn’t that just an instance of survivorship bias? If there was another winner in the GPU space, you could be sharing video of someone else’s unique perspective, no?
Related, there was a rather interesting episode in the Netflix documentary about gaming industry history (High Score, E4 This is War). The episode is about Sega console and how it succeeded over Nintendo and others. It shows the strategy of the Sega CEO and I’ve wondered since then if the strategy of the CEO was just his genius, luck of the market circumstances, or just survivorship bias.
An example is the complete unnecessary cast of Caroline Henderson (a black woman) to the series "Vikings: Valhalla". I understand it is a fictional story, but these are Vikings for pete's sake. The only reason they cast her was evidently for diversity reasons. It is a distraction to the story, I immediately turned off. Though we know that not all vikings had blonde hair, some may be even a bit more dark skinned, but definitely not black. And it is more laughable because she's a character that yields some power in the Viking society. Laughable and a distraction to the story.
Another example of a series that, instead of focusing on its central theme, ends up injecting politically-motivated content is the series "High Score". Listen, I understand that a small portion of early video game enthusiasts care about those things, but for a series that has a purpose to tell the relevant stories about creation and development of video games in the 80s and 90s, you just can't help but to think that they felt that they needed to inject some LGBT content in it such as in episode 3 on the story about the 1st LGBT RPG game GayBlade. They end up leaving more relevant content on the table to shoehorn these themes into the series. Not everything needs to be "gay", or having a "gay angle".
I'm the co-author (Walter) of the Ultimate Simpsons Doom mod. We were never sued by Fox (now it would be Disney). Hopefully there is some sort of statute of limitations. Although these days Disney seems to be pretty cool about fan-art.
Myk Friedman did pretty much everything for the mod.
My contribution was the technical work required to remove id Software assets (graphics & sounds) from the WAD so that it could be published on the popular WAD FTP site of the day. You can read more about it in the "WALTER SAYS" section of the readme at https://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames/themes/simpsons/ulsimpdm.txt
Sadly, Myk passed away a few years back. I never actually spoke with him, it was all over email and USPS, and some facebook when that came around.
John Romero appeared on a Doom themed episode of the Netflix show "High Score". In the episode, there was a quick montage of a bunch of Doom mods. The was a split-second of a Simpsons Doom mod that appeared on screen. After careful study, I determined it was the original Simpsons Doom by Steve Blauwkamp & Chuck Fuoco. I was this close to being able to say my work was featured on Netflix. Ah well.
The first episode of Netflix's High Score covers the 1970s and early 1980s video games, including arcades. The guy who made Ms. Pac Man started by making arcade mods that increased the difficulty of games. It was a killer business model because arcades were getting lower revenue over time because the playerbase would get good at a game within months. It isn't correct to say micro-transactions moved into arcades. It's more accurate to say arcade MTX have moved into the home.
Arcade value prop is at an all-time low. It's too bad, because rhythm games are a lot of fun and impractical for homes.
I got you
Documentaries
- The Airbnb Story[1] <-- Start here
- High Score (A netflix series on the history of games, the first episode has a part where some college guys had to change hardware to make games harder)
- The Pirate Bay, Away from Keyboard
- Silicon Cowboys; highly recommend this one, I believe we wouldn't have the industry as it is today, if it weren't for Compaq.
Movies
- Who Am I, No System is safe (Look for one with English Subtitles)
- Echelon Conspiracy
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XicLf8cyh5E
I don't know but for some reason this article feels like one of those things - which is what will be see in a show 20 years from now about where/how it all started.
Like the guys from 1980s talking about video games in the recent Netflix documentary 'high score', where some people started spending 8+ hours a day playing games with really primitive graphics because it was just enough to be enjoyable.
VR now seems like something that is almost finally ready to explode and like the atari or iphone is going to change all our lives forever.
The Deja Vu feeling was bothering me. Luckily found it pretty quickly..."High Score" Episode 2 on Netflix has the most footage of what you're talking about.
Not quite the video, but if you don't have Netflix, this is publicly available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKAf8eXuh9s
Wasn’t he featured in the Netflix documentary series high score?
I think you'd like that Netflix retro gaming documentary. I think it's called 'High Score'. They go into details about the Nintendo & Sega marketing campaigns.
Actually, no. We had GayBlade up and emulated earlier this year, completely unaware of the documentary. Causal chain is actually: People working with Ryan Best to tell his story at something called RAINBOW ARCADE, the world’s first exhibition on LGBTQIA* video game history at Schwules Museum Berlin. This includes multiple groups of people and museums. That's early 2019.
During that point, the story of GayBlade and Ryan Best become known to the HIGH SCORE production team, and Best is interviewed for it and his story told.
Late 2019, Best discovers some original materials and they are used to recover the game.
Early 2020, Internet Archive hosts a copy of the game emulated, and LGTBQ Game Archive does an extensive writeup on the game.
Mid 2020, HIGH SCORE is presented to Netflix, and a card is inserted into the documentary to indicate it was found. (I'm finding not many people have seen the card.)
As mentioned in the article, this was covered in the Netflix doc series High Score (episode 3): https://www.netflix.com/title/81019087
There was a documentary about a guy who tries to break the high score for Missile Command. Unlike a lot of modern games, there is no ending so you can keep playing the game until you inevitably lose
One quarter. Two days. No pause button.
http://www.highscoremovie.com/
The 30-year old record for Missile Command was just broken recently:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/55-hours-81m-points-and-the-fall-of-missile-commands-30-year-old-record/
It's theoretically possible to build up so many extra cities that you can actually take a 30 minute break in the game.