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Discovery Channel's Games Documentary Impresses

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-the-usual-pablum dept.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun notes the kickoff of a new Discovery channel series called Rise of the Videogame. Blogger John Walker discusses the show, which just began last week, with an eye towards its research rigor and friendliness to the subject matter. He comes away fairly impressed, both by the topics covered and the casting. Along with games industry luminaries like Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn, they chat with folks like Steve Russell (of Spacewar! fame) and Smartbomb author Heather Chaplin. "A little visually overwrought with its montage footage of real-world conflict, it's otherwise a solid, informative and supremely well 'cast' documentary. If you've read around the subject, it won't tell you anything new. But it's fantastic to hear the stories from the people themselves. Episode 2 is very sensibly about the rise of Mario, next Wednesday."

3 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Museum exhibit on history of video games by revscat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Five years ago or so there was a traveling exhibit that came through Dallas called Videotopia. It showed up at The Science Place (Dallas's science museum) and took up the vast majority of available floor space. It was amazing. Basically it had every video game. (Note the period at the end of the previous sentence; I'm exaggerating only slightly.) They were arranged chronologically, starting with Pong and moving onward to Space Invaders and so forth. This was all in one place and every game was a quarter. It was amazing. They even had a sit-down version of Sinistar, one of my all time faves.

    What excited me greatly was that they had working versions of all the "vector" games: Asteroids, BattleZone, Tempest, Star Wars. It also had all the laser disk games: Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, etc. All the games were in *great* shape.

    Anyway, this is only borderline on-topic, but I wanted to share anyway. I'd be surprised if these guys weren't consulted for the documentary. A brief search shows that the name of the exhibit was Videotopia, but it doesn't look like it's touring anymore, which is really, really too bad.

  2. Re:My humble 2 cents... by king-manic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wow, what nonsense. While it's true that nostalgia plays a part, it is also true that some decades just create better music than others. Don't believe me? Try comparing the good music produced in the 60s to the good music produced in the 80s. Both are old enough to have the nostlgia effect, but you'll find that there is far more quality music from the 60s than the 80s, and the cream-of-the-crop of the 60s is also of higher quality than the cream-of-the-crop from the 80s. This decade so far is another dry spell all-in-all, even though there is some decent stuff out there. The 80's did have U2, Depeche mode, Good Metallica, Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, Blondie, Guns and roses, Prince, good Micheal Jackson, the Beastie Boys, run DMC etc... There was good music as well. Compared to the 60's? It's more a different flavor then any drastic change in quality. People who like depech mode may not enjoy the Jimmy Hendrix, people who like the Doors may not be a fan of Cyndi Lauper but they each wrote some good songs.

    What do you define as quality music? Music that endures? Music with some value? Music that a 50 year old guy at rolling stones magazine says is good?

    What is your definition? Music sales? Cultural influence?
    --
    "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
  3. Yes, a little _too_ overwrought! by Whatsmynickname · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > A little visually overwrought with its montage footage of real-world conflict

    A little? I would say a LOT. There were at times I thought, "aren't they going to talk about video games?" If I had this show recorded, I would have fast forwarded through half of this show.

    As far as the core information was concerned, the show was great. However, the "linkage" video to events at the time was, IMHO, way too emphasized. The show gave me the impression that the producers / director of the show was more enamored with the era than with video games.

    OK, I can see the space race tying into games due to the push for integrated circuits, but at first it seemed like the show was about the space race and not about video games. It got way worse when the show was tying in 60s-70s cultural events (hippies, feminism) to video games. No no no, I'm sorry, but neither I nor my kids watching the show got that at all. From what I remember, it was more of a bunch of geeks just "fooling around with the technology to see what it could do" more than what cultural dynamics was happening at the time (and one of the people interviewed pretty much said the same thing).

    If there are future parts of this show, I hope they have more video game history and less non-relevant cultural crap...