A friend of mine sent this documentary to me (which I had never heard of at the time), and I'm pretty glad he did. I watched most of it in one sitting, something I don't do very often with a movie when I'm at home, I'll admit.
This starts at the very beginning of the gaming world of the Tennis for Two and Pong games, goes through the arcade explosion of Space Invaders and all, the home wars and video game crash of 1983-1984, to the rebirth of gaming with the NES and even through a little bit of the current consoles/PC stuff (at the time) of the XBox and PlayStation 2.
And it's not just about games either, it also touches a bit on the ugly sides of the business (disgruntled 2600 programmers leaving Atari to form Activision due to no credit for making games, supposed cause for alarm for gaming violence being "blamed" on crime), a little about the people involved and even "clans" of online gaming fans that meet up every year (Quake fest).
This is even pretty family-friendly, as there's only a couple of brief mentions of sex and drugs (the hippies at Atari!), as well as, yep, the violence in games, but it doesn't even go very far into a PG rating, as it's probably fine for anyone 12 or 13 years of age on up (although they might not believe the archaic games from the very beginning!).
Only very small gripes include the possibility of continuity errors, like when they were discussing the NES, yet showing SNES games (not sure if that counts as an 'error' or not), and when they talked about the Sega Genesis first coming out, yet the last model of the Genesis was shown. Also they could have shown a few more consoles that never got a mention during the video game crash, since they made it look like everything was all Atari, Intellivision, the Colecovision and Odyssey2, there was also the Vectrex and tons of computers that also played games that were never mentioned at all (TI-994A, Sinclair, the entire Atari line of computers, Vic-20, etc., etc., etc.) that were also totally affected, if not completely wiped out. It would have been nice to see at least a couple of seconds' worth of footage of those consoles and computers.
Anyway, this is pretty decent overall, and there's bound to be some nit-picky thoughts by people (such as I mentioned) arguing what should have been included, but those fleeting moments are in the minority.
Two game-blistered thumbs up from me.
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