Videogame Documentary Creators Quizzed

Thanks to Gamer's Pulse for its interview discussing the making of the new game-related documentary, Video Game Invasion: The History of a Global Obsession, which airs this Sunday on the GSN channel. The documentary creators discuss their portrayal of the death of the games industry in the early '80s ("Essentially, everyone wanted in on the video game craze. Atari's success drove everyone with enough capital to mimic them and ultimately there were too many Atari clones on the market"), as well as stories they had to leave out of the 2 hour documentary for space reasons: ("When we interviewed John Romero, he told us a great story about him and John Carmack developing Commander Keen. It seems that when they decided to make a game, they didn't have their own computers; so, they 'borrowed' their workplace systems every Friday night and returned them early Monday morning so nobody would notice.")

Romero & Carmack

[Umgawa71]

I would've cut the Romero & Carmack section simply due to the fact that the "borrowing computers" story was very well-told in the book Masters of Doom. Besides, if the filmmakers ever wanted to talk about the videogame industry making bad decisions to this day, I think we need to look no further than Eidos' deal with Ion Storm during the development of Daikatana... and -while we're on the subject of Eidos- anything having to do with the last Tomb Raider game. In other words, I smell a sequel!

I hope it's better...

[WebGangsta]

...than the one that PBS ran a few months back.

Now, I liked what PBS did as they had interviews with Nolan Bushnell and others that gave some great insight into what was happening in game development at the time.

But they had to resort to reenactments -- that weren't labelled as such -- of key moments which really threw me off.

An example: they showed "film" of when Nolan and company first put PONG into a local bar in the late '70's. They showed all the people playing the game and how it broke because there were too many quarters stuck in the box. Unfortunately, they had the PONG machine placed next to a 1996 Bally Safecracker pinball machine (which just happens to be one of the best pinball machines ever made). The least they could have done was put it next to a Fireball or something from the same general PONG timeframe. It was like watching Gladiator and noticing that Russell Crowe was wearing a watch. Ruined the rest of the show for me.

For the televisionless

[cgenman]

Anyone know of a good way to get copies of these programs once they have aired? Is there a Tivo-MPEG-NET application people use?

I'd really like to see this, but don't have cable.

Re:For the televisionless

[Doctor O]

Yeah, I'd like to see it, too - I'm in Europe, so no chance of getting it at all except .mpeg ...

Re:For the televisionless

[Osmosis_Garett]

Wait patiently for the .torrent to appear; considering the target audience of this show, I'm sure it will appear within a few minutes of the shows ending.

Re:For the televisionless

[N0decam]

I wouldn't bother - I only saw the last hour, but it was baaaaaad.

They skipped nearly a decade of console competition, then basically called the XBox an unqualified success.

They covered iD FPS after iD FPS, while barely giving a mention to other popular genres. Tony Hawk was a terrible host (in my opinion.)