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Television Media Entertainment Games

PBS Documentary on The Video Game Revolution 33

Posted by Zonk from the revolution-will-be-televised dept.
fredrikr writes "PBS is currently running a documentary on the history and relevance of video games and gaming: The Video Game Revolution. [Check Your Local Listings] From the website: "This is the story of how a whimsical invention of the 1960s helped spawn the computer industry as we know it. Video games have influenced the way children live and play, forever altered the entertainment industry, and even affected the way wars are fought. See how it all began and find out what it means for the future."
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PBS Documentary on The Video Game Revolution More

PBS Documentary on The Video Game Revolution

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  • games? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I hope they go over the beginnings of the first mainframe game.
    • SpaceWar and Adventure both get screen time. Rogue does not. I've got an Analog magazine from the 60's with a long article about SpaceWar. The coverage is so breathless I imagine the article ended because its writer passed out. My only serious quibble with the shows is I'd've found time to squeeze in Balance of Power.
  • But too bad they won't be airing it on my local PBS outlet.

    "This program is not airing on this channel during the next two weeks"

    Dang, oh well... Back to simply playing video games instead of watching TV about the history of playing video games.

  • Timing's a little off... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TMLink ( 177732 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @05:46PM (#10271552)
    The Video Game Revolution premieres Wednesday, Sept. 8th, at 9:00 p.m.

    Gee, thanks for the heads up slashdot. Much appreciated.

    • Re:Timing's a little off... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, /. DID have it covered:

      http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/0 4/ 1818225&tid=127&tid=10

      Of course, that also means that this is a repost...

  • Available on Bittorrent (Score:4, Informative)

    by swat_r2 ( 586705 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @05:55PM (#10271634)
    I don't have the link but I grabbed this from Bittorrent the other day, as I don't have cable. It was pretty informative, but if you're a gamer you've heard this all before.

    It's a great show for the older crowd, as it really drives home the fact that games aren't just for kids anymore, but an emerging media that is rivalling the movie industry.

    Plus they talk about MMO addicts, what more could you want!

    • *cough* ahem (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      http://www.torrentreactor.net/torrents/section_7
    • Unfortunately, they talk about other things in excruciating detail (like Columbine and how Doom causes people to want to kill other people ... they assume). It seems really one-sided at times, talking about how violence in video games is automatically a bad thing and then how the industry tries to justify it. Then it shows a bunch of clips of Doom3 and talks about Columbine. whee! It was obviously put together by a bunch of people who know very little about games and the gaming scene.

      I was particularl

  • For those who missed it... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 16, 2004 @06:05PM (#10271742)
    ... here's the .torrent [66.90.75.92]
    • According to the s-nova page, you can no longer hotlink torrents, as its been eating up their bandwidth....*cough*.... ./....3rd-party extensions...*cough*
      the torrent now only works if you directly get it from the suprnova page. [btw, its .org ]

  • A poor documentary (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kur ( 195888 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @06:15PM (#10271850)
    After seeing the first Slashdot post about this a week or two ago, I dutifully set the Tivo to record it. Unfortunately, after watching it, I wish I hadn't recorded it. The show was deriative and disappointing. The segments were short and it painfully tried to present "both sides". There was the anti-video game "mother" and the former game nerd turned MIT professor. The segments with game designers, some of the famous and a few not really, were short and unfulfilling. What makes Wil Wright tick? How has Sid Meier designed so many of the most significant computer games of the last decade or so? You won't get those answers here. Instead you'll get the usual, "video games are bigger than Hollywood!" and "MS wants to invade your living room". Blah! They didn't interview any of the creators of Everquest, Ultima Online, or, come to think of it, any MMORPG. They talked about them, sure, but that seems a glaring omission. There have been some other, much better video game documentaries made. Avoid this one.

    • Re:A poor documentary (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Slynkie ( 18861 )
      i agree with your points, though i think overall it was decently amusing. the thing that got me the most though, was that they couldn't find space in the whole two hours to even MENTION the Dreamcast...
    • While I agree that the documentarty didn't delve too deeply into the nature of the industry, I don't really think it was the point. The point was to give an overview of the industry: a history, current trends, major figures, obstacles and struggles. In this respect I think it did a very good job. It also did this without becoming pedantic, or sensationalizing pieces of the story for dramatic effect.

      Furthermore, I don't think you could have had a two hour documentary that properly fleshed out the top
      • The problem is that I think it even failed as ageneral overview. It failed to discuss many salient points and failed to interview many of the luminaries of the industry. It also failed to give a real assessment of the state of the industry. If video games make so much money, why are publishers folding left and right? Why did Mattel dump the Intellivision? Why did Hasbro ditch it's game division? Why is the market shrinking in Japan? (the documentary touted the size of the market, so I thought they sho

  • The revolution is offically over (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kenp2002 ( 545495 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @06:54PM (#10272196) Homepage Journal
    Once corporate found there was money in gaming, gaming went to pot. Time to go underground again....

  • Exact Duplicate (Score:3, Informative)

    by Lust ( 14189 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @07:22PM (#10272510) Homepage
    This is a dup [slashdot.org] of a story from Sept. 4th.

  • Dear Slashdot Editors: It's really fucking simple (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 16, 2004 @08:14PM (#10272866)
    A google search of Slashdot PBS Video Game Revolution [google.co.kr] brings up the previous story as the first hit.

    So, if I may be so bold as to suggest the following before posting slashdot stories from now on...

    1. Find two or three of the most relevent keywords, you know, the kinds of words likely to repeat themselves in multiple submissions.

    2. Go to google. You can find google at www.google.com. Here is a
    hyperlink to www.google.com [google.com]. Here is a definition of the word "hyperlink". [m-w.com]

    3. Assuming you haven't forgotten the important keywords from step 1, proceed to step 4. Otherwise, return to step 1. If this is the third or fourth time reaching step 3, you might want to consider finding a paper and pencil. If you already had a paper and pencil, then you might want to consider using them to write down the keywords.

    4. Now, with those words you've remembered (or written down) from step 1, go into the text box in the middle of that www.google.com webpage. Type in the following:
    Slashdot Keyword1 Keyword2 Keyword3
    Now press Enter.

    5. If these [google.com] are your search results, hit back on your web browser, and then type in the following:
    Slashdot Keyword1 Keyword2 Keyword3
    ONLY THIS TIME, replace the three keywords with the words that you remembered, or copied down, from step 1.

    6. Finally, have a look at some of the results to see if a slashdot story has already been posted on the submission you've just gotten. If there is a story, do not post the submitted story unless there is some information in the new submission that makes it somehow more relevent. And for the love of god, don't do a duplicate post on a story that's already too old, like you did here.

    PS: Don't like these messages? Tough. Quit giving us duplicate posts and you'll stop getting duplicate flames.
  • Does anyone know when this this is going to be on? I checked the schedule for all the PBS stations here and there's bubkis. Same for my parents house (thought they could tape it for me) 500 miles away. Are any PBS stations going to carry this show or is it just vaporware?
  • I watched it last week (and wrote a short write up on my blog [popularculturegaming.com]). It was pretty bland and uninteresting. Nothing that hasn't been talked about a million times before. The one that the Game Show Network (errr, GSN as they are now known, because heaven forbid the name of your network describes your content!) aired last year was pretty much the same as this one. The PBS website is the most instersting thing about the documentary. There wasn't anything in here that one couldn't get from Steven Kent's book,
  • I watched it last week because of the timely article that this one duped.

    It was alright, but the editing really got on my nerves. They mention the introduction of the gameboy and then show footage of the gameboy advance. They talk about pacman and then show footage from pacman world.

  • In reading many of these comments, I see a lot of people complaining "nothing new here." Duh! Chances are if you're even a semi-regular reader of the slashdot gaming forums, than you already know everything this show is going to cover.

    What I found disappointing was the fact that this show tried to cover all the bases (in a mere two hours) and failed to cover any adequately. As a classic gamer and collector I was really hoping for a well-done history of gaming. Well, for the first 30 or 40 minutes I got a h

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