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High Score Review

High Score is a Netflix docuseries that was released in 2020. It is a solid, but at the end of the day disappointing documentary.

A mini-series consisting of six 45-minute episodes, High Score is a breezy, fun watch for sure. You can never get bored watching a show about gaming after all and this is no different. I also loved the narration from Charles Martinet, who is a voice of Mario. He lent a lot of nuance and even humor into this series that desperately needed it.

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Each episode has the same structure that is repeated throughout. The first section deals with one major game development at each given point in history. The second deals with one forgotten and/or sidelined figure in game development. The third deals with the players themselves and gaming tournaments.

I only cared for the first of these sections. For a series that is supposedly about video game history, the historical section is ridiculously rushed to the point that it seriously frustrated me. Still, I loved revisiting this history even if I’d already known about most of it from reading it on my own.

The section about the players and their tournament experiences definitely felt misplaced in the context of major gaming developments, but it did have a charm of its own as it was very endearing hearing their stories and just how fun and competitive the arcade era truly was.

But the section about the forgotten figures was really infuriating. The show overall has a very odd tendency to focus on artists and sound designers for instance instead of the big game creators, which made this focus both skewed and unfair. But the worst offender is the series’ wokeness.

High Score included a trans player, black developers and a gay game creator whose game is both lost and obscure. Imagine these totally irrelevant figures mixed in with the likes of creators of ‘Mario’ and ‘Space Invaders’ and what you got is this show in a nutshell.

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The highlights for me were the Sega and Nintendo rivalry and some of the role-playing game development was also interesting to see. The opening is both visually appealing and beautifully scored and the show overall has a solid aesthetic, but the editing and the interviews made it feel a bit too old-fashioned and not as cinematic as I would have liked.