From the beginning of love is to pixels

Es need not transfer power more fully into the world of a computer game to immerse yourself. Players are accustomed to huge landscapes, often almost photo-realistic, with sound scenes, the croaking frogs, and the roaring Monster to life, as if you were right next to the living room chair. You can play with avatars that look like you, or to fly even in his most beautiful Dream, diving, fight, jump, in liquid movements with intuitive, so a relatively easy-to-learn final control. To not let yourself be carried away the challenge is more.

It was not always so. In the documentary series “High Score” to draw Melissa Wood and France Costrel, how computer games have developed in five decades from a couple of moving pixels to the leading medium and of those Multi-billion-Dollar industry of today. It is a story that was written in Code, but the language and commands, as well as the process of their creation in the minds of most viewers hardly vivid images. Wood and Costrel have selected for your Version of the story, therefore, people who have their own story with the media to reminisce, emotional, and accessible, animated in the style of the games of the time, the narrative enthusiastic accompanied by Charles Martinet, the voice of Super Mario, personally.

The feeling of new beginnings pose

Under the portrait of the giants of the industry such as Space Invaders Creator Tomohiro Nishikado, the triggered with his arcade game such a Hype, that in the whole of Japan, 100-Yen coins were scarce have archived. Or Nolan Bushnell, who is as the founder of the company Atari, nicknamed the “Godfather of video Games”: The Atari Video Computer System, with 30 million copies sold by far the most successful game console in the late seventies and early eighties. On this platform, Howard Scott Warshaw, it brought to dubious fame, as a developer of “E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial”. This was often referred to as the worst game of all time, and for the temporary Crash of an industry as a whole is held responsible.

These key figures are the games from the cultural history of video is not indispensable. Especially exciting are the often unknown people by the filmmakers with the same attention and airtime concerns, such as the famous pioneers. but Jerry Lawson, for example, an American developer, invented for Atari, among other things, the System of the interchangeable games and the console industry is revolutionized. Or Ryan Best, the developer of the “GayBlade,” the first role-playing game with themes from the queer Community. Be the boss of the Republican politician Pat Buchanan, described in 1983, AIDS as a “vengeance of nature for unnatural acts” was. Or Shaun Bloom, told by the best Job of his life: As a game consultant, he sat to the school with a Horde of the same age to the phone and headphones by Nintendo and advised players that were at the local console. For, as for the Youtube Generation today is unthinkable – remained, used to be stuck somewhere, could be finished, the game never. What, in turn, the developers had no interest, because, after all, should be the next game purchased.

The fact that games have always been commercial, made no secret of the fact. The focus of the “High Score” is, however, clear on the emotional and artistic level. In a passion-charged settings of the artist Yoshitaka Amano draws his characters in the Final Fantasy series, and the composer Hirokazu Tanaka explains how he developed the legendary sounds that made those Super Mario in 1981 its way over the rolling barrels to the brutal APE Donkey Kong, in order to free the Princess. These are just a small stones of a vast cultural mosaic, but in the first six episodes of the complex history of the medium as a whole, again, an impossible task it is to admit.

Wood and Costrel but it is possible on the basis of their choice of witnesses, the feeling of new beginnings, the rush of Innovation, and the gold-rush mood display, which ruled from the seventies, especially in Tokyo and San Francisco. And you want to convey, why even back then, as characters from no more than a few pixels passed and many of the adventures abspulte only in short sentences on a screen, the games also were in ecstasy put as it is today among the most advanced Virtual-Reality glasses.

High Score is on Netflix available.

More on the topic

1/

Promote docu-series : they are inexpensive

• Victor Sattler
• Published/Updated:
• Comments: 2 , Recommendations: 4

Netflix in the criticism : the sexualization of underage girls?

• Axel Weidemann
• Published/Updated:
• Comments: 1 , Recommendations: 10

Series “Lovecraft Country” : This Land is not your Land

• Tobias Rüther
• Published/Updated:
• Comments: 4 , Recommendations: 4

Source: F. A. Z.

Here you can buy the rights to this article.