Episode 3 (5/10)
This starts great like 2, but drops in quality quite a bit. It starts out with Ken and Roberta creating their first RPG with graphics inspired by text adventures: Mystery House.
Also a great deal of time is spend on Ultima. Then we move over to Japan, where they go to Amano. This is where it falls apart after the short interview with Amano because they sort of make it seem like Final Fantasy has the same
characters over and over again and they improve graphically with each game(?) rather than each game having their own unique characters and story.
Even though they skipped Dragon Quest, from here you have a million ways to go. Earthbound, Bethesda, World of Warcraft you name it.
But they turn the story towards GayBlade. A rather obscure game made by someone in protest against Pat Buchanan. Which was super popular but not even the creator has a copy anymore so now there is a social media campaign to find it.
They move into fan fiction theory where Pat Buchanan is living with a gay lover in France and two dogs after having visited the man who made GayBlade. This is utterly ridiculous
So they talk about this 'phantom' game that he once made. After this side story, which takes up over 10 minutes we go back to the creator of Ultima and Ultima IV.
Where he cracks the code about players having to make moral choices and then boom out of the blue, a montage of games that wouldn't exist without these early RPG's such as The Witcher and Skyrim.
Episode 4 (6/10)
This is about Kalinske and SEGA. How they made Sonic etc. . Funny enough, unlike before where Naka gets all the credit it's now actually Oshima and Yasuhara that tell the story. Kalinske's anecdotes are always great. They focus a lot on how SEGA positioned itself as a cooler Nintendo. They throw Madden and Trip Hawkins in there and of course SEGA's Rock the Rock Alcatraz gaming event. The structure is slightly better than the Nintendo episode but still a lot of jumps that don't make any sense. They also don't show anything from Nintendo's perspective at this time. The Madden Story I feel could've been it's own different thing. Especially because the game launched on the Apple 2 first. They act as if Nintendo didn't do anything as SEGA was eating their lunch which is sort of weird considering they frame this as a 'war' between the two. So the SEGA bits are ok'ish, the Madden stuff is a waste. Would've been better to combine the SEGA/Nintendo episodes, to show the back and forth between the two after Nintendo's build-up.
There's a theme in this series where they got a good thing going but then feel the need about 3/4's in put some kind of representation in there. In the first episode it works because the guy actually beat ATARI to inventing cartridges. The second episode is a mess anyway, so here it doesn't matter that they throw in a competitor of the Nintendo World Championship. For the 4th episode it's actually an inspiring story. A guy that keeps trying to work at EA on Madden and introduces African American players in Madden 95. But this was a story about Kalinske, Madden and the Genesis. As inspiring as this is as a sort of epilogue it has no place in the Genesis story of launching the first Madden on console. It basically goes like:
"Madden liked the idea of Madden for Apple 2, we could make the game" -> "Meet the first gay black guy that works at EA. When he got in there he put African Americans in Madden 95!" -> "Finally Madden released on Genesis, another step of Kalinske's plan completed!"
Another thing that that annoys me if that they throw in the wrong games from time to time. When they talk about the first Sonic, they show random scenes of Sonic 1,2,3, Knuckles and what I assume is a fan-game as I don't recall a Gust Planet Zone. With Final Fantasy they say: "The first Final Fantasy was released!" and then you see images of Final Fantasy 1 through 6.
So yeah I like the unique archival footage but the structure is all over the place and the story telling is rather poor. As for the occasional minority/gay shout-out they should've put them in half way or at the end as to not break up the stories they are telling.
Whoever made this needed an editor to piece these things together differently. If I'm watching a documentary about the creation of video games and the Nintendo Era for example. I want an interview with Miyamoto or Tezuka and not a 15 - 20 minutes story about Heinemann who won the Nintendo World Championship or something. Put that in a different episode about how gaming culture evolved or something.
In short this must be a very confusing watch if you don't know the basics about this history.
