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To be fair, some of those anecdotes and trivia from the people who lived through the history of gaming are fun. The creators of “High Score” have a charming habit of leveling the playing field in terms of interview subjects, making someone who recounts his historic run at the Nintendo World Championships as important as the man who designed “Final Fantasy,” for example. There’s something truly likable about an approach that equalizes players and creators, revealing where the skills and interests of the two intersect. And the interviewing team behind “High Score” do a notable job of presenting playful, informative subjects, even if they’re too often buried in a hyperactive visual style. 

The belief that a docuseries about gaming needs to be visually frenetic, and even hard to follow at times given how much it jumps around in terms of subject matter, is a fatal flaw here. There’s a sense that the creators don’t trust their audience as much as they should—jumping from subject to subject to keep people watching, when the truth is that gamers are committed to the medium they love. We’d listen to the creators of “Doom” talk about its development for an hour. We don’t need animated recreations of crucial board meetings to keep us from flipping back to the main menu on Netflix. (And the final episode, which focuses on “Doom,” is easily the best because it gives more than average time to a creator of a single game without flitting off to something else.)

Each episode of “High Score” ostensibly focuses on one aspect of gaming history—arcade gaming, Nintendo, RPGs, Sega, fighting games, and online shooters. It's a logical chronology, especially as it’s relatively easy to trace the history of the form through “Pac-Man,” “Super Mario Bros.,” “Ultima,” “Sonic the Hedgehog,” “Mortal Kombat,” and “Doom.” The fact that the series stops at “Doom” feels like it’s setting up for a second and maybe third outing given how much has transpired in the form since then. After all, we haven’t even gotten to Sony and Microsoft’s involvement. Each episode focuses on a few stories/subjects for its running time, but often bounces around them within the episode, leading to a sense that the entire thing isn’t as focused or complete as it should be. It’s one thing to frame this as a “Fun Video Game Anecdotes” series but the creators often frame it through narration as a “History of Gaming” series, and it comes up incredibly short in that regard. For example, the RPG episode jumps from a thin history of text-based gaming to “Ultima” to “Final Fantasy” to “Skyrim.” Sure, these are major tentpoles, but there’s so much development missing there that it feels thin for those of us who lived through it.

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