First, I'll start with what I liked about this series, which is considerable.
The animated bits that help pull the documentary along are cool, and look just "8-bit" enough to be fitting with the series. It was also nice to "meet" some of the icons from the earlier days of gaming, like the founder of EA or the guy who made Ultima.
The episodes are also not overly long, so you can watch 1-2 and not feel like you just wasted the whole day. Also, for the most part, the narrative that is portrayed is fairly easy to follow, even for a non-gamer like my wife (who watched this with me).
The not so great? Well, being that the episodes aren't incredibly long for a huge documentary topic like the history of gaming, and many things got skipped entirely, and too much time was spent on things that maybe didn't matter.
For example, no less than 3 times in the 1st 5 episodes, considerable time was spent (wasted) on following the stories of individual gamers who won tournaments. The 1st one, Space Invaders, made sense in the scope of the documentary because in the early 80's video game tournaments were a novelty. But the Tetris and Sonic tournaments? Nobody cares about those now unless you were an actual contestant back then, so time spent telling those stories could've been better spent on other things, or not glossing over important stuff (like the fact that the Genesis was not Sega's 1st console, even though it seemed to be portrayed as such).
One side note, I do take issue with some reviews here about the "woke" elements. They didn't bother me one bit. They were minor points, at best, nothing was shoved in your face, and it constituted maybe 30 minutes of total dialogue in a series with 240+ minutes of runtime. If you took issue with that one piece, maybe reevaluate your own world-view and not be so threatened by everything?
I'd say this documentary is best for those who didn't live through the era like myself, because you don't miss what you didn't know was there.
Overall, not perfect, but worth watching, for the nostalgia alone, at least.
The animated bits that help pull the documentary along are cool, and look just "8-bit" enough to be fitting with the series. It was also nice to "meet" some of the icons from the earlier days of gaming, like the founder of EA or the guy who made Ultima.
The episodes are also not overly long, so you can watch 1-2 and not feel like you just wasted the whole day. Also, for the most part, the narrative that is portrayed is fairly easy to follow, even for a non-gamer like my wife (who watched this with me).
The not so great? Well, being that the episodes aren't incredibly long for a huge documentary topic like the history of gaming, and many things got skipped entirely, and too much time was spent on things that maybe didn't matter.
For example, no less than 3 times in the 1st 5 episodes, considerable time was spent (wasted) on following the stories of individual gamers who won tournaments. The 1st one, Space Invaders, made sense in the scope of the documentary because in the early 80's video game tournaments were a novelty. But the Tetris and Sonic tournaments? Nobody cares about those now unless you were an actual contestant back then, so time spent telling those stories could've been better spent on other things, or not glossing over important stuff (like the fact that the Genesis was not Sega's 1st console, even though it seemed to be portrayed as such).
One side note, I do take issue with some reviews here about the "woke" elements. They didn't bother me one bit. They were minor points, at best, nothing was shoved in your face, and it constituted maybe 30 minutes of total dialogue in a series with 240+ minutes of runtime. If you took issue with that one piece, maybe reevaluate your own world-view and not be so threatened by everything?
I'd say this documentary is best for those who didn't live through the era like myself, because you don't miss what you didn't know was there.
Overall, not perfect, but worth watching, for the nostalgia alone, at least.