The cream of the crop of video game docos (and where you can watch them)
The world owes a lot to Martin Scorsese’s 1986 movie The Color of Money.
The film was an overdue commercial success for Scorsese, arguably clearing the way for him to resurrect (sorry) his The Last Temptation of Christ, which was eventually released in 1988.
The Color of Money was also the launching pad for the career of Forest Whitaker, who turned in an indelible five-minute cameo as a kid-hustler taking down Paul Newman. Legendary critic Pauline Kael was so impressed, she devoted more of her review to the unknown Whitaker, than to Newman or co-star Tom Cruise.
And, maybe oddest of all, The Color of Money also led to the naming of the one of the most influential video games ever, via one short scene in which Cruise opens his cue case, and announces to his hapless opponent that the stick inside is ‘‘Doom’’.
Turns out that game designer John Romero saw The Color of Money in 1992 and reckoned that Doom was just the moniker he wanted for something he and his co-creators had been cooking up: the world’s first multi-playercapable 3D shooting game.
I picked up that little nugget watching Netflix’s High Score, which is a likeable, in-depth walk through the early years of video games, from Pong to Doom ,ina six-part series that doesn’t outlive its welcome.
But High Score, good though it is, still settles for one of gaming’s more pervasive myths: that the game adaptation of the movie E.T. was so bad it caused the first collapse of the home gaming industry. The truth is far more nuanced and interesting.
E.T. designer Howard Scott Warshaw lived for decades under the cloud of being ‘‘the man who killed video games’’. While E.T. passed into legend as being the worst game ever produced, when it really, really wasn’t.
The documentary Atari: Game Over (on DocPlay) is a hugely enjoyable deep-dive into the urban legend that millions of unsellable E.T. game cartridges were buried in a New Mexico landfill. Not too far from Roswell, naturally.
The film weaves the excavation of the site around a compelling and moving account of Warshaw’s public rehabilitation, as thousands gather in the desert to belatedly applaud the man who built a game in five weeks flat, and reveals that even Steven Spielberg thought it was actually pretty good.
Although even the joys of Atari pale next to the jaw-dropping, award-winning, 2007 King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (newly available on iWonder), which recounts the battle for the highest score on the arcade game Donkey Kong, and the fantasists, frauds and occasional good-guys who live in the fringe world of competitive gaming.
As of June last year, gamer Billy Mitchell – very much the bad guy in the narrative – was still fighting court cases to have his scores on Donkey Kong recognised. Watch, and be amazed, at the extremes people will go to, to ‘‘win’’.
The Color of Money is on Disney+, or on DVD and Blu-ray and The Last Temptation of Christ can be found on to rent at Microsoft, or on DVD and Blu-ray. They’re both pretty fantastic.