Gameplay

Filmmaker Richard Goldgewicht's PBS-aired documentary offers an overview of the roughly half-century history of video games, beginning in 1962 with the MIT primitive computer game Spacewar!, and continuing up through the promise of tomorrow's virtual reality games. Along the way, the film combines comments from video game industry professionals—including Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Activision founder David Crane, and Fallout 4 director Todd Howard—with clips from signature games. What Gameplay does well is chronicle the evolution of video games: from the primitive 1972 table tennis game Pong, to the 1980s arcade craze of Pac Man and Donkey Kong, to the rise (and subsequent fall) of Atari (maker of the first major game console for the home), to the revitalization of the flagging video game industry thanks to Nintendo's 1985 hit Super Mario Bros. Later developments included the emergence of role-playing games (such as 1981's Ultima), the birth of the controversial first-person shooter genre (including 1993's highly influential Doom), the leap in visual graphics achieved by Sony's 1994 PlayStation, the advent of multiplayer gaming (which allowed players to simultaneously inhabit the same game space online and led to long-running hit series such as 2003's Call of Duty and the massively-multiplayer-online-RPG World of Warcraft in 2004), and the burgeoning social gaming market (featuring free-to-play games such as 2009's Facebook smash FarmVille). While the evolution-of-gaming approach does a fine job of helping viewers chart the barebones history of the rapidly changing video game industry, the film itself fails to generate the level of engagement and excitement featured in the similarly-themed Video Games: The Movie (VL-7/15). Still, as a workhorse chronicle, this one gets the job done. A strong optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)