I remember watching this when it came out in 2013 many times, i really enjoyed learning about the history of video games, I’m glad I found it again :))
I envy kids today growing up with the internet and flash graphics like it ain't no thang .. .but there was something very cool about being there at the start and being wowed by a computer, and the future held wonder. The killer for me was the 20-30 minute cassette loads ... especially when something went wrong.
+Nautilus1972 still have my first Nintendo with rob the robot and my Atari 26 and 5200.....I believe that the first A.I. that will gain consciousness will be from an n.p.c. in a video game,.....perhaps our universe is just a simulation itself.
Can't underestimate the feeling of seeing a little sprite moving on a screen and how mind blowing it was at the time. After first playing the Atari 2600 I😢 was hooked for life. Then the speccy, Amiga, consoles. I now own an xbox x, and I'm still loving games at 50.
Peter Serafinowitz saying "I'm not a fan of miniaturized Hugh Grants", is even funnier now that he has done a movie with a miniaturized Hugh Grant.. ('Wonka' from 2024)
My mum bought a ZX Spectrum as a kind of family Christmas present in about 1985. Me and my 2 brothers loved it and it started a lifelong love of video games.
Charlie Brooker is an amazingly creative individual, creating everything from Newswipe and this to the brilliant Black Mirror series. He's a sarcastic, cynical jackass after my own barely beating heart.
Charlie is something of a lover of the ridiculous, in the case of Black Mirror it's the ridiculous effects that technology, both directly and indirectly seems to be having on society. And in the case of his wipe shows he's pretty much just pointing and laughing at the ridiculous things that are televised to us on a regular basis. It's almost something of an antidepressant hearing someone point out how ridiculous it all is; it just makes me feel like at the end of the day there's not much point in getting depressed by it all.
Yeah, but he's also hideously hypocritical about failing to identify any of the things he eagerly knocks if they implicate Left wing politics. Boring PC. I already know before viewing anything that there is going to be the jibe at the Royal Family, the jibe at 'the Tories', it's as boring and predictable as opening a Private Eye or watching Frankie Boyle. Nothing to challenge the PC-ifying of video games and bleating about Games 'sexism' without critical scrutiny because some fat whale with angry spectacles says so, - all the while inserting videos from unattractive female 'experts' to fulfil some sexist communist quota but laughing off gun violence- and ignoring the bigger picture that this creepy blandifying of society is attached to politics, not to science or evidence and subversively spreading by conquering culture and media in a way more creepy than anything
After watching this, feel really warm inside remembering that there'd always be a spot for video games in my heart irrespective of my age. Superb commentary and sense of humor here, not censoring words or all that.
I'm amazed at how far TH-cam has fallen. Used to be fantastic for finding rabbit holes of new tunes. Now they just keep forcing shit you've already watched or is completely unrelated.
@@Swindel67 I don't remember what exactly it was, but I was recently watching a "part 1" of something. "part 2" which literally only had the difference of having the 1 changed into 2 in the title didn't even show up in the next/recommended videos and I had to manually look for it, like WTF.
I helped get the C64 version of Elite into the U.S. market, as a consultant for the publishers, Firebird (owned by British Telecom at the time!) It was my first time working in the U.S. (I'm a Brit), and I ended up living and working there for 12 years! Best time of my life from 1985 to 1997, the peak of gaming as far as I am concerned!
46:39. I hear you bro. I remember my first time hearing a Cyberdemon without seeing it behind a door. The roar didn't faze me. But my fucking god... That metallic stomping. And it still gives me sweaty palms even now when i hear it even though i know exactly where the bugger is.
And now 10 years on The Last Of Us is the biggest show on TV. My favourite games haven’t changed that much though (I’m a person of simple tastes who likes to stick to things they like) AOE2, RCT2 (or Open RCT now) with the additions of Motorsport Manager, Fly Corp and Stardew Valley.
There's a lot to go over with video games in general, so i'm not surprised. However, Pokemon wasn't big just because of the games. Pokemon right from the off had 4 different companies, knowing full well the conceptual franchise they had on their hands. Right out of the gate, Manga, Anime, Games, Merchandise, etc. All of these things mostly mutually exclusive. Most Gamers I believe didn't really watch the anime, and vice versa. The concept of the overall premise is what sold, it just happens that the games were absolutely fucking amazing for their time. Their innovation died out not many years after, so they expanded and made a bunch more crap to follow. You only have to look at the state of Pokemon now, amidst its 25th anniversary and see how much lower it has since sunk. The only reason it still sells is because the initial concept was so strong, fresh and boasted longevity, it seems.
I wish he'd do a sequel episode, but there's so much stuff nowadays, it would be difficult. It would turn into a "which games have gone viral in every year since 2013".
Manic miner was all I needed. I couldn't get past 3rd screen but that didn't stop me playing for hours and hours. So much love for the little old speccy.
I'm only in my early 20s, yet it feels like I've playing video games forever, so much has changed, so it's interesting to see it from the perspective of someone who's been playing video games since the start of video games, someone who's really been playing forever lol
haha, I was one of those gamers! I remember when they came on cassette and took like half an hour to load so you could go do other stuff while you waited on a menu screen. I remember my old Atari ST - I had so many floppy discs of all sorts of games. I love Ikari Warriors, James Pond II and Warhammer, along with the old Sierra point and click games. Those were the days! I used to play the original Elite, flying around space represented by like 4 pixels, now Im flying around space in VR. Kids will never know how far we've come since the 80s!
Wing Commander was ground breaking in many ways, but it's sadly largely forgotten, these days. None of these gaming list programs on TV or TH-cam videos ever feature it.
@@gmann6269Brooker played it, he used to be a PC gaming magazine journalist. Games with FMV were 10 a penny back then, beside it’s budget Wing Commander wasn’t special.
I'm not a gamer, but I am in the entertainment world, so I'm quite aware of them and how they're evolving. This documentary is very fascinating and eye-opening, as well as filling in the cultural and historic gaps in my knowledge. Also, as an American, I found the British perspective refreshingly new. Bravo, Charlie Brooker!
Finally something great about the British home computing scene. We didn't have the NES and Mario (well, I didn't). We had games on cassette tapes and we liked it that way! Sorta... Also: 27:40 ... AOIFE!
What's even more amazing about The Last of Us is the fact that Naughty Dog gradually built up to it with each of their games. The Crash Bandicoot games were story driven, all be it on a basic saturday morning cartoon kind of level not unlike Looney Tunes, The Jak & Daxter games were incredibly story driven and kind of laid the foundation for Naughty Dogs later games, The Uncharted games were the same but honestly I felt the character writing was better in the Uncharted Games, and The Last of Us was just the final bit of icing on the cake.
Lara was a female Indiana Jones and she wasn't that sexy, Lara was a bunch of geometric blocks painted to look female, i was a horny teen and that body never intrested me but the gameplay and puzzles were great for the time.
My first game was 1986's Pool of Radiance, running on a Mac LCII. My old man gave it to me circa 1990. It wasn't until 2001 that I had the capability to finish it. Good times.
I love Elite Dangerous now and I grew up with the BBC Micro in the 80s, but we never had the original game. I'd love to go back in time and give it to 8 year old me, I think it would have blown my mind.
What a great film by the great Mr Brooker. This is (as time of going to press) ten years old. I'd love it if he made a new one for 2023 ... then make the final part of the trilogy in 2033. That'd be cool.
As a BBC Micro owner, it's hilarious to see Spectrum and C64 owners squabble over which of their machines was better. ...That being said my family was the opposite of rich, and it was a 10 year old hand me down by the time I got it. Really loved it though, I taught myself coding on that machine as a little girl, something the more modern computers at the time stopped making so easily accessible. MSDOS might have come with QBASIC (a terribly limited version of BASIC compared to the BBC), but it didn't come with an enormous literally Bible sized manual which told you how every command operated and gave you simple example programs.
To me it was the school computer they had at the infant school I went to from 1989-1991. At junior school they had Acorn computers which made the BBC seem outdated.
@@gmann6269 yeah I remember them in school, and I remember the first day we got an Acorn Archimedes, and a bunch of us kids plus the headmaster were sitting around playing Lemmings on it 😁 I’m not sure if you know since you called the Archimedes “Acorn computers”, but Acorn made the BBC Micro, too! In fact it was the first testbed for early ARM CPUs, which would go on to become the processor used in the Archimedes, and then in like 99% of mobile phones, and most recently became the base of Apple’s M1 chips in their new Macs.
@@DissociatedWomenIncorporated I didn't know Acorn made the BBC Micro. It is hard to remember which models they were but the infant school computers (the school probably had only 2 or 3 or maybe it was just one) were these black things that used large floppy discs about 6 inches cross, the teachers called them "the BBC", and the Acorns at junior school (I remember an Archimedes but there was also another model we had) were white, more advanced, used smaller 3.5 inch discs and had a Windows-esque interface. The BBC computer must have been the first computer I saw/used, though I didn't get to do much on it. My family didn't get a computer until 1995 and that was a used Amiga 600. The only game I remember on the school BBC was Granny's Garden and the junior school Acorns had this naff educational game about 2 kids going around the world, a very basic game about jet airliners and Twinworld. At school we never got to play any cool popular games like Lemmings, games kids would want to get. Also it must have been at lunchtime, not during lesson time.
Video games combine other media forms, including (but not limited to) books, music, movies and board games, distilling and filtering their best parts. In the same game, you can pick up and read an engrossing text, listen to a cinematic score, watch an in-game cutscene with movie-level editing and engage in a similar abstract strategizing to that demanded by games like Poker and Chess. Game developers also tend to be younger and more progressive in their outlook, so narrative themes are often more contemporary than legacy media. Only books are more stimulating. And that’s only because images and audio aren’t presented. In some ways the interactivity of video games develops abstract thought in such a way that supersedes even books.
Pretentious nonsense. Wideo games are just elaborate slot machines. It’s actually heartbreaking that they have taken over but you can’t fight that kind of addiction, especially when they get them young. Youth now consists of kids sitting in their bedrooms screaming at a television. There’s no interaction except within their little echo chambers. Speaking to people through only text or voice does not connect you with someone. It’s a lie. Or kids just sitting on devices ignoring the world around them. Ignoring their loved ones, blanking them as the absolutely worthless games they are playing take or swallow up all their attention. It’s awfully depressing. Had to go through it myself growing up with them. Most my friends just addicted. Spend all night playing call of duty or fifa, gears of war etc and then come into school next day zombies. Rinse and repeat. Also games are awful in terms of writing and even connecting to humanity. The eyes will always be dead. When they are eventually considered not, it’s just a technical achievement. An advance in graphics. You aren’t actually looking into the eyes of a human being. Me just typing this all out makes me awfully depressed thinking of what’s to come with kids growing up on these things. They literally steal and swallow up your time, probably most valuable thing we have. It will only heighten indifference and lack of empathy or inspire a psychotic kind of empathy not grounded in any kind of reality. Like people who think animals are more important than humans because they look cute. It’s a mental disease. Also people who play wideo games are awfully dull. Reading books, watching cinema, these things saved me from the hell of growing up having to play wideo games. Just awful. Many game developers don’t even see games as art and I’d have to agree. Just an elaborate slot machine with art hung onto it. I had to find and discover art. Be connected to humanity, life, people, our existence. Apparently soemthing like silent hill 2 is a deep psychological masterpiece of profound depth. I played that as a kid and have played it as an adult. It’s just a dumb game. Compare that to a film like Don’t Look Now. It’s embarrassing. Supposed to be for adults but it still has emotional depth of a child. Humanity deserves what it gets honestly if this the type of shit that passes for deep and profound. Reminds me of some of the youtubers like Jake Paul, who call themselves artists. Such an abused word. So sad the world. And no one cares. They just want 20 plus hours of their time swallowed up. A film is a magical and mysterious combination of reality, art, science and the supernatural - as well as a gateway to the nature of time, and perhaps even the first clue in solving the puzzle of what we’re doing in this world - Nic Roeg. RIP Nic Roeg. I know many game developers who take inspiration from your work and openly say that but even they admit games are not art and that’s soemthing I realised as a teenager. The world seemed so bleak. So confusing. Like you couldn’t escape anymore. Games games games games. Everything games. Loops. Slot machines. The most transparent corporate culture. It’s sickening.
As a long time football ramble fan seeing Pete Donaldson in this doc feels like seeing your crazy friend from school at a really formal event looking normal.
Haven't finished yet, but loving this. And the inclusion of a God like Molyneaux is fantastic. But oh my lord, Jeff Minter?!?!? You are absolutely spoiling us, those of us who were there!!!
Excellent documentary, and relevant in 2017 more than ever, now that the USA got a president that mostly communicates with the rest of the world via Twitter. Also, a good selection of milestone games in video gaming (although it doesn't even mention my all time favourite Metal Gear Solid or any of the driving/sports sims) and a decent job of providing some cultural context while not shying away from touching on some issues in gaming, like depictions of violence, female characters, etc. This is the way to talk about games if you want to make them seem as something more culturally relevant or really anything more than just a conduit for socially inept teenagers allowing them to scream at strangers playing CoD.
Mario Brothers is a survival game. The turtles or whatever came out the tubes and fall down the screen until they reached the bottom and then came back out the top. If you touched them you would die but if you jumped so you hit the ground beneath them they would flip for a short time where you could touch them and kill them. As far as I could tell the game went forever like this so it's essentially surviving waves of enemies. I thought it was very playable but it didn't seem to end like Super Mario Brothers does, you didn't really have an objective other than your own score, if it even had a score, I can't remember. It's good though, check it out if you haven't.
@@1anre In-game economies Narrative single player games, especially that of FPS FPS puzzle games huge bargain digital game sales Hiring people who modded their games instead of suing them memetic humour in games I know there's more, but it's scratching the surface
@@Hysteria98 Arguably, that's how Valve changed gaming, more than how gaming changed the world. They certainly should have given at least a nod of the head to something Valve. Probably HL2 since it required Steam and created that monopoly (as well as being an all time great). Also weird to have no sports games. But it's a pretty good list really and Charlie Brooker's writing's as good as ever.
@@DiegoRuiz1991 It was at least a new genre of games, taking the old fairy tale world from the old days and making it interactive, some with the first choices that shaped the game world you were playing in for the rest of that playthrough (multiple endings).
The Elite section is really interesting to me because I just keep seeing parallels to No Man's Sky, which didn't even come out until three years after this documentary.
Elite was my first game addiction, mine was on the Amiga 500 and have upgraded to the newest version Elite Dangerous Horizons a brilliant game in a 4 Billion star Galaxy, can you be the first to discover a new star system, (that is my coal). Starcraft another addiction this time due to the strategy involved and again still playing decades later. Thanks for the video, big thumbs up.
Crazy to see the origins of Elite Dangerous came from a humble yet brilliant game from the early 80s - mass-generated galaxies are as mesmerising now as they were 40 years ago!
nah, Minter is far too over rated. Over simplistic and repetative but marketed as quirky. You want a true 80s legend? Try getting Tony Crowther on the show (the coder, not the Price is RIght man!)
I was shaking my head when they were complaining about the violence and blaming violent behaviour on videogames, while watching the show. However when I saw the clip with Mortal Kombat 9 I was repulsed, so my reaction was pretty simmilar to Charlie´s ... Btw I am turning 33 this year, so I grew up playing Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto.
One issue that plagued Sinclair early on and especially with the Spectrum was quality control. Failure rate for the Spectrum was something like 24% which is insanely high (the industry standard is less then 1/10th of that, even back then.)
@@gaztheman7879 I'm not a huge GTA fan myself and I liked Book of ELi and Rogue One. That being said i think GTA need not fear the comparrison storywise. Both movies I found really entertaining but they do not really provide overly complex or interesting Storylines. And as far as After Earth is concerned. Well let's just say GTA still has to go a long way down to reach that kind of quality. All IMHO of course.
I kinda went off him when he was the emeritus editor in PC Gamer, writing a page a month about his (then) fat self, imagining that anyone gave a flying fuck.
Great doc from Charlie as per usual. Love the man. Shame after Doom no reference to Half-Life and the community that came after it, specifically Counter-Strike which was a mod which now has tournaments just like Starcraft does/did. Had to fit into TV segments though and that's a whole 'wipe' by itself!
31:11 I know it was largely just because his name is an easy pun on "flash in the pan" but it was pretty unfair to describe Crash Bandicoot that way. Of all the failed mascot characters from the 90s, Crash was one of the _most_ successful ones, he was the unofficial mascot of the PS1 after all. I guess you can call "only" being a superstar for a single console gen a flash in the pan relative to Mario's eternal dominance but it still bugged me a little, especially since, while I appreciate the series' importance to video game history, I've personally never been a big fan of any of the Mario games.
The Amstrad CPC overtook the BBC Micro to be the third most popular of the 8 bit home computers in the UK. And had great success in Europe too particularly in Spain, France and Greece. The BBC Micro got relegated to that one computer you were lucky to have wheeled in on a trolley during class at school some days. Many times the Amstrad CPC port was better than either the C64 or the Spectrum versions and in some cases both.
I grew up up with the ZX81 (and countless other computers) i programmed with my brother (they were all shite) Syntax error will be always programmed into my mind...Charlie Brooker used to write for a games mag, so he knows his shit.
There's still a huge stigma around video games. The very word "game" implies something immature and childish, as if the concept of playing (at anything) is shameful for an adult. However, in my view, games of any kind are not only phenomenally beneficial for mental health and sheer joy, but I regard video games as one of the highest forms of art that you can get. Think about it. You paint a picture, but then what do you do with it? You write a song, but what then apart from listen? Making a video game has someone do art for graphics, compose music for the sound, and it's all brought to life using mathematics and logic in the form of game code that everyone can now interact with on a tangible level. In no other medium does this amalgamation of the arts happen, bar maybe an animated film (although that isn't interactive). Yet still, video games are brushed off by the snobs in society who deem it a "waste of time" and do not regard them as the beautiful works of combined art that they are. I mean, the Mona Lisa is lovely, but you can't make her jump and collect coins.
Docking computer in Elite, God sake it was hard to make it that far at the start. It was a filter for going into the game, only really devoted people could master manual docking.
every manual docking involved 1 or 2 seconds of black screen at the final entry point where you were never quite sure if you'd matched the rotation - that final nail biting moment to see if you splattered or docked.
@@anusolly the strat was to creep up to docking slot, stop, wait for rotation to align then full thrust. Then buy docking computer as soon as you could.
I was an Xbox teen when The Last of Us came out and Bioshock Infinite made me cry. Weird to see the trends being so connected and continuously evolving. Fascinating video being a "gamer" who missed a lot of the beginning.
Ah man, those games were right in the middle of my high school years, I loved them, wait how did you play Last of Us if you were an Xbox teen? I'm only in my early 20s, yet it feels like I've playing video games forever, so much has changed, so it's interesting to see it from the perspective of people who have been playing video games since the start of video games, people who have really been playing forever lol
Ralph Baer created Pong before Bushnell and Alcorn. There was a whole lawsuit about it that ended with Atari being the first company to license the game from Magnavox.
(Talking about GTA) "Despite being set in an exaggerated version of the USA. It was a defiantly British game, made in Scotland. From MURDERS!" LOL! I love that description! Hehehe 🤣
I remember being emotionally invested in a Colecovision game. I was a blue pixel being chased by a red pixel........I have never experience terror like it since. I also, remember seeing that 'Shock and Awe' on the tele - that kind of actual violence on a screen was ok....(?)
![NISAMANEE - TADA (ท้าดา) [ OFFICIAL MV ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/hcQHEPMmJpU/mqdefault.jpg)
I miss Charlie's TV skits programs, Black Mirror is no substitute
I remember watching this when it came out in 2013 many times, i really enjoyed learning about the history of video games, I’m glad I found it again :))
I envy kids today growing up with the internet and flash graphics like it ain't no thang .. .but there was something very cool about being there at the start and being wowed by a computer, and the future held wonder. The killer for me was the 20-30 minute cassette loads ... especially when something went wrong.
+Nautilus1972 still have my first Nintendo with rob the robot and my Atari 26 and 5200.....I believe that the first A.I. that will gain consciousness will be from an n.p.c. in a video game,.....perhaps our universe is just a simulation itself.
+tatito rodriguez
Video game AI is garbage compared to what elite science is doing...
Exaggerating just a tad there mate. 20 mins lol
@op envy? I pity kids today.
@@dene39 I remember having games that seemed to take 20 minutes to load.
Can't underestimate the feeling of seeing a little sprite moving on a screen and how mind blowing it was at the time. After first playing the Atari 2600 I😢 was hooked for life. Then the speccy, Amiga, consoles. I now own an xbox x, and I'm still loving games at 50.
fun fact: space invaders wasn't intended to get faster, but as there were less things on the screen, the computer ran faster.
.
Jesus SuckedGayPenis the creators of space invaders have said so themselves...
Allan Søndergaard
Bollocks, I was there.
Jesus SuckedGayPenis well... that is hard to argue against... pics?
Allan Søndergaard Here you go.
Peter Serafinowitz saying "I'm not a fan of miniaturized Hugh Grants", is even funnier now that he has done a movie with a miniaturized Hugh Grant.. ('Wonka' from 2024)
😆
"Thatcher in Space". Yep, that line was quite possibly the best.
I'd buy a game with that title.
My mum bought a ZX Spectrum as a kind of family Christmas present in about 1985. Me and my 2 brothers loved it and it started a lifelong love of video games.
Same here, mate. My lovely mum (rip) got mine from Dixons in 85.. I'm still gaming and have an xbox now at 49 lol.
That is so dope
Ditto!😊
Charlie Brooker is an amazingly creative individual, creating everything from Newswipe and this to the brilliant Black Mirror series. He's a sarcastic, cynical jackass after my own barely beating heart.
Charlie is something of a lover of the ridiculous, in the case of Black Mirror it's the ridiculous effects that technology, both directly and indirectly seems to be having on society. And in the case of his wipe shows he's pretty much just pointing and laughing at the ridiculous things that are televised to us on a regular basis. It's almost something of an antidepressant hearing someone point out how ridiculous it all is; it just makes me feel like at the end of the day there's not much point in getting depressed by it all.
Yeah, but he's also hideously hypocritical about failing to identify any of the things he eagerly knocks if they implicate Left wing politics. Boring PC.
I already know before viewing anything that there is going to be the jibe at the Royal Family, the jibe at 'the Tories', it's as boring and predictable as opening a Private Eye or watching Frankie Boyle. Nothing to challenge the PC-ifying of video games and bleating about Games 'sexism' without critical scrutiny because some fat whale with angry spectacles says so, - all the while inserting videos from unattractive female 'experts' to fulfil some sexist communist quota but laughing off gun violence- and ignoring the bigger picture that this creepy blandifying of society is attached to politics, not to science or evidence and subversively spreading by conquering culture and media in a way more creepy than anything
Yet he's a complete idiot...
@Darth Wheezius Co-owning a retail chain no doubt to to peddle his hypocritical rubbish doesn't make him clever. It just means he has money.
@Darth Wheezius What retailer? Cex? Ahahahaha!
After watching this, feel really warm inside remembering that there'd always be a spot for video games in my heart irrespective of my age.
Superb commentary and sense of humor here, not censoring words or all that.
TH-cam recommendations has done it again, one out of a hundred ain't bad for an algorithm.
I'm amazed at how far TH-cam has fallen. Used to be fantastic for finding rabbit holes of new tunes.
Now they just keep forcing shit you've already watched or is completely unrelated.
@@Swindel67 cool story
@@Swindel67 I don't remember what exactly it was, but I was recently watching a "part 1" of something. "part 2" which literally only had the difference of having the 1 changed into 2 in the title didn't even show up in the next/recommended videos and I had to manually look for it, like WTF.
@@franklinnartz1381 that happens a lot now. Unless the part 2 has about a million views, it never shows up under the original video. Very frustrating
I helped get the C64 version of Elite into the U.S. market, as a consultant for the publishers, Firebird (owned by British Telecom at the time!) It was my first time working in the U.S. (I'm a Brit), and I ended up living and working there for 12 years! Best time of my life from 1985 to 1997, the peak of gaming as far as I am concerned!
"BOOTY" One of my favourite speccy games from firebird.
"...we're seeing the gaming equivalent of the critically-acclaimed HBO boxset"
Very prophetic from Charlie there.
Timestamp?
@@jabrondestoroyah 1:30:17
@@jabrondestoroyah 1:30:29
Blackmirror he's the king of prophetic television
46:39. I hear you bro. I remember my first time hearing a Cyberdemon without seeing it behind a door. The roar didn't faze me. But my fucking god... That metallic stomping. And it still gives me sweaty palms even now when i hear it even though i know exactly where the bugger is.
E.T. Still the most underrated game of all time................. So amazing in fact, that even the desert wanted millions of copies
And now 10 years on The Last Of Us is the biggest show on TV. My favourite games haven’t changed that much though (I’m a person of simple tastes who likes to stick to things they like) AOE2, RCT2 (or Open RCT now) with the additions of Motorsport Manager, Fly Corp and Stardew Valley.
I'm surprised Pokémon wasn't mentioned. That was everywhere when it came out. Became the biggest merchandise franchise in the world.
I was thinking the same. Pokemon for the cultural revolution and Metal Gear Solid for the technological one
Yeah, they lost me with their game choice after '97
Braid got a mention but Pokémon didn't... 🤷♂️
There's a lot to go over with video games in general, so i'm not surprised. However, Pokemon wasn't big just because of the games. Pokemon right from the off had 4 different companies, knowing full well the conceptual franchise they had on their hands. Right out of the gate, Manga, Anime, Games, Merchandise, etc. All of these things mostly mutually exclusive. Most Gamers I believe didn't really watch the anime, and vice versa. The concept of the overall premise is what sold, it just happens that the games were absolutely fucking amazing for their time. Their innovation died out not many years after, so they expanded and made a bunch more crap to follow.
You only have to look at the state of Pokemon now, amidst its 25th anniversary and see how much lower it has since sunk. The only reason it still sells is because the initial concept was so strong, fresh and boasted longevity, it seems.
I wish he'd do a sequel episode, but there's so much stuff nowadays, it would be difficult. It would turn into a "which games have gone viral in every year since 2013".
The last 5 minutes were pure genius.
Manic miner was all I needed. I couldn't get past 3rd screen but that didn't stop me playing for hours and hours. So much love for the little old speccy.
36:02 Ironic that that's what it eventually became. Basically nothing but Star Wars.
I'm only in my early 20s, yet it feels like I've playing video games forever, so much has changed, so it's interesting to see it from the perspective of someone who's been playing video games since the start of video games, someone who's really been playing forever lol
Clustered around the telly, playing Pong..we were agog! I played Days Gone today, the feeling is the same.., magical.
haha, I was one of those gamers! I remember when they came on cassette and took like half an hour to load so you could go do other stuff while you waited on a menu screen.
I remember my old Atari ST - I had so many floppy discs of all sorts of games. I love Ikari Warriors, James Pond II and Warhammer, along with the old Sierra point and click games. Those were the days!
I used to play the original Elite, flying around space represented by like 4 pixels, now Im flying around space in VR. Kids will never know how far we've come since the 80s!
I can imagine the editing booth when they reveal number 1 and going "oh, people are gonna hate this".
Wing Commander was ground breaking in many ways, but it's sadly largely forgotten, these days. None of these gaming list programs on TV or TH-cam videos ever feature it.
I guess Charlie Brooker never played it. The series was an interesting example of a game trying to be like a film.
@@gmann6269Brooker played it, he used to be a PC gaming magazine journalist. Games with FMV were 10 a penny back then, beside it’s budget Wing Commander wasn’t special.
@@TheBroz Yes it was. I loved it.
I'm not a gamer, but I am in the entertainment world, so I'm quite aware of them and how they're evolving. This documentary is very fascinating and eye-opening, as well as filling in the cultural and historic gaps in my knowledge. Also, as an American, I found the British perspective refreshingly new. Bravo, Charlie Brooker!
What do you do in the entertainment world? 🙂
Finally something great about the British home computing scene. We didn't have the NES and Mario (well, I didn't). We had games on cassette tapes and we liked it that way! Sorta...
Also: 27:40 ... AOIFE!
What's even more amazing about The Last of Us is the fact that Naughty Dog gradually built up to it with each of their games. The Crash Bandicoot games were story driven, all be it on a basic saturday morning cartoon kind of level not unlike Looney Tunes, The Jak & Daxter games were incredibly story driven and kind of laid the foundation for Naughty Dogs later games, The Uncharted games were the same but honestly I felt the character writing was better in the Uncharted Games, and The Last of Us was just the final bit of icing on the cake.
Lara Croft, "She was kinda like a sexy Mario, sexy Sonic." *shudder*
Lol relevant today because of the "sexy Sonic" memes
Lara was a female Indiana Jones and she wasn't that sexy, Lara was a bunch of geometric blocks painted to look female, i was a horny teen and that body never intrested me but the gameplay and puzzles were great for the time.
hes an idiot
Like it or not, she did become the unofficial face of the PlayStation.
it's funny how the guy who didn't like the look of the braid character, looks like the braid character.
That’s Darth Maul(‘s voice)
this is fantastic. how come i didn't find this earlier. and everything in black mirror makes much more sense now =)
My first game was 1986's Pool of Radiance, running on a Mac LCII. My old man gave it to me circa 1990. It wasn't until 2001 that I had the capability to finish it. Good times.
Elite was probably the game most ahead of its time. It was just amazing.
I love Elite Dangerous now and I grew up with the BBC Micro in the 80s, but we never had the original game. I'd love to go back in time and give it to 8 year old me, I think it would have blown my mind.
What a great film by the great Mr Brooker. This is (as time of going to press) ten years old.
I'd love it if he made a new one for 2023 ... then make the final part of the trilogy in 2033.
That'd be cool.
As a BBC Micro owner, it's hilarious to see Spectrum and C64 owners squabble over which of their machines was better.
...That being said my family was the opposite of rich, and it was a 10 year old hand me down by the time I got it. Really loved it though, I taught myself coding on that machine as a little girl, something the more modern computers at the time stopped making so easily accessible. MSDOS might have come with QBASIC (a terribly limited version of BASIC compared to the BBC), but it didn't come with an enormous literally Bible sized manual which told you how every command operated and gave you simple example programs.
That Liberal Democrat joke was perfect though.
@@framebadger it was 😂
To me it was the school computer they had at the infant school I went to from 1989-1991. At junior school they had Acorn computers which made the BBC seem outdated.
@@gmann6269 yeah I remember them in school, and I remember the first day we got an Acorn Archimedes, and a bunch of us kids plus the headmaster were sitting around playing Lemmings on it 😁 I’m not sure if you know since you called the Archimedes “Acorn computers”, but Acorn made the BBC Micro, too! In fact it was the first testbed for early ARM CPUs, which would go on to become the processor used in the Archimedes, and then in like 99% of mobile phones, and most recently became the base of Apple’s M1 chips in their new Macs.
@@DissociatedWomenIncorporated I didn't know Acorn made the BBC Micro. It is hard to remember which models they were but the infant school computers (the school probably had only 2 or 3 or maybe it was just one) were these black things that used large floppy discs about 6 inches cross, the teachers called them "the BBC", and the Acorns at junior school (I remember an Archimedes but there was also another model we had) were white, more advanced, used smaller 3.5 inch discs and had a Windows-esque interface. The BBC computer must have been the first computer I saw/used, though I didn't get to do much on it. My family didn't get a computer until 1995 and that was a used Amiga 600.
The only game I remember on the school BBC was Granny's Garden and the junior school Acorns had this naff educational game about 2 kids going around the world, a very basic game about jet airliners and Twinworld. At school we never got to play any cool popular games like Lemmings, games kids would want to get. Also it must have been at lunchtime, not during lesson time.
16.30 -
"You have bummed Aidy! Well done!
GAME OVER!"
Yeah that's the kind of "game" I used to make too.
Video games combine other media forms, including (but not limited to) books, music, movies and board games, distilling and filtering their best parts. In the same game, you can pick up and read an engrossing text, listen to a cinematic score, watch an in-game cutscene with movie-level editing and engage in a similar abstract strategizing to that demanded by games like Poker and Chess. Game developers also tend to be younger and more progressive in their outlook, so narrative themes are often more contemporary than legacy media. Only books are more stimulating. And that’s only because images and audio aren’t presented. In some ways the interactivity of video games develops abstract thought in such a way that supersedes even books.
Pretentious nonsense. Wideo games are just elaborate slot machines. It’s actually heartbreaking that they have taken over but you can’t fight that kind of addiction, especially when they get them young.
Youth now consists of kids sitting in their bedrooms screaming at a television. There’s no interaction except within their little echo chambers. Speaking to people through only text or voice does not connect you with someone. It’s a lie. Or kids just sitting on devices ignoring the world around them. Ignoring their loved ones, blanking them as the absolutely worthless games they are playing take or swallow up all their attention.
It’s awfully depressing. Had to go through it myself growing up with them. Most my friends just addicted. Spend all night playing call of duty or fifa, gears of war etc and then come into school next day zombies. Rinse and repeat.
Also games are awful in terms of writing and even connecting to humanity. The eyes will always be dead. When they are eventually considered not, it’s just a technical achievement. An advance in graphics. You aren’t actually looking into the eyes of a human being.
Me just typing this all out makes me awfully depressed thinking of what’s to come with kids growing up on these things. They literally steal and swallow up your time, probably most valuable thing we have.
It will only heighten indifference and lack of empathy or inspire a psychotic kind of empathy not grounded in any kind of reality. Like people who think animals are more important than humans because they look cute. It’s a mental disease.
Also people who play wideo games are awfully dull. Reading books, watching cinema, these things saved me from the hell of growing up having to play wideo games. Just awful.
Many game developers don’t even see games as art and I’d have to agree. Just an elaborate slot machine with art hung onto it. I had to find and discover art. Be connected to humanity, life, people, our existence.
Apparently soemthing like silent hill 2 is a deep psychological masterpiece of profound depth. I played that as a kid and have played it as an adult. It’s just a dumb game. Compare that to a film like Don’t Look Now. It’s embarrassing. Supposed to be for adults but it still has emotional depth of a child. Humanity deserves what it gets honestly if this the type of shit that passes for deep and profound.
Reminds me of some of the youtubers like Jake Paul, who call themselves artists. Such an abused word. So sad the world. And no one cares. They just want 20 plus hours of their time swallowed up.
A film is a magical and mysterious combination of reality, art, science and the supernatural - as well as a gateway to the nature of time, and perhaps even the first clue in solving the puzzle of what we’re doing in this world - Nic Roeg. RIP Nic Roeg. I know many game developers who take inspiration from your work and openly say that but even they admit games are not art and that’s soemthing I realised as a teenager. The world seemed so bleak. So confusing. Like you couldn’t escape anymore. Games games games games. Everything games. Loops. Slot machines. The most transparent corporate culture. It’s sickening.
The revolving car firing beams was actually a reference to another game extremely popular at the time -- Asteroids.
Ah that tune at the start. RoboCop on the GameBoy. Sooo good.
thank you
Clicked the thumbnail for the title... and for Tim Schafer. And whoa, I did not expect to also see Felicia Day here!
I love the theme tune to this. It takes me back to my C64 days.
JD's Mobile Disco robocop!🥳👍🏻
@@tetsuoshima7385 TY so much, that was killing me !! ;)
@@tetsuoshima7385 was conflicted with Scumball, the Ocean Loader and Commando's high score screen ;)
@@donraggo77 It was written for the Gameboy version of Robocop.
"angry birds has brought intense hand held pleasure to millions.... just like your mom has" xD
1:27:30
I'm happy that Braid is on this, I LOVE that game.
Have loved Charlie Brooker's style ever since he used to write game reviews for PC Zone. Funny shit indeed!
As a long time football ramble fan seeing Pete Donaldson in this doc feels like seeing your crazy friend from school at a really formal event looking normal.
Haha Linehan describing his coding career at 16:13 looks just like his twitter career
I remember wiggling the plug in a socket at an arcade in Black rock sands to rack up free credits on a galaxian machine in approximately 1980
Haven't finished yet, but loving this.
And the inclusion of a God like Molyneaux is fantastic. But oh my lord, Jeff Minter?!?!? You are absolutely spoiling us, those of us who were there!!!
55:28 legend right there
Watching this in November 2022. The inclusion of Twitter has made me chuckle. Elon working fervently for the Game Over screen.
2024 and he's on the final boss.
Excellent documentary, and relevant in 2017 more than ever, now that the USA got a president that mostly communicates with the rest of the world via Twitter. Also, a good selection of milestone games in video gaming (although it doesn't even mention my all time favourite Metal Gear Solid or any of the driving/sports sims) and a decent job of providing some cultural context while not shying away from touching on some issues in gaming, like depictions of violence, female characters, etc. This is the way to talk about games if you want to make them seem as something more culturally relevant or really anything more than just a conduit for socially inept teenagers allowing them to scream at strangers playing CoD.
Mario Brothers is a survival game. The turtles or whatever came out the tubes and fall down the screen until they reached the bottom and then came back out the top. If you touched them you would die but if you jumped so you hit the ground beneath them they would flip for a short time where you could touch them and kill them.
As far as I could tell the game went forever like this so it's essentially surviving waves of enemies. I thought it was very playable but it didn't seem to end like Super Mario Brothers does, you didn't really have an objective other than your own score, if it even had a score, I can't remember.
It's good though, check it out if you haven't.
Would be interesting to see them tackle the phenomenon of Modding in videogames, something I've always felt is far too overlooked.
They could have done a solid hour ALONE on how Valve influenced SO MUCH of gaming today.
I downloaded free Halflife mods for years when I was broke. 90% were crappy but still some good times.
@@Hysteria98 I'm sure you can do a piece on that. would be really neat
@@1anre In-game economies
Narrative single player games, especially that of FPS
FPS puzzle games
huge bargain digital game sales
Hiring people who modded their games instead of suing them
memetic humour in games
I know there's more, but it's scratching the surface
@@Hysteria98 Arguably, that's how Valve changed gaming, more than how gaming changed the world.
They certainly should have given at least a nod of the head to something Valve. Probably HL2 since it required Steam and created that monopoly (as well as being an all time great).
Also weird to have no sports games.
But it's a pretty good list really and Charlie Brooker's writing's as good as ever.
Doom: I am the most violent.
Mortal Kombat: No way, I am the most violent.
Manhunt/Manhunt 2: I beg your pardon?
This is one of the best things Brooker ever did. =D
his r
RIP Sir Clive... Legend.
wtf - no matter what you think of them NO mention of RPGs like Final Fantasy
good overall though
What did Final Fantasy do except being popular?
He does say literally within the first 30 seconds that it's his "personal, possibly bull-headed list".
@@DiegoRuiz1991 It was at least a new genre of games, taking the old fairy tale world from the old days and making it interactive, some with the first choices that shaped the game world you were playing in for the rest of that playthrough (multiple endings).
Remake
@@DiegoRuiz1991 bring story telling games to the mainstream on ps1
My geography teacher still had a load of BBC Micros from the 80s when I was going to secondary school in the 00s 😅
The Elite section is really interesting to me because I just keep seeing parallels to No Man's Sky, which didn't even come out until three years after this documentary.
Elite was my first game addiction, mine was on the Amiga 500 and have upgraded to the newest version Elite Dangerous Horizons a brilliant game in a 4 Billion star Galaxy, can you be the first to discover a new star system, (that is my coal). Starcraft another addiction this time due to the strategy involved and again still playing decades later. Thanks for the video, big thumbs up.
Crazy to see the origins of Elite Dangerous came from a humble yet brilliant game from the early 80s - mass-generated galaxies are as mesmerising now as they were 40 years ago!
This needs a 2024-25 update!
Great to see Jeff Minter in there 👍
nah, Minter is far too over rated. Over simplistic and repetative but marketed as quirky.
You want a true 80s legend? Try getting Tony Crowther on the show (the coder, not the Price is RIght man!)
I was shaking my head when they were complaining about the violence and blaming violent behaviour on videogames, while watching the show. However when I saw the clip with Mortal Kombat 9 I was repulsed, so my reaction was pretty simmilar to Charlie´s ... Btw I am turning 33 this year, so I grew up playing Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto.
20:57 the first word that came to mind when I saw the man on the right was "Poindexter"
0:52 Ranch or Cool Ranch
13:32 - That's a takeoff of Kim Carnes "Bettie Davis Eyes"
Yes, it was driving me nuts.
You're welcome.
you da real mvp
I remember that 7up advert as a kid quite vividly - had no idea what the song was so thank you for that!
th-cam.com/video/7m_L3sPNouk/w-d-xo.html
One issue that plagued Sinclair early on and especially with the Spectrum was quality control. Failure rate for the Spectrum was something like 24% which is insanely high (the industry standard is less then 1/10th of that, even back then.)
My old guitar teacher was one of the directors on this. WHOOP. Claim to fame.
lol, the esteemed writer of 'After Earth' criticises GTA's writing
He also wrote book of Eli and Rogue one.
@@gaztheman7879 I'm not a huge GTA fan myself and I liked Book of ELi and Rogue One. That being said i think GTA need not fear the comparrison storywise. Both movies I found really entertaining but they do not really provide overly complex or interesting Storylines. And as far as After Earth is concerned. Well let's just say GTA still has to go a long way down to reach that kind of quality. All IMHO of course.
His writing may suck but that doesn't excuse GTA's writing from being a poor pastiche of much better crime movies.
One out of three ain't bad?
I kinda went off him when he was the emeritus editor in PC Gamer, writing a page a month about his (then) fat self, imagining that anyone gave a flying fuck.
You know your old when you know the music playing in the intro, C64 time.
I remember it from Robocop in C64.
It's the Game Boy version in this, which is slower than the C64 version.
Great doc from Charlie as per usual. Love the man. Shame after Doom no reference to Half-Life and the community that came after it, specifically Counter-Strike which was a mod which now has tournaments just like Starcraft does/did. Had to fit into TV segments though and that's a whole 'wipe' by itself!
I used to play Elite for hours! I loved it! An early attempt at an open world RPG.
31:11 I know it was largely just because his name is an easy pun on "flash in the pan" but it was pretty unfair to describe Crash Bandicoot that way. Of all the failed mascot characters from the 90s, Crash was one of the _most_ successful ones, he was the unofficial mascot of the PS1 after all. I guess you can call "only" being a superstar for a single console gen a flash in the pan relative to Mario's eternal dominance but it still bugged me a little, especially since, while I appreciate the series' importance to video game history, I've personally never been a big fan of any of the Mario games.
The Amstrad CPC overtook the BBC Micro to be the third most popular of the 8 bit home computers in the UK. And had great success in Europe too particularly in Spain, France and Greece. The BBC Micro got relegated to that one computer you were lucky to have wheeled in on a trolley during class at school some days. Many times the Amstrad CPC port was better than either the C64 or the Spectrum versions and in some cases both.
The BBC was a hugely expensive Acorn Electron.
I just realized. The segment about the Wii where it looks like the 4 blokes are wanking and then Charlie says "the spectacular coming of the Wii"
Even as a teen i couldn't understand Space invaders not paying out. Prior i had played the one arm bandit with my Grandad, a tanner a time.
I grew up up with the ZX81 (and countless other computers) i programmed with my brother (they were all shite) Syntax error will be always programmed into my mind...Charlie Brooker used to write for a games mag, so he knows his shit.
1:30:30 the irony 10 years later of Charlie talking about how games could be like HBO boxsets... and then using THAT game.
Awesome programme
There's still a huge stigma around video games. The very word "game" implies something immature and childish, as if the concept of playing (at anything) is shameful for an adult. However, in my view, games of any kind are not only phenomenally beneficial for mental health and sheer joy, but I regard video games as one of the highest forms of art that you can get.
Think about it. You paint a picture, but then what do you do with it? You write a song, but what then apart from listen? Making a video game has someone do art for graphics, compose music for the sound, and it's all brought to life using mathematics and logic in the form of game code that everyone can now interact with on a tangible level. In no other medium does this amalgamation of the arts happen, bar maybe an animated film (although that isn't interactive). Yet still, video games are brushed off by the snobs in society who deem it a "waste of time" and do not regard them as the beautiful works of combined art that they are.
I mean, the Mona Lisa is lovely, but you can't make her jump and collect coins.
Sir Terry Pratchetts daughter wrote the re-vamp Tomb Raider!!? Brilliant.
I can here the RoboCop music at the intro! Nostalgia right there ☺️ I had it on the amstrad CPC
Uhuh.
Odd that I was expecting it to therefore be one of the listed games, but not to be.
Docking computer in Elite, God sake it was hard to make it that far at the start. It was a filter for going into the game, only really devoted people could master manual docking.
every manual docking involved 1 or 2 seconds of black screen at the final entry point where you were never quite sure if you'd matched the rotation - that final nail biting moment to see if you splattered or docked.
@@anusolly the strat was to creep up to docking slot, stop, wait for rotation to align then full thrust. Then buy docking computer as soon as you could.
I was an Xbox teen when The Last of Us came out and Bioshock Infinite made me cry. Weird to see the trends being so connected and continuously evolving. Fascinating video being a "gamer" who missed a lot of the beginning.
Ah man, those games were right in the middle of my high school years, I loved them, wait how did you play Last of Us if you were an Xbox teen? I'm only in my early 20s, yet it feels like I've playing video games forever, so much has changed, so it's interesting to see it from the perspective of people who have been playing video games since the start of video games, people who have really been playing forever lol
Ralph Baer created Pong before Bushnell and Alcorn. There was a whole lawsuit about it that ended with Atari being the first company to license the game from Magnavox.
Amazing overview. Thanks!
"Say fuck 20 times that's my programming career" i'm dead XD
Mr. Dorgan: "It has been quite a leap from Pac-Man to Night Trap"
(Talking about GTA) "Despite being set in an exaggerated version of the USA. It was a defiantly British game, made in Scotland. From MURDERS!" LOL! I love that description! Hehehe 🤣
When i was like 3 or 6 i saw on tv pacman boardgame and i told my mom i wanted it and someday it was just gone i wish i had it
Sad thing is this could be the last documentary where the people in the entire industry were all gamers themselves. 🥺😢😭😭.
Watching this whilst editing the database of Championship Manager 97/98.
The coca brovaz super Brooklyn is the best rap song to ever use a video game sample in a rap song !!!!!
please title of that epic famous melody on 7:50 ? nm found it space . magic fly
I remember being emotionally invested in a Colecovision game. I was a blue pixel being chased by a red pixel........I have never experience terror like it since.
I also, remember seeing that 'Shock and Awe' on the tele - that kind of actual violence on a screen was ok....(?)
Very interesting content. I do like your editing!
Title of the song at 7:30 please?
***** darude-sandstorm
Space magic fly
It's been 10 years since this programme came out. If Charlie Brooker would have added 5 more games to this list since 2013, which would he add?
I’d hope Stardew Valley just because of it being a one man operation (yes, I know he has help now).
What is beautiful about tetris - is that how it shows meaningless of life: success never keeps, fails always stocks.
SFMBE
If I had written After Earth, I wouldn't show my face in public again!