Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I LOVE Deadliest Catch. And it seems I’ve made this reasonably public, as so far this morning three colleagues have linked me to stories about the ludicrous news that they’re going to make a game based on the show.

In case you’re unitiated, Deadliest Catch is a phenomenal Discovery Channel documentary, where we follow the lives of six crews on six boats who take part in Alaskan king crab fishing. Indeed, it doesn’t sound so enticing, does it? Until you realise that this is the deadliest job in the world, where there’s a realistic chance that those who head out for the haul will not be coming home. 20ft seas when the conditions are calm, 40ft waves crashing over the deck, sweeping any who don’t hold onto something either into the barriers, or worse, into the deadly, freezing Bering Sea. It’s intense. (See at the bottom of the post for a clip of the show).

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For those lucky enough to be in the US (or indeed those who come by their television through mystical futuristic means), there’s a new Discovery documentary that should be on everyone’s TIVO/hard drive. Rise Of The Videogame.

Unlike so many programmes about videogames, Rise Of demonstrates a depth of research and work that lifts it above the usually banal, patronising rubbish that television normally produces on the subject. It interviews all the right people, knows to show clips of all the right games, and makes the assumption that you’ve already a basic knowledge of the subject.

The first episode (of five hour-long documentaries) explores the birth of videogaming, and takes the Cold War as its allegorical guide. After discussing oscilloscopes being hacked to play a tennis game, it moves on to the enigmatic Steve Russell talking about how he created Spacewar!, comparing the original nature of gaming (shooting things, missiles, explosions, etc) with the American culture of fear surrounding the tensions with the USSR; how it was, “Born out of Cold War anxiety and nurtured in the era of counterculture.”

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