‘High Score’ Showrunner Melissa Wood Tells Us About The Joys And Challenges Of Telling Gaming History

Netflix’s limited series High Score is an attempt to highlight video game history, a topic so large showrunner Melissa Wood admitted it could swallow up the entirety of her filmmaking career. And she’d be just fine with that, if Netflix is interested.

The show is both sprawling and narrowly focused, touching on the intensity of the early console wars between Nintendo and Sega, the differences between the Japanese and American game markets, and how gaming pioneers unleashed new ideas that radically shifted its trajectory into the multi-billion dollar market that it is today.

But it also is a limited series on small stories hidden in plain sight that changed the industry forever. In its six episodes, Wood and France Costrel highlighted the work of relative unknowns like Jerry Lawson, a Black man who first pitched the idea of a console that had interchangeable game cartridges. High Score is a series that manages to make Mario and Zelda visionary Shigeru Miyamoto a side character, not a major player, making clear the simple fact that some of the best stories about video games are often the least well known.

Uproxx spoke to Wood about High Score, the joy of working with other creatives on projects and why the show highlighted some stories and decisions over others during its six episodes. And what might be coming next if there’s more High Score in store.

Uproxx: I was just reading your Reddit AMA after finishing the series myself. What was it like to get some feedback from people who have watched

Melissa Wood: That was fun. I’d never done that before. It’s great to talk to people directly, you don’t usually have a chance to do that. Things go out in the world so it’s nice when you have that direct line to people who’ve seen the show.

One thing I was thinking while watching this and I wanted to ask you about was how you choose the narrative of the show. The industry has so many stories and so many ways to explain its history, but where do you start deciding what’s important and needs to be explored

It was really hard, actually. Because you’re right, the industry is huge. So much has happened in the last 40-something years and there’s endless stories to sort of look into. There are a few things that sort of guided our decision-making in the beginning. One was we sort of wanted to look at the industry from a personal perspective and from a different perspective. For instance, we knew that we wanted to include a music composer because we thought that this was a part of gaming that’s not really thought about really often but it’s so crucial to the experience as a player.

We knew that we wanted to have sort of a diverse cast of characters whose own experiences and creation would vary from each other. For instance Gordon Bellamy’s attachment to Madden, we felt like that was really special and unique and different from the other people in our series.

What we really wanted to sort of not go down the route of with our series was sort of telling the same perspective of the visionary lone creator who has a great success over and over again. We thought that would be really repetitive and thought it would sort of sell the industry a bit short in how innovative it was and how many various people had been involved in creating these games.

Then in 1976, a Black engineer named Jerry Lawson invented "interchangeable cartridges" and changed the industry forever