The first season predictably covered Star Wars (Kenner/Hasbro), Barbie (Mattel), Masters of the Universe (Mattel), and G.I. Joe (Hasbro). The second season covered Star Trek (MEGO/Playmates/Diamond), Transformers (Takara/Hasbro), LEGO (um, Lego), and Hello Kitty (Sanrio).
If I had to guess, I'd expect their third season to explore the likes of Nintendo (by far the largest product line in the toy trade they haven't examined), Beanie Babies, Hot Wheels, My Little Pony, Thundercats, NERF, and/or probably something that was bigger overseas but flashed in the pan here, like Tamagotchi.
It occurred to me that Netflix (or YouTube Premium, or Amazon, or whoever) could do the same sort of show based on the history of the modern game industry, and they'd have enough surviving principals and physical product safely stored in collections and company vaults that they'd be able to do a lot of showing and not just telling.
I say modern game industry because they wouldn't be able to get a lot of viewership if they covered their diligence for a season or two with chess, checkers, whist/poker, cribbage, billiards, and so on. They'd have to limit the scope to the games that present-day adults grew up playing, that a generation or two before that either weren't as widespread, or have evolved significantly since.
Here are the games I'd love to see documented on The Games That Played Us!
Monopoly
We know they have to start here as the modern board-game industry began in 1935 with Parker Brothers' seminal game of capitalism and futility. The journey to what we have today with USAopoly and the licensing tie-in of classic board games has reshaped the analog game landscape.
Dungeons & Dragons
Gary Gygax's 1974 Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures, actually originally an expansion for his 1971 miniatures wargame Chainmail, grew in the hobby trade for the rest of the decade, but then went nuclear after appearing in the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982. The D&D Basic Set and Expert Set were everywhere, and Advanced D&D sourcebooks were showing up in grocery stores. An eponymous Saturday-morning cartoon left us all wondering if the party would ever get back to the rollercoaster. Before long comic shops and bookstores moved heavily into RPGs, including spinoffs in other genres like Traveller, Gamma World, and Champions. Then came all the mysterious cults and devil worship and Michigan steam tunnels and whatever. AD&D 2nd Edition in the 1990s purged the hellfire but we all knew what a Baatezu was. There was a silly movie starring Jeremy Irons, and Everquest and World of Warcraft largely supplanted D&D for years, until a double-whammy that nobody saw coming: an unexpectedly excellent 5th edition, and retro-chic thriller Stranger Things showing an entire new generation of players that fighting the Demogorgon was cool.
Warhammer
Games Workshop started out as a broader player in the hobby realm, publishing hobby review magazine White Dwarf (since the term had relevance both in fantasy and science fiction) and introducing an assortment of RPG and miniatures lines. Since the 1990s, things simplified: Warhammer 40k is the most popular miniature-figure wargame in the world and everything else Games Workshop does is ancillary to it. White Dwarf dropped all third-party content and became a house organ. Tray-pusher Warhammer Fantasy persisted for over a decade more, especially in Europe, but has now been supplanted by a "40k version" of the same setting, Age of Sigmar. The episode on Warhammer will get to look at lot at the business side of things, because while we were mostly just chuckin' dice, Games Workshop had to contend with technological upheaval and metallurgical problems such as worldwide spikes in the price of tin.
World of Darkness
This could be a very timely episode if the new 5th Edition of Vampire: the Masquerade takes off after its forthcoming release. The 1990s saw D&D continue to be the category leader, but weaker than it ever had been (and it would be even weaker in the late 2000s, enough so that Pathfinder arose against it). Goth subculture struck around that time and White Wolf's Vampire, Werewolf, and Changeling RPGs and Rage TCG all raked in the cash. They even had a TV show, Kindred: the Embraced. The impact was significant enough that for over 20 years, Chessex continued to make packs solely of 10-sided dice.
Catan
Klaus Teuber changed the way board games were played with The Settlers of Catan in 1995. There was no more elimination, everyone could influence gameplay to the end, and rule sets gave full agency to the players, reducing RNG and making strategic choices the core game determinant. "Euro-style" board games began a slow build over the course of over a decade, and after some economic dry spells, finally saw their boom in the 2010s when the entire culture of board gaming married itself to social media. The histories of Mayfair, once an RPG publisher, and Asmodee, now the biggest board game publisher in the trade, are both entwined with the history of Catan.
Pocket Monsters
It all started as a Game Boy game and some trading cards in Japan. But GameFreak's Pocket Monsters made the leap, somehow, to North America to become Pokemon in 1998-99, and here we are 20 years later and it's the single biggest media franchise in history, surpassing even Star Wars and Batman with a staggering 59 billion dollars in sales and its own property oversight subsidiary spun off from Nintendo, The Pokemon Company. Linking all the milestones Pokemon has seen come and go would be a series of articles by itself. Somehow Pokemon became the best, like no one ever was, very likely because it was the focal toy of the gigantic Millennial generation.
Magic: the Gathering
There have already been some treatments of Magic in documentary form, but pieces like Enter the Battlefield focus on pro players, and while those guys are surely decent people, their personal journeys as players are of near-zero interest to me and anyone interested in the business history of Wizards of the Coast and Magic. We've read bits and pieces of it through decades of mothership articles, Mark Rosewater pieces, and hobby media, but for a product that arrived in 1993 and for which internet chronicling has always existed, we should be able to do better. We should be able to show that history. My understanding is that Wizards has some special tidbits in prep for Gen Con next month, video and media and product from the company vault that we'll all get to enjoy. Peter Adkison and Dr. Richard Garfield are still alive. Let's not let this one slip away; we've already lost Christopher Rush and Quinton Hoover, two of the first artists who brought the visual beauty of the game to life.
Cards Against Humanity
For the 2010s, this game is at the center of the industry's story, from the rise of Kickstarter (and the thousands upon thousands of shovelware titles that appear for every one success that breaks through) to the explosion of lowbrow party games and copycats to the publisher's brash political stunts and so on and so forth. Love it or hate it, Cards Against Humanity is a thing now, and so are Exploding Kittens and What Do You Meme and Joking Hazard and on and on, and it all started with a bunch of people making sex and fart jokes and playing Apples to Apples with it.
There you go, Hulazon YouFlix. Two full seasons worth of material ready for your writers and producers to do awesome things with. I have every faith in your skills and talents. Please make that check out to Michael Bahr, it's spelled B-a-h-r, in care of Desert Sky Games, 3875 W Ray Rd Ste 7, Chandler, AZ 85226. I look forward to celebrating your success!
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