BBCs The Gamechangers didnt exactly do its GTA subject matter justice.
In the very next scene, the game engines finished and demonstrated to Jamie, another Rockstar co-founder.
As a result, the games industry has its own history, its own stories to tell.
Like empires, studio and publishers have sprung up, grown to huge size and vanished without trace.
Take, as an early example, the story of a British outfit from the 1980s: Imagine Software.
Brilliantly, one of those games was calledBandersnatch.
But as the BBCs cameras rolled, Imagine unexpectedly went into meltdown.
Bills werent being paid, and before long, the bailiffs had rolled in and closed the place down.
Just like that, Imagine was gone takingBandersnatchwith it.
The whole sorry episode was captured for posterity in the documentary,Commercial Breaks.
This spelled trouble for Sega, since it had already produced thousands of copies ofTetrisfor the Sega Mega Drive.
These had to be recalled at an unspecified (but probably painful) cost.
Production onAPBtook five years, yet after all the hype and anticipation, it was a misfire.
Behind these games are ordinary people with potentially fascinating stories to tell.
Whats it like to work for years on a game, only to see it sink within weeks?
Whats it like to be the boss of a company that employs hundreds and spends millions on one game?
How do they sleep at night?
The games industry is a fascinating collision of art and commerce.
Surely then, its about time the games industry got a great movie of its own.
