Video Game Primer Sticks With Easy Points

"Game On!" includes Jonathan Wendel, a champion professional player. (Cnbc)

For the most part, you either get video games or you don't.

But if you fall into that vast I-get-it-but-not-really gray area, CNBC's two-hour documentary tonight on the history of video games is the perfect primer, a comprehensive crash course on the relatively young history of the form.

That's two days before the launch of the PlayStation 3, four days before the Nintendo Wii drops, exactly 40 days before Christmas. In games, as in television, timing is everything.

Narrated by CNBC anchor Bill Griffeth, "Game On!" pins the birth of video games to 1958, when Henry Higginbottom, a nuclear scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, created a game called Tennis for Two. An engineer named Ralph Baer, considered the father of video games, took the game out of the lab and into the living room with the Magnavox Odyssey, a game system that sold 300,000 units in the early 1970s. A flop.

It wasn't until Atari's Pong took everyone's quarters at an Andy Capp's Tavern in Silicon Valley that the modern video game took off. And except for what game historians gloomily refer to as the "crash" of the early 1980s, the industry has been on an incredible roll ever since, transforming the entertainment landscape along the way.

Gamers, you've been warned. Nothing new here. If you're a hard-core gamer, it may be a little painful and somewhat embarrassing to hear Griffeth announce that "video games make fantasies come true" at the top of the show. And Keith Feinstein, a game historian, says that whether it's driving a race car, skiing down a mountain or being in a war, games "let you do what you always wanted to do."

Where's Henry Jenkins, the MIT professor who's known as the "thinker" of the gaming industry and the author of the recent book "Convergence Culture," to talk about the influence of games on movies? He's not in the documentary.

Still, there are some factoids that even the most fervent gamers might not know, and non-gamers might find fascinating. For example: Apple's Steve Jobs, a gamer himself, got his start at Atari, which was founded by Nolan Bushnell, who in his quest to market games outside the arcade also founded Chuck E. Cheese. Says Bushnell: "Children the world over are the same -- they like fun, food, entertainment and games."

No other entertainment medium is as influenced by technological advances as games. Every five years or so there's a reshuffling -- from Sony's original PlayStation to the PlayStation 3, from Nintendo's Super Nintendo Entertainment System to the Wii, from Microsoft's Xbox to Xbox 360. "Game On!" chronicles the evolution, briefly but effectively, of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, now in an all-out war to get their share of a $30 billion global business.

Inevitably the documentary also touches on the issue of violence in games, especially after the Columbine shootings. Sens. Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton make appearances. Last year, after a hidden sex scene was discovered in the ultra-violent and phenomenally popular Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the two lawmakers were the first to attack the industry.

The documentary packs a lot into two hours, highlighting icons of the industry -- Shigeru Miyamoto and Will Wright, two legends of interactive storytelling -- and introducing some gamers. There's an 8-year-old cancer patient who makes his own video game that shoots cancer cells and puts cancer in remission. Then the two strangers, one in Philadelphia, the other in Seattle, who find romance in the online role-playing game Asheron's Call. And a married couple who are making real cash selling virtual items in the online community Second Life.

Too bad "Game On!" doesn't focus enough on gamers. In hoping to appeal to those who don't get games, it shortchanges the viewers who do.

Game On! (two hours) airs tonight at 9 on CNBC, and will re-air Sunday at 9 p.m.