At one time regarded as a fad, and then a niche industry, videogames have boomed to a $135 billion-plus annual business, on par with the cumulative total of the global film box office and home entertainment businesses. And when final numbers from 2020 are tallied, aided no doubt by last year’s pandemic stay-at-home orders, MarketWatch indicates that the global videogame revenue is expected to further surge an astonishing almost 20 percent over 2019 figures, to more than $179 billion.

Playing With Power: The Nintendo Story, narrated by Sean Astin, provides an engrossing, well-indexed overview of this international pastime, from nascent industry to world-straddling behemoth, all as told through the lens of the Japanese company which cracked open the North American market in the 1980s and dominated well into the 1990s.

Helmed by Jeremy Snead, this five-part documentary, which recently enjoyed its world premiere on the streaming platform Crackle, in many ways serves as an expansion of the director’s 2014 feature Video Games: The Movie, as well as a sibling of Unlocked, Snead’s 2016 nonfiction series which examined various aspects of game innovation and culture. Featuring reminiscences and commentary from fans like Wil Wheaton and Alison Haislip, plus interviews with a deep Rolodex of executives, developers and other industry veterans, the program delivers a litany of great anecdotes and, in its best moments, a fascinating portrait of the heady intersection between art and commerce – of massive creativity and intricate game design mechanics working in awe-inspiring lockstep with state-of-the-art technology.

For much of its running time, however, Playing With Power evidences the fact that there can be a difference between inherently interesting subject matter and singular vision or exacting execution. It’s certainly not, as is the case with so many current docu-series, an issue of there not being enough narrative to fill an expanded running time. Instead, Snead misappropriates some of that time. He overestimates, for instance, a viewer’s need to know the “origin story,” or complete work history, of various marketing executives; adds diorama-style recreations that feel nipped from a Wes Anderson movie; and sprinkles throughout digressive little bumpers that are meant to serve as broader cultural timestamps but come across as a waste of time. Snead also over-indulges in a terrible, overwrought score which mistakes almost every interview for the climax of a fantasy epic.

Thankfully, though, the story of Nintendo and the enormous tug-of-war for market share dominance with its competitors contains enough natural peaks, valleys, and palace intrigue to paper over most of these somewhat benign shortcomings and hiccups. It certainly helps that the curated interviewees, inclusive of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and Nintendo consultant and spokesperson Howard Phillips among many more, are all great guides.

After a debut episode that reaches all the way back to Nintendo’s founding in 1889 as a trading card company and establishes its corporate culture and first tentative commercial steps in the United States, things pick up with a second episode that details the introduction of the groundbreaking 8-bit NES home console. It’s here where the series takes flight, delving into the pace of technological advancement, the bow of the 16-bit Sega Genesis, and how third-party developers came to operate in this emerging space. The third episode touches on, among other elements, Nintendo’s foolhardy decision to reject Sony’s disc storage over cartridges, which would lead to the consumer electronic giant’s creation of the PlayStation. Playing With Power’s final installment chronicles, among other elements, the huge triumph of the Nintendo Wii, the failure of its WiiU, and its bold gamble on Pokémon – as well as Apple’s iPhone entering the chat, and the subsequent impact of smartphone games on the marketplace.

These big, sea-shifting events or explorations of legitimate brand personality – console successes and failures, the arrival of Microsoft’s Xbox, or Nintendo’s enviable touch with iconic characters – provide Playing With Power with its structure and most of its foundational dramatic moments. But the series is also notable for the manner in which it can locate little details, like the tweak of an ergonomically designed joystick, and explain how important they actually were in the arc of video gaming history. There are also plenty of fun stories (one executive recalls buying golf gloves in bulk to deal with gamers developing callouses on their thumbs) and digressions, as with a segment giving love, appropriately, to composer Koji Kondo, whose evocative compositions for Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda series still live in the heads of millions of people.

In the end, Playing With Power makes the case that, despite the gigabytes of innovation which presently outstrip what could ever be imagined in the industry’s infancy, there is a poetic legacy to be found in Nintendo’s core competency, which is delivering – from playing cards to Game Boy to Nintendo Switch – portable, enjoyable, and highly addictive entertainment options for people all over the world.