dev environment

People Make Games investigates how Roblox relies on young, often child, developers to build its content while paying them very little. It covers Roblox's monetization model, the revenue split, and the harms to kids who make games on the platform.

Valve's two-hour documentary for Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, with team members discussing development, nearly running out of money, being hacked, the publisher lawsuit and the birth of Steam.

A KQED Truly CA documentary narrated by John Waters about the Salton Sea, a once-glamorous California vacation spot now home to an eccentric community. It covers the area's economic, political and environmental problems and features Salvation Mountain.

In an Ars Technica War Stories episode, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner describes how he made the game on the Apple II, fighting hardware memory limits and the platform's decline. It covers the rotoscoped animation and the engineering tricks involved.

A roughly 75-minute video essay from Ahoy's RetroAhoy series on the making and history of The Secret of Monkey Island. It covers the small LucasArts team, the game's development and its sequel.

A Russian-language investigation by Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation into Dmitry Medvedev's alleged corruption network. It documents charities funding palaces, vineyards and yachts, and has English subtitles available.

Internet Historian tells the story of No Man's Sky, from its over-hyped and badly received launch to years of updates by Hello Games that redeemed the game. It is a long, comedic mini-documentary.

Chai Jing's 104-minute documentary on China's smog, with full English subtitles. A former TV anchor, she investigates what smog is, where it comes from and what can be done, prompted by her daughter's health problems.

A Noclip Greatest Hits documentary on the legacy of RollerCoaster Tycoon, covering its original design, Chris Sawyer and the OpenRCT2 community that keeps it alive.

A FRONTLINE documentary on whether efforts to fix plastic pollution made it worse. It looks at the battle over plastics and recycling and how little plastic is actually recycled.

DW Documentary on the roughly 6,300 ships sunk in World War II that are now rusting and leaking oil into the seas. Scientists investigate contamination and the risk of a huge oil spill.

The first episode of the 1996 PBS documentary series on the creation of the Boeing 777. It follows the design, build and certification process, including meetings with subcontractors.

A short tour of a UK materials recycling facility showing how mixed recyclables are mechanically and optically sorted. Aluminum, ferrous metal, glass, paper, and trash come out as separate streams.

A People Make Games follow-up investigation into Roblox, built on stories from players and creators after the channel's first video. It covers the platform's treatment of young developers and its moderation.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

Jason Scott discusses making his documentary GET LAMP at a Google Tech Talk and screens part of the film. It covers the history of text adventures and interactive fiction, with interviews of Infocom developers and others.

A VICE documentary that visits Agafia Lykova, last surviving member of the Lykov family of Old Believers who fled into the Siberian taiga in 1936. It shows how she lives in remote isolation and the outside world encroaching on it.

An hour-long, carefully sourced video essay from Ahoy asking what counts as a video game and which one was truly first. It examines Tennis for Two, Spacewar, Pong, the Brown Box and a 1947 CRT device.

A Dartmouth-produced documentary on how professors John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz, with a group of undergraduates, invented the BASIC language. It covers the creation of BASIC and the early time-sharing environment at Dartmouth.

A documentary from Swan Bitcoin exploring Bitcoin's relationship with energy, featuring Lyn Alden and others, and arguing that mining is a net positive for the environment and not wasteful.

A 1995 episode of The Computer Chronicles devoted to Gary Kildall, creator of CP/M. It works as a retrospective and tribute to the personal computer pioneer.

Veritasium tells the story of Kary Mullis, the surfer and LSD user who invented PCR and won a Nobel Prize. It explains how PCR works and how it was developed at Cetus.

A feature-length documentary on General Magic, the 1989 startup that envisioned the smartphone and handheld connected devices, featuring Tony Fadell, Andy Hertzfeld and Marc Porat. It covers the company's vision and eventual failure.

Remastered episode of Tim Hunkin's The Secret Life of Machines about the radio, covering its development including Hertz and Marconi experiments and Armstrong's FM radio in animated form.

The full 2010 documentary Inside Job, directed by Charles Ferguson, examines the causes of the 2008 global financial crisis. It traces the story through interviews with key financial and political players across several countries.

A 2008 documentary by Brett Whitcomb about the Rock-afire Explosion, the animatronic band built for ShowBiz Pizza Place restaurants. It follows the band's history and the fans who keep the machines and their technology running.

ILM shows how The Mandalorian season one used a large curved LED wall to display interactive 3D environments in camera. The video covers the virtual production setup replacing location shoots.

Technology Connections gives a deeply researched history of RCA's CED video disc system, a capacitance-based format that took over a decade to reach market. Part one covers its development and strange technology.

minimme traces the timeline of 3D graphics engines on the Game Boy Advance, from early experiments to commercial 3D games, covering techniques such as voxel rendering. It is a history and showcase of what developers coaxed out of the limited hardware.

A French-language documentary on the history of Prolog, created in Marseille by Alain Colmerauer in the early 1970s, with interviews of many people involved. It traces the origins of logic programming and later developments of the language.

A short Great Big Story piece on the Ocracoke Brogue, or Hoi Toider dialect, spoken on North Carolina's Outer Banks, which developed through centuries of isolation and traces back to the 1600s.