The BBC’s ‘Make it Digital’ season focuses on ‘coding and digital creativity’ and with it we’ve had a slew of interesting programmes. From the story of Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, to Girls Can Code – like The Apprentice, but with likeable people who don’t stab each other in the back to get ahead and designed to encourage a group of young women to consider a career in tech. However, the headlines have been grabbed by The Gamechangers, a dramatisation of Rockstar’s rise to fame and the success of the GTA series.

When The Gamechangers was broadcast last week, the games industry was out on the defensive. Rockstar tweeted that it was all load of made up bollocks, while others complained that it was set in New York, not Rockstar’s home turf of Scotland. Generally, the gaming internet response ranged from ‘meh’ to ‘well, that was shit’.

The  Gamechangers focused on Rockstar’s battle with moral crusader, Jack Thompson, played by Bill Paxton.  Danielle Radcliffe stepped up as Sam Houser, who was presented as a Steve Jobs style visionary with a steely determination to have things on his own terms. Radcliffe spent the first half of the story staring into space, dreaming up the next big thing in gaming and then sending his minions (namely his brother Dan Houser and co-founder Jamie King) to do his bidding, before beating them at table tennis.

I’m not entirely sure that games companies work exactly the way The Gamechangers made out and that’s what got the industry’s goat. In one scene, Houser demands a new game engine and in the next scene, just one plane flight later, it’s been delivered. Cue tweets from devs telling us that it just ain’t so. The state of the Rockstar office caused a stir too. Apparently, not all games are developed in swanky, loft-style office spaces with glass panelling and roof gardens.

Skipping the early years in Dundee, the story focuses on the few years between GTA Vice City and the launch of GTA: San Andreas, plus the fallout of the Hot Coffee sex scene. When it starts, Rockstar is already established and has been bought by Take Two. We open with news of the 1 million units sold in one day, which is laughable by GTA standards today. Then the scene changes to a black kid, eyes glazed, with overlaid images of him gunning down people in GTA Vice City.

The black kid later gets arrested, grabs a gun from an officer during a police interview and walks out, gunning down two members of the force. He steals a police car and later claims that life is like a game. Thompson sees the case and decides to sue Rockstar for peddling violence to kids.

Although the early years of development may have been interesting to the likes of us, drama needs conflict, so the legal battle between games, representing creative freedom, and the Christian right delivers just that.  As a piece of light entertainment, The Gamechangers had me gripped to the end. As a glimpse into the world of games development and its most successful series ever – not so much.

Paxton puts in a good performance as the angry and religious  lawyer who is good to his family, but lets his crusade take over all their lives. And Radcliffe is best when he’s the anxious, paranoid Sam Houser with his back up against the wall and the Feds at his door.

However, some scenes are ridiculous. There are the 90s style montages of people tapping their fingers on keyboards, sleeping at their desk and waking up to discover they’ve created the best game ever.

Then there’s the moment where the Houser brothers and cohorts drive a spanking new 4X4 into a gang neighbourhood of downtown LA, armed with a video camera, for research. They are dressed in what these white, British guys perceive to be street cred appropriate garb – gold chains, baggy jeans and lots of white sportswear. They look like the Inbetweeners on the way to a Backstreet Boys fancy dress party.

To add insult to injury, when a car full of ‘locals’ rolls up looking fierce, it all gets a bit edgy. But when the gang members find out that it’s all for GTA it’s smiles all round because they love that game. It’s painful to watch and I suspect that’s the made up bit Rockstar derided.

Apart from the lame hip-hop outfits, the costume department did a sterling job on The Gamechangers. The Etnies skater shoes, ZooYork and Carhart jeans and t-shirts, all topped off with a suit jacket were the official uniform of the UK games industry circa 2003. If only the same attention had gone into the script, which sometimes felt awkward. At one point Dan Houser cries, “This is whack!” at news of their impending federal law suit.

When it comes to portraying GTA, the drama wasn’t successful in revealing why it was and continues to be so successful. The only aspects of the game we saw were the violence. During its development, Houser is obsessed with having a sex scene in the game and then focuses on being able to customise characters by choosing their hair and clothes.

At no point do we get a sense of the snappy dialogue and believable characters. We identify with the GTA characters because they have strong story lines, which we can then control, rather than because we can make them fat. But GTA’s real golden egg is the fact that we play the bad guy. We’re playing  the robber, not the cop and GTA gives us a world where we can do anything we want, including mowing down civilians or trying to drive a motorbike off the top of a multi-storey car-park. The drama seems to skirt around the fact that  the violence plus freedom of GTA is central to its success.

The Gamechangers is basically our industry’s version of The Social Network, the film about the founding of Facebook. Tech conflict dramas are so hot right now, it’s just a shame this one found a great story, but made a lot of it up. Rockstar didn’t cooperate and Sam Houser rarely gives interviews, so it’s amazing that The Gamechangers is as coherent and entertaining as I found it to be.

There are some nice moments, where gaming and reality slide over the top of each other. Houser walking out into a New York street, grabbing someone out of their car and then driving away into a GTA style scene is one highlight, but there were others. The Gamechangers is no history lesson, but it is entertaining.