[notafraudster]

The causal chain is obvious: the documentary surfaced interest in the game; this led to a call to try to locate the lost game; it was located and uploaded on archive.org (a library) for preservation's sake. You can consume the game with or without watching the documentary or subscribing to Netflix and no one was compensated.

Of course the documentary and the release of the game are connected, but in precisely the opposite way from what you propose.

[textfiles]

Actually, no. We had GayBlade up and emulated earlier this year, completely unaware of the documentary. Causal chain is actually: People working with Ryan Best to tell his story at something called RAINBOW ARCADE, the world’s first exhibition on LGBTQIA* video game history at Schwules Museum Berlin. This includes multiple groups of people and museums. That's early 2019.

During that point, the story of GayBlade and Ryan Best become known to the HIGH SCORE production team, and Best is interviewed for it and his story told.

Late 2019, Best discovers some original materials and they are used to recover the game.

Early 2020, Internet Archive hosts a copy of the game emulated, and LGTBQ Game Archive does an extensive writeup on the game.

Mid 2020, HIGH SCORE is presented to Netflix, and a card is inserted into the documentary to indicate it was found. (I'm finding not many people have seen the card.)