The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters

So you think you’re pretty good at videogames?

In Seth Gordon’s documentary The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters, you will meet a bunch of gamers so obsessed with their hi-scores they’ve been playing the same classic video games for over 25 yrs in pursuit of leaderboard glory. In particular The King Of Kong focuses on Billy Mitchell, the be-mulletted, ice-cool, undisputed King of Donkey Kong, and his unheralded new challenger, the shy and unassuming Steve Wiebe – apparently the opposite of Mitchell in many ways. 

In the present cycle of fashionable nostalgia 1982 seems like one of the coolest years ever, the crude electronic sights and sounds of the age an integral part of it’s appeal. Before home consoles arrived this was the golden age of arcade gaming, videogames such as Ms Pac-Man, DigDug and the super-difficult Donkey Kong ate up the coins and challenged gamers a helluvalot more seriously than today’s pansy-ass X-Box/PS3 nonsense. This was the year Life magazine published it’s landmark article on the kids setting videogaming records, many of whom never stopped. The King Of Kong’s clash of gaming titans is given verbal context through interview’s with Mitchell & Wiebe’s friends & family, including the inner circle of gamers and scorekeepers at the Iowa-based videogaming world-record tracker Twin Galaxies, mostly gaming veterans in their early 40s, many of which still loyal to Mitchell and unwilling to accept a change in the status quo.

Walter Day formed Twin Galaxies in 1981, and acts as a referee to the legitimacy of game hi-scores, adjudicating in person and vetting video recordings of world-record attempts received from around the world. We hear both Billy Mitchell, and others, describe himself as a winner, with a “burning desire never to settle for what I have”, a “charming”, “perfect” presence which extends to his successful hot chicken-wing-sauce business. Meanwhile Steve Wiebe is revealed as the archetypal underdog, a devoted family man who never fulfilled his superb early sporting and academic promise, uncomfortable in social situations but possessed of an OCD-like focus we see applied to his big shot at proving himself the best at at least something… yep, the Donkey Kong world-record.

(This paragraph contains spoilers, scroll to trailer to avoid- Ed)

We begin to get an idea of the politics behind Twin Galaxies’ record-vetting process when they dispute a video recording of Wiebe’s Donkey Kong record-breaking score and dispatch 2 associates to Wiebe’s house who break into his garage to take apart his Donkey Kong machine and check for cheating, subsequently finding a package with the return address of a Roy Schildt, body-building gamer and self-styled ‘Mr Awesome’ – sworn enemy of Twin Galaxies and Billy Mitchell. So Twin Galaxies smell a conspiracy and reject the record, prompting Wiebe to fly 3000 miles to prove his prowess in person at the New Hampshire Fun Spot arcade tournament, but after Steve takes the record Billy dispatches one of his cronies with a new video of himself reclaiming the hi-score, which Twin Galaxies accepts as legit despite many unexplained jumps and glitches in the video. Wiebe is disheartened, and competition between the two seems to die until The Guinness Book Of World Records request new hi-score listings from Twin Galaxies and the cycle restarts – with higher stakes this time.

Watch The Trailer:

There’s enough texture to this overall mix to reward repeated viewings, when little details begin to demand closer examination, for instance; whats the deal with Billy’s old-granny gaming protege? And how come his crony Brian Kuh retired at 30 to hang around the Twin Galaxies family? The film features many odd characters indeed. I also really loved the vintage footage of media crews swarming around Mitchell, Day & Co back in the videogaming golden age, when the top players briefly acquired an almost rockstar-like status, I guess one might easily conclude Mitchell is still trying to relive those halcyon days, when he held 5 hi-score world-records.

Personally I’m left with the feeling Billy Mitchell probably gets a rough deal in the film, where is the deviousness we’re promised in testimony from his friends and family? The worst thing he can be accused of is avoiding a head-to-head challenge with Wiebe – which to be fair is the shortcoming Gordon & Co focus on. Seth Gordon has concluded that Mitchell likes to play games with people as well as computers, but on film that only extends as far as keeping people guessing, he’s not overtly villainous, but his ambiguity in the end does his portrait no good in that the viewer ends up projecting their villainous expectations onto him.

At times the film-makers do such a good job of giving weight to this rivalry I had to stop and remind myself it was just about a videogame hi-score, theres alot of humour in the film and it mostly stems from how seriously these guys take their hobby. A deal has already been inked for Gordon to direct a dramatised version of the film, and it seems like a shoe-in for the type of comedy rivalry formula Will Ferrell and friends have been knocking out in recent years. You can pluck all kinds of allegorical meaning from the film if you like, is it about winners and losers in America? Men in mid-life crisis? It’s up to you to decide. Don’t miss this one. 

Words by Kurt Vile

BUY:
The King Of Kong on Region 1 DVD

BROWSE:
A Fistful Of Quarters Official Site
Interview with King Of Kong Director Seth Gordon (SPOILERS)