THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS
June 9th 2009 08:37
It's Billy Mitchell vs. Steve Wiebe in The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
In the early 1980s, video arcade gaming was taking off in the United States. The rise and rise of this unique subculture revolved around games such as Pac-Man, Galaga and Donkey Kong, which eschewed detailed strategy in favour of razor-sharp reflexes and pinpoint muscle memory. Like any burgeoning movement, video arcade gaming had its leaders, and most prominent of all was Billy Mitchell.
Mitchell appeared just as the zeitgeist was gathering pace and proved himself a wizard on the jockey stick. When Life Magazine gathered the greatest video arcade gamers together for a competition and photo shoot in 1982, Mitchell shellacked the opposition, and consequently managed to parlay his success into becoming a high profile gaming personality while also establishing his own chicken wing hot sauce business(!). Mitchell was and remains to this day the king of classic arcade gaming.
Steve Wiebe, on the other hand, seems a born loser. Wiebe is one of life’s forgotten souls. His early dreams of becoming a professional sportsman and then musician fell by the wayside, and he lost a job as a Boeing engineer the day he and his wife signed the papers on their house. Steve Wiebe, it seems, can’t buy a trick.
But Wiebe is also an anomaly, because despite the cavalcade of disasters that life’s dished up, he’s an exceptionally gifted individual, his talent for baseball and music illustrating a level of dexterity and coordination that is out of this world.
So it seems that Mitchell and Wiebe could only ever be polar opposites, and yet these two are to be brought together in brutal competition by documentary maker Seth Gordon’s excellent film, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.
The focal point of The King of Kong is the classic arcade game, Donkey Kong. Originally released in 1981, Billy Mitchell has held the world record on the game for almost 25 years, his score of 874,300 being almost double that posted by his nearest challenger. Donkey Kong is renowned for being the hardest arcade game ever released, and amongst Mitchell’s plethora of world records held across an array of classic games, his score on the Nintendo classic is the most cherished.
Unfortunately for the hubris-spouting Mitchell, a newcomer on scene is proving to be a potent challenger. Steve Wiebe has just recently been laid off from Boeing. With extra time on his hands and in an effort to regain some semblance of control in his life, the father of two spots Mitchell’s record and decides he can beat it. Wiebe purchases himself an original Nintendo Donkey Kong arcade machine, and so begins a fascinating struggle that turns out to be as much a battle of wills, as it is a battle of skill.
With any documentary, it’s the subjects that bring the film alive, and Seth Gordon has an amazing ability to dig into the personalities of those he’s interviewing. Mitchell is a fascinating character, and an unfettered egotism rides roughshod over his achievements as he seemingly falls in love with the filmmakers. His refusal to acknowledge the threat posed by Wiebe is his biggest downfall, as if he can’t understand that the film might be bigger than him and any story he tells.
Wiebe on the other hand is such a likeable and unassuming person that his outright determination to beat Mitchell is almost alarming. He drags the wife, kids and the audience along with him, and you feel his pain as he’s thwarted time and time again not by Mitchell’s prowess, but by the skulduggery used to try and discredit the dangerously talented challenger. It’s classic underdog versus blow-dried Goliath stuff, and as such carries a delicious potency.
The genius of Billy Mitchell is rewarded once again.
There’s a whole raft of intriguing supporting players too, including Walter Day, founder and proprieter of Twin Galaxies, a web-based organisation that’s the de-facto regulatory body for classic video game competition, and Steve Sanders, Billy Mitchell’s right-hand man who spruiks his friend’s talents while organising his legal affairs. There’s also Brian Kuh, the deluded Donkey Kong challenger who, left foundering in the wake of Wiebe and Mitchell, becomes an eager frontline reporter for the latter. All of these characters have a part to play in the greater story, and before the end of the documentary there will be shifting allegiances and actions that flirt dangerously with foul play.
As the conflict plays out on screen, The King of Kong also illustrates a brilliant if economical technical proficiency. Gordon’s own camera work is spot on, and his and Luis Lopez’s editing has a large part to do with the documentary’s genius, whether it be the juxtaposition of the two title contenders at the start of the film or a sublime sequence where the filmmakers take the tactical white line drawings that Wiebe makes on his Kong cabinet screen and applies them to the grainy footage of the challenger’s brilliant sporting youth.
There’s word that the story of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is now being developed into a feature-length screenplay. While Gordon’s work certainly deserves such flattery, it seems that any Hollywood rendering would ultimately dilute the purity of such an amazing documentary. This is fantastic storytelling, capturing a sense of human drama well beyond its initial license, and can rightfully take a place as one of the finest feature documentaries to be produced in recent times.
Check out the rather awesome trailer for The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters below:
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Comment by Wilson Pon
Health 2 Know
Adventure Toes
Techno Stuffs
boxing sound
Business Rope
Fun Places 2 Travel
Missed the old days...
Comment by MVD
Ah, entire afternoons were once squandered playing Pitfall, River Raid, Combat, and all the old favorites on my Atari 2600 (with color/B&W control to show my age).
Donkey Kong the toughest arcade game ever? Whoulda thunk?
Comment by Matt Shea
20/20 Filmsight
Mike - thanks for reading. Check this out - you'll totally dig it. Wiebe is simply not featured much in the trailer because he isn't controversial, like the abortion issue.
I love those old games and if you play DK it is seriously hard - much harder than I remember on the handheld Nintendos!
And my brothers and I can join you on the 2600 front - River Raid! Woohoo!
Comment by David O'Connell
Screen Fanatic
Comment by Matt Shea
20/20 Filmsight
There is no shame in being crap at video games, and the worse your skills are at playing video games, usually the better your skills are at dealing with the rest of life.
I really can't recommend this one highly enough, Dave. Check it out - you won't be disappointed.