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The King of Kong : A Fistful of Quarters

September 13, 2007

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 79 min Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

There is a British filmmaker who has made a documentary about a group of ordinary people every seven years for the last 42 years. If you knew that every seven years somebody would be making a documentary about you, wouldn’t you tend to make dramatic choices in your life like becoming a skydiving sex therapist demolition expert?

THE KING OF KONG is a documentary about two guys vying for the World Title of Champion of 1980s arcade game Donkey Kong. Billy Mitchell first set the record in 1982 and nobody has surpassed him. But there’s a stranger riding into town, Steve Wiebe, who has a Donkey Kong machine in his garage and he has been practicing, practicing, practicing.

Even though last weekend I spent four days at a science fiction convention, I was prepared to jeer these geeks who obsess about getting the high scores in an arcade game.

But I had to keep re-evaluating the film as it went along. The movie isn’t really about arcade games; it comes down to two guys, who are each other’s Moby-Dicks. Everyone needs a nemesis; just ask Maggie Simpson about the baby with the unibrow. Both of the guys in this film are family men, with wife and kids. One is a successful hot sauce mogul who set a DONKEY KONG record back in 1982, the other is (after taking some time to find his niche with less successful careers) a high school science teacher seemingly well-liked by his students. He took up DONKEY KONG relatively recently, at least to this extent.

The movie isn’t really about obsession either; neither of these guys seems to have completely wrecked their life in pursuit of these records.

The basic idea is that these arcade games of the 1980s achieved a certain purity because of the limitations in graphics and processor speed. More modern games have fancier graphics, but just don’t take the skill that these games do. It’s like chess versus somebody’s made-up rules for three-dimensional chess; the classic wins out. And because of the difficulty of the game, it’s a hammer-and-anvil to lesser players. But those who master the game achieve a Zen-like state.

So it really comes down to the nature of competition. Having just seen an idiot blow $130 million because apparently the groupies that professional football players get don’t compare to a bunch of guys hooting over a dogfight, I’m prepared to expand my horizons as to what constitutes a suitable arena.

This is a competition without a big prize purse, presumably without hot groupies, and seemingly a relatively small fan-base; there were a few dozen onlookers at most at these competitions. The big deal seems to be a possible Guinness Book world record and the knowledge that you beat The Other Guy.

Fairly quickly the two align themselves with Jedi and Sith. The Johnny-come-lately seems to be a basically earnest, nice guy who just wants to be the best at something. The guy who holds the crown is a long-haired bearded guy who wears all black and seems to think he’s a rock star. And as the movie progresses, what constitutes legitimate psyching out on his part gets into more questionable sportsmanship as he seems to change the rules and tries to control the governing body of this sport.

And it builds to a climax as suspenseful as any underdog sports movie, because I didn’t know how it would turn out.

Popularity: 20% [?]

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