Cyde Weys Musings

I saw The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters yesterday. The movie is about a challenge between two men vying for the world record score in Donkey Kong. The movie is exciting, of perfect length, and contains more real life plot twists than you would’ve thought possible. The basic structure of the movie is David v Goliath, where Goliath is Billy Mitchell, a slick-haired slimy dude who’s held the world record since 1982. His life revolves around playing videogames and making hot sauce. The part of David is played by Steve Wiebe, a family man who was laid off from his job as an engineer at Boeing and used his free time to get ridiculously good at Donkey Kong (he then later became a public school science teacher). You find yourself rooting for Steve throughout the film, especially because Billy bests Steve’s recently set world record within hours through a questionable video tape submission that shows the digits in the score flickering as they roll over to one million and VHS copy artifacts obscuring the majority of the left-hand side of the screen.

I would highly recommend this movie to anyone who’s into videogames (and even open-minded people who aren’t), because this is a fascinating side of the videogame world that you rarely ever hear about. My heart goes out to one of the world records reviewers at Twin Galaxies (the world authority in videogaming high scores), who watches videotapes of high scores on a voluntary basis nearly every day to vet them. If you agree that videogaming is culturally significant, and that it is worthwhile to track the performances of the absolute best players in the world, you see the necessity for his position; at the same time, I cannot ever imagine doing it. He says it’s worth it, though, because who else gets to see world records broken every day? You can sort of understand his excitement.

The movie ends on a note of disappointment, as Steve Wiebe fails to break Billy’s world record during four days of public play at a videogame arcade in Hollywood, Florida (which is within ten miles of Billy’s house). Despite Steve’s repeated requests for Billy to come out and play head-to-head, Billy defers, and only drops by for a brief visit. The tension in the air is obvious. During the whole film, we never see Billy playing Donkey Kong, which is amusing, because he repeatedly says that scores are only really significant if they are done in the high-pressure situation of a public tournament. It makes you wonder if he is just a cheater, what with his questionable Donkey Kong high score tape submission. The film implies that he is.

But I have a different explanation. Billy suffers from performance anxiety. It must be anxiety-inducing as hell trying to defend a world record you’ve held since 1982. He is afraid of making his failures seen in public, content much more to just play a lot at home and only submit his high score tapes so that others cannot see his failures. Despite the film’s framing, he is not a cheater. The film announces in the epilogue that Steve did eventually beat Billy’s high score in a videotape submission, and that he thus now has high scores for both public play and private play. It seems as if Billy is bested, a has-been, resigned to the trash heap of history. That was his last world record going up in flames.

Only something curious happened within a few months of the end of the filming of The King of Kong: Billy bested Steve’s score in live, refereed play (according to Twin Galaxies, whose reputation is never in question). The legitimacy of his earlier high score is thus reaffirmed. Yes, he is a shady, not-too-well-adjusted individual, but he is no cheater, and after realizing this film was going to paint him as permanently dethroned, he overcame his anxiety of public play and performed well when it mattered most. That, I think, is the real story of this film, but you wouldn’t even know it unless you did a little bit of research. For all his faults, Billy really did walk the walk. The situation isn’t comparable to David v Goliath, but rather, Man v Man.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 19:30 and is filed under Gaming, Pop Culture. Keywords: Tags: Billy Mitchell, Donkey Kong, high score, Steve Wiebe, The King of Kong, videogame, world record. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.