Dir. Seth Gordon
Starring Steve Wiebe, Billy Mitchell, Walter Day
One of the more popular formats for documentaries these days has been following a group of offbeat individuals who have a passion for some unique style of competition. The king of this genre was Jeffrey Blitz’s Spellbound, which followed teenagers competing in the national spelling bee. As the genre has expanded, the competitions followed become more and more peculiar. We’ve also recently seen documentaries about inner city kids learning ballroom dancing (Mad Hot Ballroom), and obsessive Scrabble players who travel the country to play in tournaments (Word Wars). Seth Gordon’s King of Kong is one of the most original yet; it follows the battle between two guys in achieving the highest score on the classic video game Donkey Kong.
Billy Mitchell is the all time Donkey Kong champion, achieving a score that is thought to be unbeatable. He is also an ambassador for classic video gaming and is well revered among enthusiasts in that area. In one interesting segment, he is shown offering encouragement to Doris Self, who was one of the few female players to have achieved a high score on a video game back in the 80s. Steve Wiebe is a married man and father who just got laid off from his job. During his down time (with the surprising support of his wife), he decides to make a run at Billy Mitchell’s high score on Donkey Kong.
King of Kong takes us inside the interesting world of classic video game competitors. These are guys that could care less about the latest high tech gaming system. They’d rather hang out at a place like the Funspot arcade in New Hampshire, playing old school arcade games like Pac Man, Burgertime, Centipede, and of course Donkey Kong in their original versions. One of these people, Walter Day, decided there should be a central resource that verifies the high score on all video games. In the early 80s, he created Twin Galaxies, an organization that verifies high score submissions from people around the country. This organization still exists today and is even endorsed by the Guiness Book of World Records.
Gordon does a really good job of exploring this world, and initiating the viewer in the various intricacies of classic video games. The concept of a “kill screen” (when the game stops because it has run out of memory) is introduced and shown to be the pinnacle achievement that gamers try to reach. There is also a clever use of diagrams that show the patterns in a game like Donkey Kong, and help explain how Steve Wiebe’s engineering background definitely comes in handy. The people that obsess over these games aren’t mindless idiots pushing around a joystick. Casual viewers will be surprised at the level of thought and planning that these gamers go through when attempting a new record.
The film really takes off when Steve Wiebe breaks Billy Mitchell’s legendary record and Twin Galaxies gets mixed up in the fight over the validity of that score. Up to this point, Gordon’s film had painted a very positive picture of Mitchell, but that comes to a screeching halt when Mitchell and his followers attempt to discredit Wiebe’s score. This leads to Wiebe making several attempts to prove his score in person, including direct challenges to facing off against Mitchell in head to head competition. Gordon takes a completely one-sided view of events at this point, and from here on out the film paints Steve as the hero and Billy as the enigmatic villain. Gordon piles it on a bit high to make his chosen hero to look like a saint (despite some obviously poor parenting skills exhibited at one point in the film). To be fair, he does have quite a bit of video evidence to support this viewpoint, but his inability to explore Billy’s motivations for his actions really hampers the overall story that the film presents.
Despite this flaw, King of Kong remains an entertaining film thanks to the colorful and informative presentation of an obsessive hobby not many people know still existed, at least in the format shown here. Like the best documentaries, it uses real life events and fashions them to form a very satisfying story arc that leads to a surprisingly rousing conclusion. It may not reach the heights of Spellbound, but it stands shoulder to shoulder with the other strong works in this genre.
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