Movie Review: King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

I play video games. Since I was a kid I have been in awe of the increasingly astounding leaps in technological capability. The detail just keeps getting richer and more impressive, and I am consistently amazed. And when you look at what the games were like way back when I was a kid, then you will se they have come a long way, indeed. What hasn’t come a long way, however, is human nature. King of Kong is a documentary about the best players of one of the most popular video games ever. It was one of the originals, along with Pac-Man, Galaga, Defender, and Asteroids, to break the arcade game market wide open. It is called Donkey Kong, and millions of dollars in quarters were spent playing this game in the 80’s.

 The game is a pretty straightforward: Donkey Kong is a giant gorilla standing high up on the top girders of a construction site. He has captured Princess Peach, and it is up to her erstwhile rescuer, Mario, to scale the building while dodging barrels and balls of bouncing flame that Donkey Kong is tossing down at him. Simplicity of the game aside, there is a fair amount of skill required to master this game. The game isn’t truly random at all; it is a programmed piece of code, written to execute in a specific pattern. That pattern can be discerned through hours upon hours of study. Now, having determined the pattern, it is up to the player to not only remember the pattern while under the stress of playing through the game for hours while striving for a high score, but to display the manual dexterity necessary to perform the complex actions necessary to navigate the pattern, again, hour after hour, flawlessly. This is the world of competitive video gaming.

Since the first national competitions one name has stood atop the hill as “King”, and that is Billy Mitchell, a legendary figure from the 80’s who enjoys a very specific flavor of celebrity for holding a seemingly unbeatable record in the game. Enter Steve Weibe, a mild-mannered family man from Washington state who mastered the game on a machine in his garage, and who has produced a video showing him beating Billy’s record. Both the video and the arcade console Steve is using comes under scrutiny as the masters of this little demesne strive to protect their pantheon of demigods from becoming mortal once again. Steve enters a competition, which Billy fails to enter, and in front of a crowd of agape video game cultists, utterly destroys Billy’s longstanding record. In response to the shellacking, Billy sends in a tape of himself not only beating Steve’s score, but playing the game until the score had to reset back to zero and start counting anew. All suspicions about the validity of the somewhat poorly video-taped game are ignored by the true-believers among Billy’s vacant-eyed congregation. And when a head-to-head competition is scheduled everyone is certain Billy will show up wielding thunderbolts and walking on water. But he doesn’t. Show up, I mean. Even though the competition is a mere 10 miles away from his home, practically in his back yard, and Steve has travelled 3,000 miles to spend 4 days in head-to-head best-man-win competition.

The movie is clearly on the side of Steve, and well it should be. Billy Mitchell is laughable in his fortress made of Ego. It is clear he is not ok with losing face, or his place among the video-gaming pantheon. What is so amazing is how the rest of the community works so diligently to challenge and hopefully disprove Steve’s achievements while shrugging away very good concerns about the validity of Billy’s offerings. It is as though the entire insular community is much too comfortable with their little cult of personality, and fear losing it, even if through thoroughly valid means. Billy is king of a very small, very inbred community, while Steve is an outsider to be feared and mistrusted. It’s incredible to watch, if a little uncomfortable. There are moments when you can almost taste the thickening tension, such as when Billy is avoiding the competition while constantly calling his friend Steve Sanders, one of his true believers, to check up on Steve’s current top-scores, all the while doing loops around the arcade parking lot and making excuses as to why he can’t stop by. When they finally do meet up in person, you could hear fairies farting in the silence that breaks out in the arcade. And when Steve says ‘Hey Billy”, he gets a cold shoulder response. You almost wish you had a chalk-board to scratch your nails down so you don’t have to listen to the uncomfortable silence of the moment. In the end Steve and Billy never face off in competition, the gaming community shrugs as they take their ball and go home where the sacred image of a Billy Mitchell who never really left the 80’s remains enshrined above each bed, and Steve goes home without ever really being given a chance to prove his ability. The movie ends. It ends well, and I won’t spoil the final moments by explaining how.

 The documentary, as I stated earlier, is fully on the side of Steve as the hero, so don’t expect unbiased editing by the director. We like Steve, and we come to loathe Billy, and most of the Cult of Billy. It is still a wonderful portrayal of the sometimes small-mindedness of everyday people, of our fears of losing our legends, of the status quo being challenged. King of Kong is a movie about the small guy challenging an institution, and the hurdles and trials he must go through to prove himself worthy. It is a classic story, and very satisfying in the telling, and even more satisfying in that it is, for the most part, real life. Delicious. Hands down one of the most entertaining documentaries I have ever seen.