Who's the real king of 'Kong?'
In the early 1980s, there was no such thing as PlayStation. If you wanted to play the coolest new video games, you pinched quarters from Mom’s purse and went to the arcade. Back then, being an ace at video games didn’t mean you were a shut-in with hygiene problems. Back then, being a video game wizard would get you chicks.
In this time of game gods, there was no one more godlike than Billy Mitchell. In 1982 — at the age of 17 — Billy Mitchell held the high score in “Centipede” and “Donkey Kong.”
At 34, he scored the first-ever perfect game in “Pac-Man.” And in 2006, MTV named him one of the top 10 most influential video game players of all time.
Enter Steve Wiebe, a laid-off engineer from Redmond, Wash. Bummed out and looking for “something positive,” as he puts it, he found Mitchell’s “Donkey Kong” score online, and figured he could beat it. After all, he’d played a ton in college, where he says he beat Mitchell’s score.
When director Seth Gordon met Wiebe in 2005, he’d been planning to make a documentary about classic video game competitions — a quirky world that he says was interesting in his own right.
“I met Steve and he was super nice, almost too nice to be the subject of a film. I didn’t think there was a lot going on,” he says. “But in classic gaming, all roads kind of lead to Billy.”
The soft-spoken and mild-mannered Wiebe is the protagonist of “The King of Kong.” But Billy Mitchell, without question, is the star.
But this time, Wiebe wasn’t fooling around at the frat house. This time, more was at stake. So in 2003, Wiebe got a stand-up “Donkey Kong” machine, installed it in his garage, and set to work...
Gordon and Cunningham say they stand by the film as an accurate representation of what they witnessed: One hyper-competitive guy trying to one-up another hyper-competitive guy for the world record in “Donkey Kong.”
“The story was so bizarre and twisting in real life, we didn’t have to fake it,” says Cunningham.
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