GGN GamingAngel: Who is the King of Kong

This summer has seen two films about retro gaming, Chasing Ghosts and King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters, with both based on the 1982 LIFE Magazine article that assembled the World’s Greatest Gamers for a photo shoot. At the time, Walter Day had created Twin Galaxies to become the place to submit all electronic game scores. Twin Galaxies set the rules and standards and also posted a list of the top players across the nation.

King of Kong follows Steve Wiebe as he sits a particular low point in his life. He’s 35 and just lost his job at Boeing. Steve does some soul searching and comes upon Billy Mitchell’s record score for Donkey Kong — which at the time was 874,300 points.

Here’s where it gets interesting: Steve is quite the OCD type. Once he gets something in his head he focuses on that and everything else just gets left behind. The movie pays a lot of attention to Steve’s failures in life and hypes the focus that Steve could finally break that chain by becoming the world record holder in Donkey Kong. Steve’s goal is more complex because of the hero status of Billy Mitchell.

Who is Billy Mitchell? Billy at face value looks like a country singer. He proudly sports the mullet and wears U.S. flag ties. He currently works at his restaurant, Rickey’s. Billy is in the Twin Galaxies record books for the first perfect score in Pac-Man and the highest score in Donkey Kong. Most recently he played at the Microsoft Xbox Pac-Man World Championships and placed eighth. The guys that are associated with Twin Galaxies treat Billy as their hero. To them, he represents excellence at games and life. It’s a strong contrast to the way they portray Steve.

At the L.A. Film Festival, I spoke to Walter Day about King of Kong. Walter was not pleased about the direction that King of Kong took. He claimed they were deceived into thinking the film would be about the rise of retro gaming instead of the underdog story that director Seth Gordon decided to go with. In truth, after seeing both films, King of Kong was just more entertaining. It has a focused story that it wants to tell and does a great job in doing so. The audience even cheered at parts. In a way, most of us can sympathize with Steve Wiebe and his dedication to make his mark in the world. As Seth explains, “It’s a heated battle unfolded in the name of the pursuit of excellence on what seems at first blush a trivial pursuit makes Billy and Steve’s story all the more universal.”