THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS

Sometimes you find heroes and villains in the strangest places. Take for instance THE KING OF KONG – A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS. It’s a well made documentary about the world of competitive video gamers. By gamers, I’m talking about people who almost obsessively play 1980’s, 8-bit graphic, stand-up Atari classics. “Grand Theft Auto? No thanks, but how about a game of Q-Bert?”.

The movie is mostly about two men: Billy Mitchell, who set the world record for a high score on Donkey Kong (over 874,000 if you must know), and Steve Wiebe, a high school teacher from Washington State who manages to eventually rank an even higher score. On the surface, such a story would seem like silliness…the sort of forty-five second segment that tends to end the local news. However, the documentary is quite engaging and dramatic, and it’s all because of the good-guy/bad-guy dynamic between Mitchell and Wiebe. They might as well have been wearing black and white hats.

The movie pays close attention to the niche of classic video-gamers. It reminded me of the fact, that even though a lot of these people may be looked at as freaks and geeks, in their own circles they are cool kids and rock stars. In that respect, I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised at Mitchell’s actions when an unknown challenger tries to take his crown as King Geek.

The best thing about KING OF KONG is the fact that you don’t have to have any interest in video games to enjoy it – it isn’t about that. It’s about one man who owes a lot of who he is to one achievement twenty years ago, and the measures he takes to keep his achievement intact.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll party like it’s 1982