King of Kong

Just watched this documentary-film. Hilarious and highly recommended for anyone who remembers 80s video games. It tells the story of laid-off engineer Steve Wiebe and his attempts to topple the Donkey Kong world record held by Billy Mitchell since 1982. Surprisingly, Steve comes across like a pretty nice and well-adjusted guy. In contrast, Billy comes across as a conceited, cretinous bad sport, jealously guarding his record and unwilling to come and defend it publicly (while closely monitoring Steve's attempts through constant mobile phone calls to his "fans"). Some of his moments had me thinking the whole thing was a send-up. (

Highlights: Billy having "Never Surrender" on his mobile; one of his friends referring to him as "the closest thing to a jedi"; the other player running around Funspot telling everyone that "there's a possible Donkey Kong kill screen coming up if you're interested...

Reading up on it afterwards, it seems that "bad guy" Billy has sinced reclaimed the record (though not publicly). And apparently the film maker manipulated things a little to fit the story he wanted to tell (though Billy's character is apparently fairly, or even positively, represented).

Some aspects of the geekiness of these guys is uncomfortably familiar to me, and I'm sure there's a large part of it is universal whenever groups of men follow a common interest (e.g. football fans discussing the ins and outs of their football team at the pub and getting dressed up for the game seems no less sad). But there is something special about the geekiness that occurs around science fiction/computer games/games workshop stores...