Toronto Thumbs

REVIEW
The King of Kong

It has never ceased to amaze me that the seminal video game film was made in the early 1980s. Tron was an all around fantastic film that still holds up today, its images instantly recognizable even to non-gamers. One would expect that with the push of gaming into the mainstream, a number of memorable films with gaming involved would follow. Instead, the 1990s and onward treated us to the likes of Silent Hill, Alone in the Dark, and Doom. In Super Mario Bros., we saw gaming’s most recognizable and bankable franchise treated like Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas. This is a genre where Resident Evil with Mila Jovovich is considered “decent.”

Apart from the odd scene in a buddy flick, gamers don’t get much screen time in films either. Where they do, it seems to always be the stereotypical PC gamer complete with glasses, acne, and a smattering of Lord of the Rings figurines around his basement apartment. Plus the whole fun of games is that they’re not passive entertainment. Where’s the fun in watching someone else’s video game for 2 hours?

Enter The King of Kong.

The story follows 37-year-old Steve Wiebe, a quiet, average, out-of-work engineer. Steve is on a quest to set the high score on Donkey Kong on the arcade machine in his garage. Simple enough. Until he actually pulls it off, besting the decades-old record of Billy Mitchell.

The stoic and evil Mitchell is the closest thing gaming in the 80s had to a rock star. He seemed to own every high score in existence at the time. Other gamers feared and revered him. As it was the 80s, you can be sure there were copious amounts of blow too. But snorted off Galaga machines, not hookers. The man is like the Kid with the Power Glove from The Wizard, but grown up.

Of course, Billy can’t sit idly by as his iconic Donkey Kong record is beaten. Nor can Steve see everything he has worked so hard for disappear. Thus we are left with two middle-aged men in a battle to hold the Donkey Kong high score and top the elusive 1,000,000 point threshold. Perhaps the lowest stakes two middle-aged men have ever battled for.

Steve and Billy fight it out across the years and the country, never speaking in person on camera. Think Deniro and Pacino in Heat, with less violence and less nudity. Far less nudity.

Oh, and did I mention this is a DOCUMENTARY?

It’s all real. The film makers somehow stumbled across this little universe while doing another, less-intriguing documentary. Despite the fact that their accomplishments could be undone at any time by someone tripping over a power cable, there were actually people willing to sacrifice their families and dignity to hold the high score on an arcade version of Donkey Kong. In fact, there are dozens of them.

There’s Walter Day, the founder of Twin Galaxies, the central body that keeps track of gaming records. Walter keeps track of thousands of scores, and sees himself as the Referee of the gaming world. In fact, he wears a referee’s uniform. In public. Often.

Roy “Mr. Awesome” Schildt is a megalomaniac who secretly assisted Steve Wiebe by getting him a Donkey Kong machine, only for Steve to find out that his association with Roy called his record into question. Mr. Awesome, it seems, is something of a rogue with a reputation for cheating. How one could expect such assoholic behaviour from someone who nicknames himself “Mr. Awesome” is beyond me.

There are the sycophants who go to all lengths to sabotage Steve and support Billy Mitchell, convinced that only he is the One True Kong. They harass Steve in his own home, they discredit his scores, they lurk near him at arcade gaming conventions when Billy isn’t around. They wage psychological warfare on a man who wants nothing more than to enter a sexually inappropriate name at the top of a high score list.

I repeat: this is a DOCUMENTARY. What fun is a movie where you watch sad people play video games, and even sadder people live vicariously through them? Where the film succeeds is that it somehow manages to treat the proceedings as the most dramatic and yet most absurd thing ever and…

Wait, isn’t that how we all treat our video games?

We do, and this is what makes The King of Kong the best movie about gaming of all time. It shows real people, real gamers, with real non-existent lives. We do treat games as serious and real. I still remember my four-year-old self falling off the bed with the controller as Mario leaped chasms in Level 1-1, unable to grasp the concept that I wasn’t moving with him. GoldenEye death matches were seen as a true mark of manhood amongst my non-masculine friends. Hell, I still ignore phone calls if I’m convinced that a certain online game of Madden will come down to the wire. Despite the fact that this is all accomplished by sitting on a couch staring straight ahead for hours on end, I would insist to friends that they couldn’t have the TV until I had saved the game because I had “worked too hard to waste it.”

It is a mirror that the film presents to gamers, giving us a healthy laugh at what we can become when we forget that games are just a glorified distraction, not a defining pursuit. But sometimes, treating them as such is a major factor in what makes them so addictive. If you put down that controller, real or not, that Princess is going to sit there waiting to be rescued. It is that same feeling that drives Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell.

Oh, and on a less artistic note, these guys are really fucking good at Donkey Kong.

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