I finally had a chance to watch last year’s excellent documentary “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”, directed by Seth Gordon and produced by Ed Cunningham, about the rivalry between reigning champion Billy Mitchell and his challenger Steve Wiebe for the world record high score for the classic arcade game Donkey Kong.
Here’s the trailer for the film. It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in a while.
Even after the film was released, the battle for the Donkey Kong championship still continues. For the latest high score news visit Twin Galaxies, which is featured in the film and has been keeping the official scores for many popular games since 1981.
The documentary also generated a bit of controversy over how certain events were portrayed in the film. Josh Modell of The Onion A.V. Club recently conducted separate interviews with Billy Mitchell and the film’s creators Seth Gordon and Ed Cunningham to try to clear up some of the issues presented in the film.
“The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters” was recently released on DVD.
image via The King of Kong
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree, that was a lot of fun. I thought the production did a fantastic job of pulling together a narrative arc and letting the people portray their real depth as characters, when it could have taken a much more patronizing tone and gone for cheap schadenfreude.
Steve is going to try for the world record in March at MIX.
Here’s the link to the MIX Donkey Kong event: http://visitmix.com/blogs/News/The-King-of-Kongs-Steve-Wiebe-joins-MIX08-for-a-special-screening-of-the-movie-and-an-attempt-to-rec/
Jason Scott wrote two excellent articles about this film here: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000580.html and a shorter, original version here: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000574.html .
He is in the process of creating an arcade documentary himself and has some fascinating criticism of the narrative added to the film and its effects on his obtaining interviews, etc while making his own film.
That being said, I saw the movie at the Parkway in Oakland and enjoyed the Hell out of it.
Hey Scott,
I just watched this movie the other night and really enjoyed it. And the DVD special feature that shows Billy and Steve’s playing styles side by side was super cool.
Cheers,
Joe
Hi i just finished watching the movie and then i decided to search the internet for more info and i was delighted when i read the billy's video tape entry of the world record was actually taken off after 48 hours. because i thought that it was wrong for them making it the world record in the first place when they didnt let steve have his record that he sent in. overall it was a good movie showing this side of games that i have never seen before and that all records should not be accepted throguh a video tape and only in person