King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Not from Netflix, but last week I saw the unspeakably awesome The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. Video gamers are not typically depicted as leaders in the battle of good versus evil. But in Kong, director Seth Gordon crafts an heroic epic more compelling than six installments of Star Wars and six more Rockys combined. The documentary follows the journey of everyman Steve Weibe, a down-on-his-luck schoolteacher, as he tries to get his world-record-breaking Donkey Kong score verified by Twin Galaxies, the official keeper of such stats.

Twin Galaxies, however, is in bed with Billy Mitchell, holder of the Donkey Kong world record for almost 25 years. Mitchell is first shown as a teenager—mulleted, pimpled, and with a gigantic hickey on his neck—in a 1983 Life magazine spread about arcade game champions. As an adult, Mitchell, a chicken wing sauce mogul, is a weasel with a gang of sycophants who help him ensure that his score is the one that stays in the books and is ultimately printed in the Guinness Book of World Records.

If slimy Billy Mitchell is unabashedly portrayed as the villain in this drama, then Steve Weibe is every bit the hero. After being laid off from his job at Boeing on the same day that he signed his mortgage papers, Weibe takes up playing Kong in his garage while becoming credentialed as a middle school science teacher. Between a montage of interviews from his parents, brother, friends and wife about how Weibe has never been the best of anything, he videotapes his record-breaking score while his toddler son yells “Daddy! Stop playing Donkey Kong! Come wipe my butt!”

Twin Galaxies officials are initially excited by Weibe’s score, until Mitchell complains that it was sent on video and, thus, not admissible. Undaunted, Weibe travels from his home in Redmond, Washington to an arcade in New Hampshire to beat Mitchell’ record live for the judges. He succeeds—until the panel accepts the dodgy, possibly-faked winning tape that Mitchell submits. The rest of the film chronicles Weibe’s quest for justice, amid officials that break into his garage to test his game and familial pressures to quit.

The stranger-than-fiction characters elevate the fairly straightforward story to a raucous, fascinating study of a subculture. The Twin Galaxies judges are uniformly doughy, pale, bad-hair-having men in their 30s who view Mitchell as a legend, and go to unimaginable lengths to make sure that their icon emerges from the controversy unscathed. Walter Day, founder of Twin Galaxies, writes bizarre folk songs about Mitchell’s gaming accomplishments. Brian Kuh, who broke 16 arcade records in one day in 2006, comes off like a gaming version of The Office’s Dwight Schrute as he calls Mitchell from the competition with play-by-plays of Weibe’s moves. And Doris Self, who delivered Mitchell’s sketchy tape to the judges, was in pursuit of the world record in Q*Bert until she passed away in 2006 at the age of 81.

The heart of the film is the characterization of Mitchell as the scoundrel and Weibe as the heroic everyman, which, though oversimplified, are self-conscious enough to be entertaining. With his slicked-back hair, scary eyebrows, ominous theme music and devious henchman, Mitchell is a dead ringer for Satan; Weibe, on the other hand, comes across as a bumbling but lovable, Forrest Gump-type that you can’t help but root for. Even his wife and mother are candid about the fact that just a regular guy, nothing special about him, with his mother adding that he might even be a little autistic.

Though watching people play video games may sound like a mind-numbing way to spend two hours, Gordon structures the film for maximum suspense, peppering the central conflict with interesting insider info about retro arcade games. Part epic battle, part character study, King of Kong fulfills the mission of any great documentary—making the viewer feel like part of a world with which they would never otherwise come in contact. Unfortunately, the viewers are, at this point, limited, with the film showing in just five theaters nationwide. However, Internet rumor has it that Hollywood is casting a fictionalized version with Johnny Depp as Billy Mitchell for release next year. If that’s the case, I can only hope that such an unnecessary remake drives more people to check out the real thing.