The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters

I remember playing Donkey Kong in the arcade when I was in elementary school. I only played a couple times because it was a very difficult game and if I played a different game (Golden Axe or Gauntlet for instance) me and my quarters could survive a lot longer.

But Donkey Kong was a pervasive game in those days. My neighbor got a "table top" Donkey Kong game that we played a lot of hours on and it was the game that shipped with colecovision, an early console video game that we got for Christmas one year. The home version of the game was much easier, it had to be, you could practice it without plugging quarter after quarter into the machine. Our colecovision died a long time ago and I thought Donkey Kong had pretty much died too but it's alive and back in a new documentary that is getting a tremendous amount of buzz.

In King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters, 37 year old Steve Wiebe, a chronic second placer, copes with yet another lay off by retreating to his garage to play Donkey Kong after his wife and kids are in bed. He gets really good and eventually shatters the world record set 20 years ago by Billy Mitchell, legendary video gamer, world record holder for Centipede, Burgertime and Donkey Kong Jr., 1st gamer to achieve a perfect Pac Man score, LIFE Magazine's 1999 Gamer of the Century award winner. For the first time in his life Steve is the best in the world at something. But Billy isn't ready to give up the record.

The film makers set out to tell a simple story about rivals competing for a prize and seem to have unearthed an epic contest that touches on our universal need for acceptance and identity. I've only seen the trailer, and it's incredible how much it looks like the most brilliant Christopher Guest mocumentary ever, but it is a real documentary and it looks like a great film.

Check out their website here.