The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007) Director - Seth Gordon; Starring - Billy Mitchell, Steve Wiebe, Walter Day; Rated PG-13 for a brief sexual reference; see trailer here.

I was always more of a Q*Bert/Jungle Hunt/Frogger guy myself.

When I was a kid, I played all the video games I could. Growing up in El Paso, my favorite way to waste a long summer Saturday or Sunday afternoon was to meet my best friend Brian halfway between our houses and walk to the Dollar Cinema a couple of miles away. We'd stop off at the arcade across the plaza from the theater either before the movie or after, and I'd busily waste the $5-10 my father gave me to play on any video game that struck my fancy. Ms. Pac-Man. Crystal Castles. The original Mario Brothers.

Which brings us back to Donkey Kong. As Billy Mitchell explains in Seth Gordon's documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, "The average Donkey Kong game doesn't last a minute. It's absolute brutality." When I heard those words, it jibed pretty evenly with what I remember of the game. Making it to the screen called "The Pie Factory" was, in my game-centric ten-year-old world, a major accomplishment. But the game was too frustrating for me to hold any serious allure.

Flash forward a couple of decades and those accomplishments seen terribly small and inconsequential to my adult sensibilities. So when I first saw the trailer for The King of Kong, I expected it to play as farce. My personal current obsession with Guitar Hero II notwithstanding, the idea that having the all-time highest score on a twenty-five year-old video game struck me as absolutely ludicrous. Instinctively, I almost wanted to scream that these people needed the word "PERSPECTIVE" tattooed on their foreheads, that they might finally find it. Gordon gets right up to that point with his film, and then does the most amazing thing possible in my mind.

The King of Kong begins by introducing us to Billy Mitchell. In 1982, Life magazine did a story chronicling the budding young video game craze. As part of the process, they assembled what were commonly accepted as the greatest players in the country at a variety of video games. Mitchell was at that point recognized as the best player at Centipede, and he quickly established himself as a wizard at Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong, Jr. He set what was at the time believed to be an unassailable record score of over 800,000 points. And that score held as the gold standard for over twenty years.

Enter Steve Wiebe. Wiebe is your average middle-class American dad. Wiebe's greatest failing may be that his ambition has always slightly exceeded his talents. After being laid off from Boeing, he finds work as a middle school science teacher. He has a loving wife, and two wonderful children. But Wiebe always has wanted to something special that would set him apart from others. Which is why he disappears for hours at a time into his garage to take a crack at the Donkey Kong machine that he owns, positive that he can exceed Billy Mitchell's record score.

When Wiebe finally tops the score, it is a moment that is equal parts triumphant and funny in a sad way. Verification of the score is submitted by videotape to Twin Galaxies, the body that tracks and verifies all claims of record scores for video games of all varieties and across all platforms. The background noise/argument during the snippet from Wiebe's record run would probably have elicited a call from Child Protective Services under any other circumstances. But the score is clearly visible, and Wiebe seems to finally have his moment in the sun.

Except that Billy Mitchell will not let his record go quietly. Mitchell begins an escalating volume of gamesmanship in an attempt to deny Wiebe any claim to the record. The events that unfold from that moment illustrate the attitudes of both men as they pursue their goals at cross-purposes: Wiebe's quest to achieve the recognition and respect that he feels he both deserves and has earned; and Mitchell's attempts to maintain the status quo and his obscure niche of celebrity and glory.

The tour guide along the way is played in part by Walter Day. Day is the founder of Twin Galaxies and the final arbiter of video game glory. Judge Wapner at 25¢ a play. As Wiebe takes his pursuit of his goal from his home in Washington State to various parts of the country, Day provides the background on the history of competitive video gaming and how he came to be the gatekeeper for record validation.

Other gamers are also introduced, including Todd Rogers and Steve Sanders, two players who have thrown their allegiances in line with Billy. Collectively these peripheral characters combine with Mitchell to weave a tapestry of borderline ethical dealings that under any circumstances would play as downright pathetic. If the people involved in current Presidential Administration are the Mayberry Machiavellis, then Mitchell and his crew could be looked at as the Berzerk Borgias. It begs the question: why is this so important to any of them, and how can it possibly be worth all the effort they've put into trying to maintain Mitchell's legacy?

That question may be what ultimately turned me on this movie from thinking it was only so-so, into a legitimately entertaining documentary. For if you have to have the evil cabal of the Berzerk Borgias on one side of the equation, then Steve Wiebe provides the perfect foil to their pitiful attempts to derail his efforts. The role Wiebe fills is one that Hollywood and other mass media purveyors have utilized so much, describing it as cliché doesn't even begin to do it justice. And yet, Wiebe fulfills that role so authentically and unassumingly, I can't help but root for him in everything that he does.

Damn it, Steve Wiebe really is the original underdog story, and he sells that in a huge way just by being himself.

Everyone who sees this movie might hypothesize how Wiebe fills that role in his or her own personal way. For myself, I think much of it comes down to just how self-aware Wiebe is of his own limitations, personally and professionally. For all that he feels like he's come up short with in his own life, he wants that one little thing that most everyone craves: that recognition, from however few or many people genuinely care about it, at being the best at one simple thing. And he simply can't comprehend why it is so important to Mitchell that Wiebe be denied so small a piece of celebrity.

There are multiple moments where Wiebe could easily have gone over the line and ascribed any of a number of malicious motivations to Mitchell, whether they are based in fact or no. That he never crosses that line, and in fact makes several genuine efforts to be the better man, to play the contest out honorably even in the face of Mitchell's callous disregard only make me root for Wiebe all the harder.

In his book Positively Fifth Street, James McManus cites professional poker player T.J. Cloutier in describing the make-up of people who were there to play in the 2000 World Series of Poker:

"The World Series is a conglomeration of local champions," he (Cloutier) says. "There's Joe Blow from Iowa who's the champion from his game at home; hundreds of local champions like him come to Vegas to play the World Series. But it's like the difference in going from playing high school football to college football: It's a big step up."

At the time Cloutier said that, the number of "local champions" he referred to totaled a couple of hundred. Seven years later, the number is in the thousands. And were it not for recent federal legislation making it near impossible to play online poker for cash, the number would probably still be growing. Because everyone who's good at something wants to be at the top level of that field. In the case of professional poker, there are also big dreams of the dollar signs that come with that particular field of success.

Steve Wiebe doesn't want fame and fortune, necessarily. You always get the impression, watching him in Gordon's documentary, that yes, it would be nice if Wiebe could parlay his skill into something lucrative. But in the end, it's about the recognition and the respect. It is about wanting the people who recognize and appreciate his particular unique skill to acknowledge his place amongst the best.

That simple basic desire is something that will resonate with any person who worked a job and was passed over perhaps unfairly for a particular promotion. It will spark recognition in any person who may have had a person they trusted lie about them to win the heart of a significant other. People who still bear the scars of being bullied in grade school, will see Billy Mitchell and recognize that bully that tormented them oh those long years ago.

And they will pull like hell for Wiebe to whoop Mitchell's ass for that same recognition. It is that universal a sentiment, that readily identifiable a struggle.

Gordon had previous experience that taught him how to shoot a documentary that captures the inherent drama in a situation with a minimum of outside narrative. Prior to making King of Kong, he served as cinematographer on the Dixie Chicks' documentary Shut Up and Sing. Many of the simpler techniques that let the subjects tell their own story in that film are employed here with equal effectiveness. Gordon let Wiebe and Mitchell take center stage and drive the story through their own unique brands of competitiveness.

By the end of Gordon's film, he's allowed Mitchell and Wiebe to sell their own respective stories focusing on the things that make each man what they are in their personal lives outside of Kong: Mitchell's ultra-competitive brash arrogance that extends to his business; and Wiebe's self-effacing humility. It makes the contest for the high score almost a secondary concern in light of what we come to know about each man respectively. Which isn't to say we don't know who comes out on top, only that it doesn't matter because depending on which characteristics you think are more important to have in a person.

It should be obvious from the angle I've written this from which side I'm pulling for. I want Steve Wiebe to send that big ape Mitchell crashing down on his over-inflated noggin like he's done to Donkey Kong countless times before. Suddenly, I find it cool again to root for the little guy.

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