Review for The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Director: Seth Gordon

Released: 2007
Genre: Documentary

The key to making a good documentary is picking a compelling subject to capture with your camera lens. The topic being covered may not seem very interesting to most, but cohesive pacing and narration can win an audience over. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters achieves this, documenting those in pursuit of highest ever score on the original 1981 Donkey Kong arcade game. On the way, we learn not must about competitive gaming, but about human nature as well- and how the true difficulty lies not with reaching the top spot in a profession, but staying there.

The King of Kong focuses primarily on two people: Steve Weibe and Billy Mitchell. Steve is on a mission to beat Billy's record score of 874,000 on Donkey Kong, which was set in 1982 and has stood for over two decades. He works on deciphering the game's physics with his own arcade version (which he keeps in his garage), and has everything down to a fine science. In one scene, we see him marking out the different paths of barrels he must avoid with chalk; he waits for the bouncing obstacles to line up with a certain sequence of parabolas, and only then attempts to climb the final ladder in a stage. Such a seemingly mundane task sounds boring to watch, but director Seth Gordon is able to show how riveting it is to see.

Gordon also chronicles the history of arcade game competition, which revolves around a record keeping and competition hosting company called Twin Galaxies. Walter Day, the founder of the business, referees games and validates scores with several assistants, who watch thousands of hours of videotaped footage people send in to establish new high scores. We're also shown a video game convention held at Funspot in New Hampshire, the place where Steve sets the highest publicly attained score on his beloved game- a score just short of a million points. What ensues is a battle for the top spot, with Mitchell sending in a video tape of him attaining a score of 1,047,000 points and offering to pay anyone who beats him a total of ten thousand dollars.

I will not reveal who winds up with the high score in the end (be it on video tape or in public), but needless to say the competition is intense. During this, Gordon shows many of those who are fixtures in the circle of arcade gaming devotees, from Billy Mitchell's clingy underling Brian Kuh, to Doris Self, an eighty year old woman who holds the record score for the game Q-Bert. What we get as a result is a very cooky but rewarding film.

3.00/4.00