The King Of Kong is a documentary following two competitive gamers who are competing to gain the Donkey Kong world record for the highest score.
The film follows high school teacher Steve Wiebe’s attempt to bust Billy Mitchell’s record of 874,300, untouched since 1982. This is harder than you might think, since the aforementioned Mitchell now holds sway with the judges of such things, Twin Galaxies (now the official Guinness World Record judges for arcade game records). Whether he succeeds or not and the full story surrounding same is available on Wikipedia for all to see, but I highly recommend seeing the film instead, which has some real emotion and heart behind it. According to that most reliable of sources, The Internet, a film adaptation is in the works, which seems foolish since this had a theatrical release and it’d probably just be something in the Dodgeball style.
The film is very clear cut (despite being a documentary) as to whose side they’re on. Billy Mitchell is the hot sauce mogul who funnelled his record and his mullet into his business. He is portrayed so that by the end of the movie you will think that he’s scum of the highest order for refusing to play with Wiebe, even though most of the people involved in the film say that he’s a kind and generous man (sometimes not phrasing it in the best way). Lovable Wiebe, on the other hand, comes across more clearly as the everyman underdog who tries to beat somebody else at a video game. We’ve all been there.
While it gives some useful tips (apparently you can control the barrels to a certain extent in the first level), the film seems to be missing the notorious ‘custard pie’ level and the last level where you have to remove the nails to kill Donkey Kong (who would of course later become Cranky Kong), making it seem like those levels do not actually exist.
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Article comments
1 - terrible
horrid excuse for a story. not only did the movie cut things to make it look different than it happened but even if twin galaxies was "on Billy's side" the people running it back then are not part of twin galaxies now. lame excuse for journalism.