The Arcade Fire

Billy Mitchell walks with a swagger. With his black beard and mane of dark black hair, he has the mien of a medieval prince—or at least the synth player for a really bitchin’ ’80s cover band. He runs his own successful businesses (the Rickey’s restaurant chain, as well as a company that makes hot sauce), and his belief in the American capitalist system is so strong that he’s rarely seen without his red-white-and-blue tie. Self-doubt appears to be an alien concept to him, and he knows that can rub some people the wrong way: “I’m like the abortion issue,” he says. “No matter what I say, it draws controversy.” One of the interviewees in Seth Gordon’s documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters even says there’s no reason why Billy Mitchell shouldn’t get his face on a Wheaties box, although the Wheaties people would probably disagree—they tend to reserve that spot for actual athletes.

Mitchell is not an athlete. But he is one of the great videogame players of all time. He was the first person ever to achieve a perfect score in Pac-Man. And back in the early ’80s, he ran up a Donkey Kong score so high that for two decades no one even came close to surpassing it—it was the video arcade equivalent of Bob Beamon’s long jump in the 1968 Olympics.

Enter Steve Wiebe, a mild-mannered family man from Redmond, Washington. After getting laid off from his job at Boeing, Wiebe needed a project to fill his days—and after reading about Mitchell’s Donkey Kong score on the Internet, he found one. He installed a Donkey Kong machine in his garage, and began practising. He got so good, in fact, that even with his seven-year-son Derek yelling at him to “Wipe my butt!,” he smashed Mitchell’s high score, and he sent in a videotape of the game to Twin Galaxies, the videogame world’s official recordkeeping organization. Suffice it to say that Mitchell, whose identity is based, on large part, on his status as the world Donkey Kong champion, is not pleased by Wiebe’s success.

The King of Kong is a story about a rivalry over a ridiculous title that seemingly only the most hardcore nerd could care about. But it’s hard to imagine any nerds more hardcore than the characters in the film: besides the pompous Mitchell (who at one point answers his phone with the words, “Hello—World Record Headquarters!”), there’s an elderly Q-Bert champion, the head of Twin Galaxies (who never seems to remove his referee shirt), and a pudgy videogame player who also stars in a series of homemade “how to pick up chicks” videotapes under the alias “Mr. Awesome.”

But Gordon, who must have a will of iron, never resorts to cheap mockery. Perhaps he was inspired by the example of Steve Wiebe, who is so humble, so sweet-natured, so fundamentally decent, and so deserving of some kind of victory in his life, that the prospect of a douche like Billy Mitchell snatching his world record away from him is almost too horrible to contemplate. The gap between their personalities is so great that it immediately raises the stakes of the entire movie: The King of Kong isn’t just about a competition to set the high score in a videogame; it’s about whether a good person can ever catch a break in this world, or if mean people will always find some way to come out on top.

With its bargain-basement cinematography, The King of Kong may not look like much, but Gordon’s camera is always where it needs to be, catching every key moment of the story. At once funny and sad, pathetic and inspiring, it’s one of the great pop documentaries of recent years. If it were a round of Donkey Kong, it would be a million-point game.