JACK PARKS: Even non-nerds will like ‘King of Kong’

One of my favorite movies of all time is “King of Kong.” It isn’t even really a traditional movie; it’s a documentary. A documentary delving into what is probably one of the nerdiest subcultures in existence: the classic arcade gaming community.

This is a group of people who work regular jobs, but then spend a large amount of their free time playing arcade games either through emulation software on their computer or on actual arcade machines that they own. Picture the nerdiest people you could possibly imagine, then imagine the people they would call nerds. Some have even left their careers and work part-time jobs just to have some extra quarters to play everyday at their favorite arcades.

For the younger readers out there, an arcade was a place you would go to play games such as Dig-Dug, Galaga, Frogger, Asteroids, and more for just 25 cents a play. The games didn’t have much of a story except to provide a basic premise. The point of the games was to challenge the player to be able to play better than their friends.

And in case you didn’t have friends, there was a high score list that you could get your initials onto, and then even the people who didn’t know you would know that JJP was the fourth-best player at Marble Madness. If your score was high enough you could submit it to Twin Galaxies, the national video game score database.

Arcades are mostly gone now, but there is still a thriving community of people who grew up with the games and still play them as well as younger players who have rediscovered them thanks to modern computers and the internet. With the advent of the internet, people could look up the high scores to practically any game from that era and see if they could beat it and get their name in the record books.

That’s where “King of Kong” picks up. A man named Steve Wiebe (pronounced “Wee-bee”) purchases a Donkey Kong machine and starts playing in his garage with the hope of beating the international high score of 886,000. This was a particularly ambitious goal, because at the time it was filmed this score had been held for more than 20 years by a man named Billy Mitchell. In fact, in the past 20 years, no one had even come close to beating it.

Yet after only a few months of dedicated practice, Wiebe submits a video of himself scoring a record-breaking 1,006,600 points, and we descend into a whimsical world surprisingly filled with deceit and manipulation. We are introduced to Mitchell, a restaurant owner, hot sauce maker, and legitimately great arcade player. He has had several records over the years and was the first person to achieve a perfect score in Pac-Man.

Despite his smile and efforts to help an old lady beat a world record herself, it becomes clear very quickly that Mitchell is a bad guy. You almost forget that you’re watching a documentary, because you would be hard-pressed to create a villain more evil than he is in real life.

Never engaging with Wiebe until the very end, you see Mitchell working behind the scenes, orchestrating events, intimidating officials and directing his lackeys (the man has actual lackeys who report back to him) to prevent Wiebe’s taped score from being recognized, all while putting on a good face to the community at large. When Wiebe breaks the record at a live event, Billy sends in a videotape of his own on which he scores 1,047,200 points.

At the end of the film, Mitchell is still the recognized champion, but Wiebe has been accepted by the rest of the community.

The high score changed hands several times in the years since the film came out, and the two men featured in it stopped competing with each other as other players took the lead. It seemed that Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong fame was past, until recently.

At the beginning of this year, former video game senior referee Todd Rogers — who also appeared in “King of Kong” — was found to have submitted dozens of blatantly false scores, some of which he had entered into the Twin Galaxies database himself. Scores like his 65,000,000 on Centipede, when second place was only 58,078. Or his Dragster time of 5.51 which at 35 years was the longest standing videogame record in history until it was established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the fastest time possible was 5.57.

In January, Rogers’ scores were all wiped from Twin Galaxies’ database, and he was banned from submitting any further scores. Some thought that was the end of it. They were wrong.

Noting that Todd was a confirming referee on some of Billy Mitchell’s scores, a member of Twin Galaxies began looking at some of Mitchell’s submissions. The video he submitted during “King of Kong” raised some questions even during its initial viewing, and under closer scrutiny it was determined that it had been played on a different platform than what was claimed.

When you play classic arcade games today, there are often several different platforms you can use. There’s the original machines, there are console versions, and there is MAME, an emulation software that lets you play on your computer. All these different versions have slight variations in speed, response, random number generation, and other factors that can impact game play. As such, they all have their own scoreboards to keep things fair.

Slowing down the video Mitchell submitted, it’s easy to see the individual frames of the game as they are drawn on the screen. On an original Donkey Kong machine, the frames are generated as one image, from left to right. On Mitchell’s video, the frame appears piece-by-piece, like puzzle pieces coming together.

What this means is that Mitchell’s video was recorded from a source other than an original machine, and thus ineligible for consideration under the original machine scoreboard. Given Mitchell’s status in the community, his intimate knowledge of the rules for score submission, and the fact that this same issue was found on multiple submissions from him, Twin Galaxies elected last week to not just remove his Donkey Kong scores but all of his scores and, like Rogers, ban him from submitting any further scores in the future.

Adding insult to injury, Twin Galaxies has also decided to recognize Steve Wiebe’s original video submission of 1,006,600 as the first million point score for the game. The former “King of Kong” has not merely been dethroned, but thrown in the muck and forced to see his nemesis assume his position.

I don’t believe in karma, but there is still some satisfaction in seeing justice done. And when Google’s first search suggestion for Billy Mitchell is “… is a douche,” it’s safe to say many feel he had it coming. It’s bittersweet, though, because he really is a great player, and he was practically a symbol of the community.

At the same time, this latest revelation is encouraging. Because of the dedication to ensuring accuracy and reliability of its scores, someone who had cheated was disqualified even though he was “kind of a big deal.” It gives hope to the gaming community, assurance that it will recover and perhaps grow even stronger.

And it gives a new perspective on one of my favorite movies. If you’ve never seen “King of Kong,” I strongly encourage you to do so. Even if you watch it just for the admittedly weird people you will see, it’s hard not to get sucked into this view into their real lives. You will laugh, you will get angry, you might shed a tear.

You may even decide to try your hand at the high score. Who knows? You could be the next Billy Mitchell.

I mean Steve Wiebe!