King of Kong

A Fistful of Quarters

2007

U.S.A.

Dendy Films

Icon Home Entertainment

This is one of those odd little documentaries about a small piece of human endeavour that captures the imagination. Donkey Kong was a classic video game from the early days that first made its appearance on stand-alone consoles in games arcades, as opposed to the later home consoles and computers. It attracted a lot of attention as one of the hardest games to beat. An average game would last perhaps a couple of minutes. Many people enjoyed the game despite its difficulty. To others it became an obsession.

An American named Billy Mitchell held the record for many years for the highest score, well over 800,000 points. This was refereed by an informal organisation called Twin Galaxies, set up by Walter Day to monitor and publish claims for high scores. There were two ways you could claim a record – you could play at one of the public gamers conventions, or you could submit a videotape of a complete game. A weakness in this system was that Twin Galaxies relied on other gameplayers to provide technical advice. Although the games are built around computer code Twin Galaxies had surprisingly little computer knowledge. It relied instead on its referee gameplayers to notice any quirky behaviour on the videotape which might suggest the game may have been tampered with. After a while another problem emerged. Twin Galaxies began to be seen as a defender of high scorers rather than an examiner of challengers. Billy Mitchell was on their list of referees despite holding the high scores in a number of games.

The story revolves around Steve Wiebe, a young Seattle ex-Boeing worker. After being made redundant he needed something to fill his time while he retrained as a teacher. A Donkey Kong arcade console in his garage provided an outlet. His quick reflexes, developed from his early days playing baseball and basketball, gave him an edge. His engineering background enabled him to spot patterns in the game and plan his moves ahead, and his skill and scores grew. He finally beat Billy Mitchell’s score and cracked the magic one million points mark, and submitted a videotape of his game to Twin Galaxies.

This was when the trouble started. Steve’s console had a replacement motherboard (the main circuit board) which had been supplied to him by a games player friend Roy Schildt. One of the examiners sent by Twin Galaxies to check Steve’s machine was Brian Kuh, a hanger-on and sycophant of Billy Mitchell’s. In earlier days Schildt cast doubt on one of Mitchell’s high scores and had it disallowed and there has been animosity between Schildt and Mitchell ever since. Kuh had Steve Wiebe’s high score disallowed on the grounds that the motherboard had been tampered with. This claim was apparently based on one of the chips (integrated circuits) on the motherboard having some sort of sticky substance on it, making it possible that the chip had been replaced. This could just as easily have been done in the factory, but there appears to have been no examination of the solder joints for age. No other proof was provided – no check of the computer code, no examination of the play of the machine itself.

Billy Mitchell had repeatedly stated that live scores in front of an audience and referees should be the only ones allowed. Steve decided to go to a gamers convention in New Hampshire and try to repeat his feat live. He also hoped to play head to head with Billy, but Mitchell did not turn up. In spite of this, Steve was turning in a good score and was approaching the “kill screen” – the point at which the game runs out of memory and fails. Brian Kuh started rounding up other players – in front of the film crew’s camera - to watch the “kill screen” come up, which put Steve under a lot of pressure from crowding and background chatter. In spite of this he reached the “kill screen” with a score of 985,600 – a new world record in front of an audience.

At this point Kuh, who comes out of the documentary as a rather nasty person, presented a low-quality videotape of a Billy Mitchell game in which he achieved a score of over one million points. Despite Billy’s assertion that only live scores should count and despite the doubts about the accuracy of the videotape (which Kuh put down to it being a copy) Twin Galaxies accepted Billy’s new high score. They did not examine his machine or ask to view the original tape of the game.

Steve was devastated, but he returned to another convention in Florida, only ten miles away from Billy’s home, and tried again to challenge Billy head on. There was more prestige involved this time, as the Guinness Book Of Records wanted to include a section on video game scores. Whose score would go in? Once again Billy failed to rise to the challenge even though he was at the convention and was filmed by a TV news crew following Steve’s record attempt. Even Twin Galaxies could no longer pretend that all was well, and Walter Day of Twin Galaxies was forced to acknowledge Steve’s integrity in a public statement that seemed more face-saving than an admission of Steve’s high score. In spite of this it was Billy’s score based on the dodgy videotape that went into the top slot.

In 2007 Steve achieved a high score of 1,049,100 in his garage in front of the documentary film crew.

On the surface this may seem like a trivial dispute over a video game, but it is more a story of one man’s perseverance against an establishment that is itself flawed. Steve comes across as a rather ordinary person who has set a goal for himself and has tried hard to achieve it. Although Mitchell later regained the high score, his integrity was in question. Twin Galaxies also lost credibility and has been forced to sort out submissions for record scores so they can be verified by experts, not people with an axe to grind. Go Steve!

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This review will appear in Volume 2 No.5 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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