Dorks galore in this great documentary about the cutthroat competition over high scores on arcade games that were last popular in 1983. You ever casually play pool or darts with a guy and after a few minutes you start to realize that he’s not playing for fun? Rather, he’s obnoxiously competitive. There’s nothing at stake and nobody cares, but he needs to win.
That’s who this movie is about. Except the game here is Donkey Kong (and other 80s arcade games) and there’s a whole COMMUNITY of guys—it’s all guys, of course, except for the 80 year old lady who’s a Q-Bert master—who devote their lives to it.
There are two main players:
1) Steve Wiebe, the challenger. The hero of the movie. Nice guy. Schoolteacher. Family man. The sort of fella you can imagine might stop to help a stranger change a tire. He got sucked into playing Donkey Kong all day after he got laid off from his job at Boeing.
2) Billy Mitchell, the Donkey Kong high scoring champeen of the world since 1982 and clinging to that title ever since. He’s the creep of the movie. He has hair like Punky Meadows and wears gaudy ties. He also claims that he had groupies back in the 80s due to his record-breaking game scores. These days, he owns a restaurant and a hot sauce company and has a wife with breasts that could knock over his home Donkey Kong machine if she turns around too fast.
Steve Wiebe is out to break Billy Mitchell’s record, which he does, twice, only be to kept off the official list due to one technicality or another. Wiebe keeps trying to engage Mitchell in a live competition, but it’s a no go. Mitchell prefers to keep an almost regal distance from his challenger while keeping tabs on him via his weasely protege, Brian Kuh. One suspects this is because Mitchell is simply out of practice on the game, which is understandable, but he refuses to let go of his exalted place in the vintage video game nerd world.
Since this movie came out, the high scoring record for Donkey Kong has changed hands several times, but there’s ONE title Mitchell will ALWAYS have in my book: He’s the most quotable movie villain of the decade. The 80s had Frank Booth, the 90s had everybody in Pulp Fiction, and the 00s have Billy Mitchell. He’s a model of self-absorption. Hear him talk about setting video game records like it’s the most important thing since the cure for polio. Hear him compare himself to famous World War I fighter pilots. Hear him say (talking about his days after breaking the Donkey Kong record in 1982) “Whenever we went somewhere, it was like a rock band showing up”. He’s like a character from a Christopher Guest movie.