The King of Kong: Old-School Arcade Gamers Go to War

Axed from his engineering job at Boeing on the day he signed a new mortgage, Steve Wiebe could've gotten drunk, mulled suicide, or abandoned his wife and kids, à la Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. Instead, he retreated into his Redmond garage, bought an old-school video arcade game on eBay for $350, and set out to break a 25-year-old world record. And thus a very different kind of movie came out of his improbable mission: the widely praised documentary The King of Kong, which is already being adapted into a Hollywood feature.

Screening this weekend at SIFF and opening in theaters in August, Kong follows Wiebe's attempt to wrest the title of Donkey Kong champion from a smarmy Floridian who's a favorite of the gaming establishment and a co-founder of the all-powerful organization of arcade-game record keepers. You may recall reading about Wiebe, or seeing him on TV, in 2003, when he thought he'd broken the record. The documentary picks up where those reports left off, revealing how that record, his vintage machine, and his personal integrity were questioned. Just when Wiebe thought he'd proven himself, he was drawn into a cross-country duel with an elusive, scheming rival. A game originally for kids became a contest between gunslingers wearing white and black hats—and a very entertaining window into the obsessed-gamer subculture.

Expect no spoilers here about how Wiebe's quest turns out, but Kong and its remake rights sold in January for a deal in the high six figures (according to Variety) soon after playing at Slamdance, Utah's alternative film festival to Sundance. Now the Kong story will follow an even more challenging arc, as producer Ed Cunningham and director Seth Gordon, two former locals who've followed very different paths to Hollywood, attempt to keep control of the project and turn it into their first feature film.

Wiebe (pronounced WEE-bee), now a junior-high science teacher, was raised on the Eastside during the height of the early video-game era. Interviewed during a school visit and by phone, he recalls spending hours at home on an early Atari 2600 console, and out of the house mastering Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, and other arcade games "when it was still hip to hang out at the Godfather's in Factoria." [Editor's note: When did it ever stop being hip?] Described in the movie by his long-suffering wife, Nicole, as "definitely OCD," Wiebe says, "I get locked into something, playing along for hours. It's kind of my nature."

By the time Wiebe arrived at the UW in 1987, the "golden age" of arcade gaming was over, victim to home-based console games like PlayStation and Xbox. But, as documented by Seinfeld, a few nostalgia buffs bought up affordable relics of favorites like Donkey Kong. "I had missed playing it," Wiebe recalls. "I bought my own, and brought it to my own frat and to my room." Soon he was routinely scoring 400,000 to 500,000 points, while "the next nearest person was like 150,000." By the time he graduated, he could exceed 900,000 points, meaning he had actually reached the end of Nintendo's circuit-board-based obstacles: There were no more ramps and ladders to ascend and no more barrels for Donkey Kong to throw. At that point, the game abruptly ceased to function. This terminal moment has come to be called "the kill screen," the Valhalla of arcade gamers. The first time he did it, Wiebe says, "I thought there was a bug. It just tumbled."

But the world did not take notice.

Flash forward a dozen years: Wiebe had sold his old Donkey Kong machine soon after college, married, then landed a job at Boeing, once the safest, surest legacy employer in the Northwest. Not anymore. Wiebe was laid off after two years and then bounced around the tech world doing programming until the dot-com crash left him idle. It was not a good period for Wiebe. In the movie, he asks rhetorically, "What can I do to feel I have control over something?"

The Internet introduced him to the Twin Galaxies Web site, which tracks scores and activities in the vintage gaming world. The biggest star of the classic gaming revival, he learned, was a slick, successful hot-sauce entrepreneur named Billy Mitchell. Mitchell held the record for several classic games, including Donkey Kong, on which he'd scored 874,000 points back in 1982—a feat that landed the 17-year-old in Life magazine.

Wiebe realized he had beaten Mitchell's Donkey Kong score back on his college machine—only no one knew it. "Something clicked in me—'Hey, I can beat that score.' And since it was so independent of other people. It's not a team sport. It's up to me. I can achieve something. I was just looking for something to cheer me up," he says.

So naturally he went to eBay and bought another vintage Donkey Kong game and began practicing like mad, even diagramming his screen with a grease pencil to route a path to maximum points. Wiebe had plenty of time on his hands to practice—not to mention an extremely patient wife, though his two children are less understanding. In one memorable scene in the film, as Wiebe pushes a game into record territory, his young son screams from the bathroom, "Wipe my butt! Don't play!"