Billy Mitchell was crowned champion of the arcade game Donkey Kong back in 1982, and nobody had even been close to beating him for almost twenty-five years. Mitchell was quite the celebrity around the gaming community, having channeled his renown into such successful business enterprises as a barbeque sauce company, and he was idolised by the team at Twin Galaxies, who were the adjudicators when it came to judging which high scores were genuine, with their leader, Walter Day, a much-respected referee in his field. However, in 2005 there was a pretender to the Donkey Kong title: the hitherto unknown Steve Weibe. Let battle commence...
And it is a battle, of wills and skill if not of actual violence, or at least that's the way director Seth Gordon masterfully edited his footage to make this tale of computer gamers into the arcade equivalent of a Rocky movie, with Weibe the underdog and Mitchell the seemingly unconquerable bad guy. It has to be said, Mitchell appeared to embrace his role as the arrogant villain here, firing off words of wisdom about winners (himself) and losers (everyone else) so that you want to see his smug expression wiped from his face. Sure, a lot of this was manipulation on Gordon's part, but it doesn't half make for an exciting drama.
Especially as Weibe is painted as one of those sad losers who Mitchell appears to crush under the heel of his boot in his drive to succeed. Unassuming and modest, with a habit of stoically holding back tears when his dreams are shattered once more, he is an instantly likeable character who we sense would get far more out of achieving this Donkey Kong title than anyone else in the film. And after a short catalogue of his personal disasters (failure on the sports field, in his musical ambitions, at work where he was made redundant from the job he planned to do for life), he does indeed beat the high score and gets it on videotape to prove it.
It's here that conspiracy raises its head, as the Twin Galaxies chaps seem to be in the pocket of Mitchell, so any attempt to dethrone him is met with deep suspicion. They even sent two of their representatives around to Weibe's home to dismantle his machine to make sure it had not been tampered with, effectively barging into his house against the wishes of his wife. Not only that, but they believed they had found evidence tampering on the circuit board, and when they heard their arch-rival Roy Schildt, aka Mr Awesome, an eccentric self-publicist, was an acquaintance of Weibe's, their alarm bells started ringing. Gordon obviously doesn't think that Weibe was a cheat, and you accept that, so it rankles when the high score is disallowed.
Weibe, being the mild-mannered fellow he is, is ready to give up until the chance arises for him to head for Florida and prove that he can indeed do what he claims at a vintage games emporium there. Life seems determined to keep him down, however, and after he beats Mitchell by completing Donkey Kong, his rival supplies a videotape of his own million-plus score, which for some reason Twin Galaxies accept over Weibe, even though when Weibe submitted his tape it wasn't seen as authentic. Gordon plays up this kind of injustice to the hilt, and you'll be resisting the urge to boo and hiss every time Mitchell appears onscreen, so even when the film ends, as real life often does, not entirely satisfactorily, you don't feel as if you have been let down. King of Kong was a perfect example of creating screen thrills out of actual events, and if it was not wholly authentic, it was very effective at its goals. Music by Craig Richey.
