King of Kong party!

When I was a kid, there was a local 7-11
which had a couple video games. In fact, back then I think most of them
had video games. Unless of course my mind is playing terrible tricks on
me. But anyway, I would always go there and play Donkey Kong. I was
never very good and could barely get past the third screen. But I loved
the game and waited until I was able to get a copy of it on my Atari… yes,
that was as high tech as I got back then. When it finally came out, well
truth be told, it sucked ass. It was nothing like the arcade version and
suddenly, all my plans of becoming great were dashed like those barrels
underneath Mario’s hammer.

Now in case you haven’t heard of a
gentleman named Steve Wiebe, he is in a constant battle with another player of
Donkey Kong that can get to the kill screen like nobody’s business. Yes,
at one point in the game, you just keep dying, no matter what you do. But
if you have seen the wonderful documentary from Seth Gordon, THE KING OF KONG: A
FISTFUL OF QUARTERS, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And if you
haven’t, then you are missing out on not only a terrific film, but the most
sinister villain of the year… eat your heart out Javier Bardem. And Mr.
Wiebe, is not only a kick arse Donkey Kong master, he is also a damn nice fellow
with a terrific family.

And the best thing about this whole Donkey
Kong craze… Free video games. Yep, along with a few other entertainment
journalists, JoBlo was lucky enough to be invited for a chance to beat the Kong
at the Westwood Arcade over by UCLA in sunny California. It was a chance
to not only meet Mr. Wiebe (who also gave us a few tips on getting a higher
score on Kong), but also chat with the Producer of the film, Ed Cunningham.
With moderator John Gibson, they talked about how they decided to focus on the
battle of good and evil, what the draw is to the game, and how difficult it is
if you have to take a potty break on a winning streak. It was a
fascinating evening and you can read about the details below. Best of all,
we all got the chance to play a nights worth of video games without a single
quarter. My personal favorite of the night was not however, Donkey Kong,
for me it was all about House of the Dead 4. Yep, I love the whole zombie
thing.

So not only should you read all about THE
KING OF KONG below, but you must see the movie if you have not. It is
funny, it is entertaining, and Billy Mitchell is one of the best baddies ever
put on screen. Why? Because he is real and he really hates to lose.
This is a fascinating story that deserves to be seen. So read on, and as
for spitting bullets, why don’t we post some of our favorite video games and
the high scores we have achieved? But seriously, be honest about it.
I think I got about six thousand that night in Westwood. And yes, I do
realize that sucks. Tell us all about your score big shot!

Jon Gibson Moderator, Ed Cunningham, Steve Wiebe

Jon Gibson: The most interesting thing
about the documentary is the subject themselves, like how to find that nugget
that makes the movie work. So why, Ed, did you and Seth [Gordon] and the
whole crew, why did you even decide on this whole arcade scene? Going
after this kind of story, without even knowing the story was going to be there
in the first place?

Ed Cunningham: Seth and I were
working on a film called NEW YORK DOLL, another documentary. And a friend
of mine, long time friend, we’ve been friends for years, had sent me a link to
an article about his buddy who broke the world record in Donkey Kong. And
I just didn’t think much about it and we were wrapping up production on NEW
YORK DOLL and I flew up to Seattle to see my friend. And my friend used to
be in a band in high school with Steve. And I met Steve, and [my friend]
goes, ‘hey, this is the guy who holds the Donkey Kong record.’ and he turned
to Steve and he goes, ‘but tell him what just happened.’’ Has everybody
seen the film? [we respond yes with applause] You remember when Brian Kuh
and Perry Rodgers go to the garage to check out his machine? Yeah?
[We do] It was an unannounced visit is how we’re verbalizing that now.
I met Steve four days after that happened. And so he’s telling me this
story and I’m like, ‘…over Donkey Kong? They came to your house?’,
the one dude flew from New Hampshire. And you know, that was just the tip
of the iceberg for us because that’s not… I mean, it’s an interesting
story but it’s not a film. So we spent time, we went and met Billy
[Mitchell], we went an met Walter [Day], we went the Fun Spot tournament where
all that great weirdness happened with the Donkey Kong kill screen coming up and
we knew we were on to something. And it was just a chance meeting with
Steve because he was in a friend of mine’s high school band.

JG: So with meeting the film crew
Steve, what did you think? What did you think with all these guys coming
into your house with the camera crew and said we want to shoot you trying to
achieve this high score?

Steve Wiebe: Well, I welcomed them in
with open arms because at that point I’d hit rock bottom with this whole
Donkey Kong adventure. And Roy Shildt, remember him, Mr. Awesome, I was
linked to him so they thought everything I was submitting was a fraud or cheat,
so I was thinking this is my one shot to get my story told. And it worked
out, so I was really happy when they came in.

JG: The story itself, of the
movie, is pretty elegant in structure. You can’t really beat it,
even in a screenplay, if you will. You’ve got the hero, you’ve got the
villain, you’ve got the great beats of any great screenplay. So when did
you actually know that you had that story? Like you knew, you could go to
the editing room and make this work.

EC: We were very concerned, everyone
knows the film so I feel like I can talk about it in structure. The
Guinness tournament, which is, you know, the end of the film, act three, just
kind of came out of thin air. You can always go back and reconstruct stuff
in a documentary, but it’s so much cooler when you’re there as it happens.
And we just… Seth and I, Luis [Lopez] and Clay [Tweel] who are here, were
working on the film after the Fun Spot tournament, we came back to L.A., and we
had like a hundred hours of footage ‘cause we shot nonstop for five days,
three or four cameras. And we also had done a bunch of interviews.
We weren’t sure what we had, we just had no idea. We knew that —
because we had chased the Ms. Pac Man story, we were chasing Doris Self going
for the Q-Bert record, we were chasing all these other great stories. But
every time we would show up, Donkey Kong was just so much more interesting
than any of the other ones. Steve wouldn’t give up.

Billy was calling everyone in the room and
telling them what to do and it just became so obvious that we should probably
chase that story. But we knew we didn’t have a film. So we went to
visit Walter, you know when he’s playing guitar in front of the barn, it was
actually my decision to stop at that barn. So we went to him, remember he’s
into transcendental meditation, and we had spent the day at the meditating dome
with him and we came back to his place, and we wanted to go get something to
eat, and he wanted to check his messages. And on his message machine
was Guinness. And they were telling Walter that they wanted Twin Galaxies
to be the official video game score provider, and that they were going to put
video game scores back in the Guinness Book of World Records in 2007. For
the 2007 edition. And you just saw Walter change, you know, in his head,
just all of a sudden, by the end of that day he had kind of decided to we need
to have a tournament. We need to do something through this deadline so
that people who are trying to get records can get it, and if they make it, they
can get into the book. So off we went.

And we were in Florida and Billy didn’t
show up. And so we became very concerned, how do you make a film about two
guys competing when they’re never in the same room together in a gaming
environment. They’d been in the same room before but we needed them in
the same room with a Donkey Kong machine there. We thought about driving
one to Billy’s restaurant but that wouldn’t have worked. And it was
Nicole, Steve’s wife, because we thought, we had a very simplistic idea of
what this film could be. Two, head to head, guys trading off, two man
Donkey Kong. And so that was out the window. And so Nicole, I
don’t know if you remember the part where she says, you know, he’s not
mean-spirited and condescending, he’s a nice person. And Seth and I,
when we left that interview, it was emotional. It was like, wait a minute,
that’s been the story the whole time. And thank God we rolled film the
whole time because now we can go back and reconstruct it. So it was really
an interview with Nicole talking about Steve and what a good person he was, and
that, regardless of what happened upstairs at the tournament, which when we got
back from interviewing her, he’s a good man and has a great family. And
that’s what it became about.

JG: You’re a good man, you have
a good family, you’re passive. You’re a nice guy. You’re the
consummate nice guy so where does that drive to compete in something like this
come from? Why do you want to do this in the first place and why Donkey
Kong of all games?

SW: Well, I think just growing up at a –
some of the footage showed me and my brother playing football in the backyard
so, growing up with my brother, we were always competing in basketball and
football. So that competitive drive came from there. And Donkey Kong
was something I picked up in college actually, when I was growing up, I was
twelve years old and playing it when it came out. But in college, I got my
own machine, had it in my fraternity and there was a group of guys that would
always come in there and play. And that’s when I got to this kill screen
that I didn’t know existed ‘cause I thought it was a bug, that I just had a
bad machine. ‘Cause it got to this screen and I just died for no reason.
So I was always thinking, what’s happening. So I played again, got to
the kill screen one more time and it did it again. And I was like, I’m
done playing this game, I can’t get past this screen. So ten years later
is where I thought of looking up the record and then I read something about the
kill screen and that made sense now, that’s what was happening ten years
ago so that’s when I got – I’d been laid off and I was thinking of
something, a goal to go after, so I went back to Donkey Kong. And then my
wife let me do it, kinda. And then, well I was already pretty good at it,
and I just thought, well here I’m gonna go after this and then that’s what
happened.

JG: What is that conversation like
at the dinner table? When you’re sitting with your kids, you’ve got
the wife there, and you’re like ‘‘I have an idea, I want to start a new
past time. I’m thinking of going for the high score in this video game
and… what do ya think?’.

SW: I kind of eased into it, I’m
thinking, can I get a Donkey Kong machine… I wasn’t going to get the camera
and I’m going to spend hours and hours and hours going for a world record.
I said, let me get a machine and can I get a Donkey Kong Jr. too, and she said
no, there’s no room for two machines, so I have to get one. So that’s
why it’s a Donkey Kong Jr. cabinet, some of you might not have recognized
that. But it doesn’t have the Donkey Kong marquee, it’s Donkey Kong Jr.
and then I put the board in there, the Donkey Kong and I had a Donkey Kong Jr.
board…

JG: Was it a doctored
board…?

SW: [Laughing] It was semi-doctored.
[Laughing] No, it was a clean board. Actually, if you look at the extras
[Special Features on the DVD], there’s something funny on there, I won’t
spoil it for ya but the history of the board that they claim has been doctored,
you’ll find out where it came from in the extra. So I just had one
machine and then I started going for the record after I got the machine. I
didn’t want to go for the whole ball of wax at once.

JG: So you were relatively
unfamiliar with the competitive world of gaming in this sense. You
see the high score, you want to achieve it, you’re this close to getting it.
But when you first entered that world, you kind of met these other characters
that were, maybe not on Donkey Kong but they were on Burger Time, they were on
Q-Bert, they were trying to get these high scores and they had the same drive as
you. What did you think of this world? Were you intimidated?
Were you kind of seduced by it all? Intrigued?

SW: Actually, I never met any of them
until I went to this classic game expo in San Jose in 2004 is where I saw ’em.
The documentary doesn’t go back that far but I’d met ‘em there and before
I’d even met Billy, Billy Mitchell seems like a harmless name, like a little
kid, Billy Mitchell you know [Laughing] but I was in for a rude awakening.
So I wasn’t intimidated by anybody. I was just there to improve myself
on Donkey Kong. But there’s several legendary gamers… some of these guys
devote – they’ve got a list of video games and they’re like ‘okay,
I’ve got the world record on that one, let’s move down to the next game and
we’ll master that.’ I don’t have that much time but…

EC: It was interesting when we were at Fun
Spot because we hadn’t been at the tournament in 2004 to film his first
experience with the group. And then at Fun Spot, it was interesting to us
because I don’t think Steve realized the buzz he caused when he went into that
room when he showed up. I mean there was just like this tension of, ‘oh
is Steve Wiebe going to show up?’ and we were already there before Steve got
there and we’d already met Steve. We were like, he’s kind of a normal
dude, what’s the big deal? And there was just this buzz in the room
about this mysterious player from the west coast and whether he was going to
show up. So for us, it was kind of genius, like we were already there, he
was showing up. I knew when he was coming and we were like, yeah we should
probably be filming when he walks in here. It’s probably a good thing.
He may not of noticed it, but to us it was so obvious that he was an outsider
coming into this world.

JG: You’re sitting there
and you’re competing in this environment. You’ve been in your garage
for God knows how long trying to achieve this score, get to this kill screen,
get to the pinnacle of Donkey Kong. And you go to this Fun Spot and you
start playing with all these people over your shoulder, the pressure’s on…
do you feel it at all or do you just get in the zone?

SW: The whole game… well, we were
left alone for a little while so it’s not like it’s two hours of people
surrounding you and cameras flashing at you. So it wasn’t like… I
didn’t feel the pressure at that point. When you’re into the game long
enough, you kind of lock in to what you’re doing. And you don’t really
notice the people around you. I never looked around me because it might
freak me out. Because if you’re up on a mountain you don’t wanna like,
look down. So it didn’t really bother me actually. I’m like, I
got used to my kid, you know, pounding on me so it kind of prepped me for that.

JG: You read about these high
scores in Donkey Kong and it takes you a couple of hours to get to the kill
screen. There’s marathon sessions of Pac Man, Burger Time, all these
other ridiculous games, that could take twenty-thirty hours sometimes.
There’s insane records. So even for a couple hour session, say two to
three hours, how do you deal with bathroom breaks and things like that? Is
there a preparation before you start playing?

SW: I think all the beer I drank in
college created an iron bladder. [Laughing] I can hold a lot of
liquid without going to the bathroom. I actually don’t have a problem,
only two and a half hours, that’s not a problem. But there are games you
can play for – like Asteroids, you can rack up so many ships, you can play for a
month if you wanted to.

JG: There seemed to be more
challenge with this movie it being highly competitive, it doesn’t really end
story-wise, once the movie ends and the internet and whatnot. It’s a new
age documentary and you guys have been going back and forth a little bit after
the film came out in theatres and on DVD. You updated a little bit because
Billy came back and got the high score, then you got the high score and then
Billy again, it keeps going back and forth. So where is it at now and what
is your determination to possibly get back that reign?

SW: Yeah, last summer at a mortgage
brokers convention, Billy recaptured the title by a thousand points, I
think he scored one million, fifty-thousand, two-hundred, right? So it was
three hundred mortgage brokers and Todd Rogers was there as the one referee.
But my plan is to go back… actually a funny story, I heard of it when I got to
Comic Con. I arrived at the hotel and Ed breaks the news to me and he said
here’s some news that’s going to actually help the film, I think. And
he told me and I was like, where’s a Donkey Kong machine, I’ve gotta go for
this record again. But then I got back from San Diego and I was rigging up
the camera alongside the game and my son comes in and goes, you don’t have to
play anymore, the King of Kong is over. [Laughing]

JG: It seems like your kids are
very astute when it comes to life knowledge. Like your daughter
especially. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie where she says
something like, Dad, this is the kind of stuff that lives are ruined over.
Like what do you think when you hear your kid saying something like that and
you’re still going for it, you’re still gonna take that dive no matter what
it means. I mean, you still care about your family obviously but……

SW: Well in the van, my reaction is, I look
over at her. I don’t remember what I said, but I just kind of stared at
her for a minute and go yeah, what am I doing with our lives… but yeah, I
think kids are smarter than you think. I don’t know where they got it
from… they didn’t learn it from me.

Let me know what you think. Send
questions and comments to [email protected].