Two films about old-school arcade games premiered within a few days of each other in Park City in 2007. One was at Sundance, the other was at Slamdance. Guess which one you’ve never heard of? Ironically, it’s the one from Sundance. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters was the success story when these two films unintentionally butted heads, and the sad thing is that the other movie, Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade, is a much better film. But chances are you’ll never get to see it.
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I’m a self-admitted board game junkie. Perhaps the Sears catalog from back in the 1980s is to blame. The photos of uber-happy families playing games together perverted my mind into thinking that everything that Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers put out was simply something I just had to have. Hell, they even made The Game of Life look like it was incredibly fun. So, now that I’m older and don’t have a parent telling me “no,” I’ve been collecting all these odd and old games. I was sorting through some of my stranger games today and spotted one I forgot I owned: Gosford Park: The Board Game. That’s right, they made a board game out of Gosford Park.
That made me wonder what the strangest movie to become a video game has been. You know, like if they’d made Little Miss Sunshine into a video game. Actually, now that I think about it, that would be a pretty fun game: get Olive to the beauty pageant on time while avoiding obstacles like Grandpa’s death, color blindness, and the realization that you have a failing career. Okay, maybe it’s not that great of idea, but still. Turning A Clockwork Orange into a game sounds strange as well, but someone has already thought about it.
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On this week’s installment of The Media Diet, we talk to Seth Gordon, director of the documentary King of Kong. King tells the story of Steve Weibe, a mild-mannered middle-school teacher/Donkey Kong phenom who attempts to set the Guinness World Record for highest recorded score on the arcade version of the game. Steve has only one obstacle, and that’s charismatic fast food employee/”Gamer of the Century” Billy Mitchell, who held the Donkey Kong record for 20 years until Weibe managed an unprecedented 1,000,000 point game. Mitchell and Weibe spent several months battling for the Guinness record, and Gordon got it all on film.
It may sound totally dorky, but it’s also a full-on crowd pleaser. Last weekend, I went to a screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, where the median audience member age is probably 65, and the King of Kong trailer brought the house down. You can see what all the fuss is about on August 17, when Kong opens in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Austin (it’s set to expand to additional cities in the weeks to follow; to find out when Kong is coming to your town, go here and click on “Theaters and Tickets” at the bottom of the page). And click through to read Gordon’s thoughts on Uwe Boll, Saved By The Bell, his upcoming feature adaptation of King of Kong, and the Roger Ebert vs. Gamers debate.
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