Recently I saw The King of Kong [trailer], a documentary about the two best Donkey Kong players in the world and the one-upmanship that ensues when a long-standing high score is surpassed.

The film starts off by profiling Billy Mitchell, considered to be one of the best classic arcade game players alive. He made headlines in 1999 for getting a perfect score in Pac-Man, and as the movie starts, he's generally regarded as the best Donkey Kong player in the world (proclaiming himself the only player good enough to make it to the kill screen at the end). Mitchell is pretty full of himself, but seems to have the skill to back it up.

Enter Steve Wiebe (pictured below), a perennial runner-up who decides, during a period of unemployment, that he's going to take his already impressive Donkey Kong skills to the next level and set a new world record. Steve seems like an everyday, likable kind of guy.

We also meet Walter Day, the eccentric founder of Twin Galaxies, the worldwide authority in video game high scores. It's his organization's job to painstakingly verify and validate every score and record that's broken. The film draws the viewer into the uber-geeky culture of classic arcade game fixation, full of the most hardcore nerds you'll ever see on a movie screen. To them, Mitchell is a god, and Wiebe an outsider who slowly wins their acceptance.

It might sound like a strange premise, but, simply put, this movie is a masterpiece. You might wonder how the battle between two grown men to set the world record in a 25-year-old arcade game could be so compelling, but that's the magic of the thing. At some point the movie switches from being about two guys and a video game to the "new guy" vs. the establishment, the fight to stay on top, and the obsession to reach the goals we set for ourselves (regardless of why we set them).

As the movie progresses, it becomes apparent that Billy Mitchell's cult of personality has run amok, and he refuses to even acknoweldge the affable Wiebe, who travels across the country to Mitchell's hometown just to play him. When Wiebe is playing his last game, with his one last chance to beat Mitchell's score in-person - I've never been more on the edge of my seat, or wanted so badly for the "good guy" in the movie to succeed.

This documentary is a real-life roller coaster and definitely worth checking out. And, as a postscript, apparently Mitchell set another Donkey Kong world record last month. While the validity of his score seems to be in some dispute, my first thought when I read it was - I hope there's a King of Kong 2. (Though I've read that many of the people in the movie felt they were portrayed inaccurately and are somewhat upset, so I guess there won't be.)