The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

You know, you may not know, but arcades were hot shit in the days gone by. You'd go there with friends, bring a pocket full of quaters. Maybe challenge eachother, see who could get the higher score in a game. Now being as old as I am, I was not able to completely indulge in the arcade experience. I would however play the ocassional arcade style game, with the big machines and joysticks, maybe at the local pizza shop or what have you, only occasionally making it to the gaming Meccas that are/were arcades. I', sure many of you readers out there have similar experiences invloving Metal Slug and Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. I know you're there.

King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters is a look into the aracde culture that is still present in the world today. The docuementary is focused on the world of competitive retro arade gaming, centerin mainly around two characters.

The first character we meet is Billy Mitchell set a high score in the arcade game Donkey Kong back in 1982. He now (from what I could tell in the film) runs a chain of successfull hot wing restauraunts. The other character we meet, and who's journey we follow throughout the movie is Steve Wiebe, a teacher at high school in Washington who sets out ona journey to break Mitchell's high score.

The film starts off giving some backstory on Mitchell and the competitive gaming scene as a whole. The arbiters of the who retro game shindig is an organization known as Twin Galaxies. They say whether or not a high in a game is legit or not. If it isn't registered with Galaxies, then your score is useless.  From here we meet Wiebe, and learn about his "interesting" past and what exacly motivates him.

The rest of the film follows Wiebe through out his journey into retro-game stardom. His triumphs and his failures. The good times and bad. His wife and kids. Playing Kong for ours on end while his son yells at him about the fact he needs to poop. Ahhh, good times.

This documentary is by far one of the best I've seen. It's interesting, it's original, it's funny, it's just outright wacky. What really gets me though, is the story. Though this is a documentary, you could easily market it as just a normal movie, and I would be totally cool with that. Most documentaryies, like the recenetly seen Helvetica, focus so much on information about the subject that it's almost more like a text book that just happens to have a video component. Now, I know that's just the nature of the beast when it comes to documentaries, but Fistful of Quarters is different. It has story. It has characters that we can not only relate to, but by the end of the film, feel for. It doesn't shove facts about this culture of yester-year down our throats, rather presenting them smoothly in a manner that gels with the over-arching story. The way the film handles what it is, is extraordinary. You have a movie about 40 something year old nerds who spend most of their time playing video games that rest of the word seems to have forgotten about. Tell me that doesn't sound like a topic that could be easily be made fun of. The movie in no way, shape or form seems to be poking fun at the people who truly love the retro games. It's their passion. Who are we to make fun of it.

The story, sensibility and overall eccentricity have landed high on my list of must see movies. If you haven't had the good fortune to see it yet, this movie is worth your time.

I give it a:

15/17