Film of the Week: 13

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)

With the release of many amazing anticipated video games in November such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Halo: Combat Evolved & Batman: Arkham City, I felt the need to look back a little, oh say almost 40 years back.

Back in 1972 (on November 29th to be exact), a new company named Atari created an arcade game that would shape the future of all arcade, video and computer games forever, Pong.

It was revolutionary in every way and led the way for many terrific games. I myself don't remember the days of Pong but I have played it myself and I remember my dad talking about it, in-fact he still owns an original console. 

I do however remember my father's Texas Instruments TI-99 which I must admit I spent quite a lot of time on. With games like Parsec, Munch Man, Q*bert, TI Invaders and one of my favourites Burgertime, it was great. 

Then of course I got my very own Nintendo with some of the greatest games such as The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario 3 (my favourite), Batman: The Video Game and Donkey Kong.

However as time went buy, many more advanced consoles were released such as sega, playstation, xbox and of course PC Games. But these classic games were never forgotten and are now referred to as retro games. 

The Original Pong (1972)

In 2007, an amazing documentary titled The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters was released. It stares Billy Mitchell who in 1982 set a world record and became the world champion in Donkey Kong.

Now he is known as the "greatest arcade-video-game player of all time", he is the first person to have a perfect Pac-Man score and owns a chain of restaurants named "Rickey's World Famous Restaurant" and even sells sauces. But most importantly his Donkey Kong high score has been unchallenged for 20 years.

Now this documentary focuses on Steve Wiebe who tries to over take the reigning champion Billy Mitchell in the world high score for Donkey Kong. You can clearly see the absolute obsession over this game in the film, not to mention the pure cockiness of Billy Mitchell. 

We see video game lovers from all over who are not just obsessed with these games, but they live to play these games. They also required a lot of skill, mainly donkey kong. In fact it is said that Donkey Kong is one of the most difficult games ever invented and the very last level freezes and that's when the game is won.

It is an excellent documentary that was placed on many critics 'top 10 films of the year' lists, and was also my favourite documentary of the year along side Taxi to the Dark Side.

Click here for the trailer and click here for the original Pong comercial