Dedicated stalkers will know I am part of a neat little project with band/roommates Oscar, Stacey, and Jackie: Endless Feature – where we made a stack of every DVD we own and have not seen (regardless if the others have seen it), and all summer long we watch each one and liveblog the experience. A few weeks back we had the chance to see King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a documentary on two men and their quest to be the best Donkey Kong players in the world. We promptly fell in love with this cast of characters and their truly incredible story, and the movie is currently in our top favorites of the summer, along with Bandé A Part, High School Confidential, and (for all the wrong reasons) The Ice Pirates. Here’s the trailer:
The movie tells the story of 20-year reigning DK champion Bill Mitchell, a scratch-to-the-top, take no prisoners character, and Steve Wiebe, a good guy down on his luck and needing some serious validation. The movie’s thrilling conclusion takes place at the Classic Video Game and Pinball Tournament, which is held annually at Funspot in Weirs Beach, NH. The event is hosted by video game scorekeepers Twin Galaxies, a group so professional at fact-checking and ethics that the Guinness Book of World Records crew consider them the official source on world record high scores. I can do little justice in describing the experience – you really have to see this movie to believe it.
As luck would have it Oscar and I were driving home from a wedding yesterday morning in North Conway, NH. Our route home had us passing right through Weirs Beach, on what happened to be the last day of the same annual tournament. Naturally, we stopped in to check it out, and here’s what we found:
Funspot is a gigantic, three-story arcade, with the top floor dedicated to classic arcade games going back to the 1960s, most of which have been meticulously restored to near-perfect working order. The games are organized by manufacturer (Bally, Nintendo, Midway, and so on), and virtually all cost only one token to play, which is a very nice thing in an era when the pizza shop pinball machine can run you up 50 cents to a dollar. We saw a few people perched up like this throughout the place making passes at world record attempts. There was a great deal of buzz about two people going after Pac-Man high scores, and the guy pictured above was making a strong pass at Super Mario Brothers, which most of us know from its later cross-over onto the Nintendo Entertainment System. One guy started chatting me up about a high score he was about to attempt in 1970s coin shooter Twin Rifle.
While I’m a far cry from a world professional, I have always taken a liking to arcade games, and relished the opportunity to play them in restaurants, amusement parks, and skating rinks growing up. Consequently, to see virtually all of them lined up and functional brings back a wave of nostalgia. This particular one, Rolling Thunder, was a staple at the Wallace Civic Center in Fitchburg, MA, where I spent a lot of time as a kid.
Having thousands of games available also gave us the chance to try a good deal of new games, both new to us entirely and console games played for the first time on cabinets. Oscar is pictured here falling in love with Chiller, perhaps the most violent video game of all time. Here’s a screenshot of what the game looks like before you even start shooting, courtesy of the Ironic Consumer:
I made a lot of new favorites here, too. I rediscovered Tapper, fell in love with Timber, and did pretty well Ghosts n’ Goblins. On the Pinball side of things, The Black Knight proved most excellent, and I relived old NES classics with the cabinet versions of Punch Out, Paperboy (with really awesome bike handlebars as a controller), and…
Vs. Duck Hunt, which I was determined to make my specialty. Back in my freshman year of college Duck Hunt was one of the games we used to settle disagreements, and my scores quickly rose to the top of my suite. I decided to go ahead and try to match this on the arcade version of the game. Now, arcade fans will tell you that this is not a good game to be a master in, since it was merely ported over from the NES and is thus an “inferior game,” but I had a good shot at making the high score board on it so I figured I’d give it a go. The record on the table was 329,600. On my first round I cracked 100,000, and my best of the day was just over 256,000. This was good enough for second place on the table, though later a challenger would later drop me to third. In hindsight, I should have had a ref come and observe the game, since my score is good enough for 8th place on the Twin Galaxies best score list, making me the 8th best player in the world that has taken the time to go ahead and get their score formally recognized. The top: Randy Lawton, with a score of 1,033,300.
I have a Flickr set of the rest of the experience here, including shots of the Donkey Kong machine, table Q*Bert, and a hysterical little trivia game called Fax (no joke – one question was “What is the next year will see Hailey’s Comet?” Answer: “1986.”).
The experience was wonderful, and we were quite lucky to be there on the last day of the tournament. I’ve never considered myself much of an arcade junkie (I reserve my junkiness for garage rock and Tom Waits and other musical fancies), but I hold a very broad definition of “sport,” and as much as I put NASCAR in that category (although I don’t enjoy it on a personal level), so do I put these video games. To me, sports are created when a group of people establish an architecture under which we have a contest, and many strive to achieve greatness under that architecture. There are good players, which herald your ideals of the sport. There are bad players, which for one reason or another are antagonists to your heroes. There’s even the selfish exploitation of games – much as the rules are bent in sports so are coding errors exploited on these cabinets (a man going for the high score in PacMan found a spot where the ghost will forever circle around Pac, but never actually get him, so he could take a smoke break and grab a bite to eat on his multi-hour trip to the top scores).
It’s a testament to the human spirit, and while it may not have the generational history of a baseball, or even car racing, it has begun to grow as such. I saw many dads and moms with kids playing the same games. I too felt the rush in playing an original Space Invaders cabinet. My dad was my age when it came out, and I could feel the history in those three buttons (left, right, shoot). Those who doubt this are urged to see King of Kong and experience the raw beauty in its geekiness.
And, if you ever make it up to Weirs Beach, go to Funspot. Places like this deserve your money.
[...] story. Somehow it’s a perfect blend of video game geekiness (a subject on which I’m familiar), Massachusetts childhood memories, and a touching observational story. Jmac talks about girls [...]
Pingback by Jmac’s Arcade « Andy on the Road — 27 August 2008 @ 5:09 pm |