THE KING OF KONG [2007] review

January 19, 2008 · Print This Article

THE KING OF KONG had a lot of buzz in the fanboy community, so I was expecting something quite funny. Instead, it was kind of sad actually. I didn’t laugh much. And the two main characters were sadly pathetic in opposite ways. This documentary follows the attempts of someone trying to break the long standing high score record in Donkey Kong. If you think who cares about such things, quite a few people do and high scores in classic arcade games are serious business. The guy with the record is made to look like a total dick, but I here that editing of the documentary had a lot to do with it.

The best part of the documentary I found to be when the guy trying to break the record is seen analyzing how to win at Donkey Kong. Unlike today’s video games, Donkey Kong and other classic games are truly, truly hard. Using a wax pen or something the guy would draw points where he needed to make Mario jump to avoid barrels and places he’d need to wait and when exactly he’d have to employ the “baiting” of barrels to go down a ladder or not. And considering it takes about 2.5 hours to make a run at a high score, it’s impressive anyone can concentrate that long.

This documentary shows that politics and cliques exist in even the most geekiest of geek subcultures. I respect the skill of the players though, just this wasn’t as funny a documentary as the buzz would lead one to believe.

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