Bottom Of The Barrel

King of Kong

In select theaters today is a new documentary called The King Of Kong: A Fist Full Of Quarters [although I'm not sure where those select theaters are exactly] that captures the lives of two rival classic arcade gamers. Check out the trailer for this very retro topic:



According to Twin Galaxies, Steve Wiebe is the current Donkey Kong Champ with a high score of 1,049,100 points and he is the "hero" of the film while Billy Mitchell is the "villain" but not without good reason - at 17 Mitchell held the high score in both Centipede and Donkey Kong.

Although the documentary looks interesting, the big question is will Wiebe's record ever be broken? Donkey Kong has a programming flaw that creates a scenario known as the Kill Screen. In the 22nd stage on the 117th screen, a player can not get further than the second ramp without dieing. The amount of time allowed for any given screen is determined algorithmically during play, decreasing slowly as the player progresses. By the time the player reaches this screen, there is simply not enough time for the screen to be completed. Here is a video of the kill screen in action [if you watch closely at about 4:35 into the video, Mario just dies because time has elapsed]. Note a man states on camera that this was only the 4th known public kill screen, so we've got that going for us. Either way, the guy playing is obviously very, very good at Donkey Kong.

Perhaps this is just one record that will never fall, unless they want to reprogram the classic 1982 game so that the kill screen does not occur. Maybe this will lead to The King Of Kong 2: Steve and Billy Go To Funspot.

posted by TheWino @ 8:55 AM