I recently watched the documentary king of kong which is set about a record Donkey Kong record set in the early 1980s. This record was by Billy Mitchell which stood for almost 25 years.
Billy Mitchell’s records was contested time and time again and the documentary follows the record attempt by Steve Wiebe from Washington. Steve was an unemployed teacher who grew addicted to the game and addicted to beating the record. It is said that Wiebe first breaks Billy Mitchell’s record in public at Funspot but Wiebe actually mailed a taped game in to Walter day who monitors records for games. The tape by Wiebe was accepted and he was crowned the new world record holder however 2 ‘record checkers’ dismissed the film due to a chip that was inserted into Wiebe’s Donkey Kong machine because the person who game Wiebe the chip was said to be illegitimate. Wiebe then upset shows up at Funspot to beat the record.
Billy didn’t attend the tournament at Funspot however mailed in a tape that was shown to users whilst Wiebe was playing. The tape was jittery, illegitimate & plain pathetic however it was accepted by Walter Day. This really boiled my blood. A clear un touched video by Wiebe was disallowed and a pathetic version of Billy’s tape was accepted. IT was plain unfair.
You could imagine Wiebe and how upset he was so he challenged Billy Mitchell to a live challenge which Billy didn’t want to accept.
Billy was cocky, he was scared and in my opinion he would not be up to the standards of a player like Steve Wiebe.
Twin galaxies later removed Billy Mitchell’s score, i found this due to some research as i was clearly annoyed at the result – the twin galaxies report can be view here
They clearly state that the score should not have been accepted due to the clarity of the tape, i can understand that Walter took the word of a friend but in cases like this there needs to be more investigation into the matter, along with this the tape was clearly defected and breached all the rules when coming to video tape scores. This statement from Twin Galaxies was not portrayed in the movie so should be here.
All in all, great documentary i enjoyed every minute of it and i’m glad it was finally proven that Wiebe was a better player than Mitchell.
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