Battling Billy Mitchell in King of Kong
The geeky, obsessive, compulsive world of competitive video games is proving to be one of the unexpected hits of the year. King of Kong: a Fistful of Quarters, which was recently released on DVD, tells the story of a modern American rivalry. The feature-length documentary records the intense competition to gain the highest score on the classic arcade game Donkey Kong, told from the perspective that the two principal protagonists, Billy Mitchell and Steve Weibe, are a pair of latterday gunslingers. It's a lot like High Noon.
Such is the surprise success of King of Kong, that the festival circuit is showing a wave of similarly themed feature-length documentaries.
Chasing Ghosts, which follows the 1982 video game world championships, made the official selection at last year's Sundance festival. Then, last month at the SXSW in Austin, two further films premiered. Second Skin investigates the emerging genre of games played in virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, while perhaps even more surprising is the release of Reformat the Planet, a feature-length documentary examining the culture of chiptune or chip music, the practice of taking apart portable games consoles and then reusing them to make music.
All these documentaries follow a trail blazed by 8 Bit, that looked at the intersection of art and video games and was premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But it is not just prestigious art galleries that are taking notice of the culture of video gaming.
It is often quoted that the computer games industry makes more money than Hollywood. But now Hollywood wants to muscle in. Rumours abound on the internet that a feature version of King of Kong is in production, with Johnny Depp starring as the "wicked" Billy Mitchell and Nathan Fillian as the "wholesome" Steve Wiebe. What all this sudden wave of films about video games tells us is that the movie industry is finally waking up to the fact that they make great entertainment, both on and off the screen.
