Don’t get chumpatized

King of Kong was originally conceived as a documentary in the tradition of Spellbound — a handful of obsessive social retards gather together for a seminal event relying on meaningless skills, this time starring competitive arcade gamers — but filmmakers Cunningham and Gordon “always held out hope to find some form of man versus man, mono-e-mono competition”. They rapidly discovered that in the classic arcade gaming community microverse “all roads lead to Billy Mitchell”, Donkey Kong world record holder, Pacman world champion, a captain of industry, hot sauce baron, the greatest arcade gamer alive, and omnipotent totem to the scorekeeping collective known as Twin Galaxies. (Also looks like Nick Cave. Sort of. They share an evil beard.)

Cunningham and Gordon heard Mitchell’s solid gold legend echoed by classic arcade gamers throughout America. “If you could hack into the machine, and program it to play itself, you couldn’t even program it that well,” one said. But interviews with Mitchell at his hot sauce company base in Hollywood, Florida, revealed something more intriguing to the filmmakers; it seemed that irrespective of which direction the interview veered, Mitchell refused to mention a certain name, the name of the man that challenged Mitchell’s Donkey Kong world title, the man poised to threaten Mitchell’s eternal legend, the man whose home was just broken into — Steve Wiebe.

The documented byproduct of the following two years would portray the mortal combat between these two men, Billy Mitchell as gaming overlord and Steve Wiebe as beaten dog — Twin Galaxies having broken into his home, torn apart his Donkey Kong machine, and accused him of board tampering (thereby manipulating the outcome of the high score, which would have crushed Mitchell’s enduring legacy), ultimately accepting Mitchell’s scores over his own. A tear rolls down Steve Wiebe’s cheek. Audiences wipe away their own.

“I try to promote Twin Galaxies as integrity above all,” referee Robert Mruczek says onscreen. “I will do that with my dying breath.” Yet time and again, King of Kong shows the Twin Galaxies collective deny Wiebe any glory in order to restore and maintain the legend of Billy Mitchell. They reject Wiebe’s high score video tapes after months of speculation and breaking into his home; they accept Mitchell’s within minutes. The injustice appears gross.

“The stuff [Mitchell] did to keep tabs on Steve and control him was far greater than we could actually show,” Gordon would repeat to press. “He is a true puppet master, and really rules this whole group of guys [Twin Galaxies]. He tells them where to walk, where to be, what to do, what to say — it’s unbelievable. Billy is such a good gamer that when he’s finished beating the games, he moves on to play games with people. And even we became a part of that.”

Irrespective of Mitchell’s gameplay, the film would paint a vivid, unconstrained portrait of both men — Steve Wiebe, tender, innocent, defeated man with wife and adorable children, and Billy Mitchell, Machiavellian turd. “I have a bit more sympathy for him that most,” Gordon told Ugo.com. “I think he’s driven by a profound desire to be perfect and live up to the guy that he was when he was seventeen. He got an unbelievable amount of attention at a very young age. Now he’s sort of fossilised and petrified, sort of frozen in time.”

Since the film’s US release, the blood within the competitive arcade gaming community, which was already soiled, has turned aggressively fetid. Those depicted as Billy Mitchell’s peons in the film, Brian Kuh and Dwayne Richard, have turned up at US screenings of the movie to scream at audiences and denounce the film as bullshit. “They bought their tickets, I think,” Quint from AintItCool.com recollects. “I know they weren’t invited to be part of the evening; they just decided to show up and shit on Wiebe’s day. It’s okay, they were hissed. And Dwayne Richard was threatened with expulsion from the theatre because he wouldn’t shut the fuck up during the first early showing. So, yeah … class act.”

Meanwhile at the Twin Galaxies base, founder Walter Day has made a series of official statements, which undermine the film’s credibility in every conceivable detail, beginning with the fact that the film ignores another Donkey Kong record holder — Tim Sczerby. “Billy Mitchell scored 874,300 points [on Donkey Kong in] 1982. His record stood until 2000, when Tim Sczerby scored 879,200. A few days later, Billy himself phoned Tim and congratulated him. At no time did Billy Mitchell, in a fit of desperation, attempt to wrest back his world record. In fact, he hardly cared about the loss and went about his normal life as a father of three children and hot sauce manufacturer.”

Given this information, Walter maintains, why would Billy now seek to specifically crush Steve Wiebe? Indeed, why would Twin Galaxies seek to facilitate Billy’s crushing of Steve Wiebe? “Filmmakers are expected to use fiction to tell a story,” Walter says, “however, the public expects a documentary to tell a true story, based on all the facts. In the case of The King of Kong, an exclusive set of facts were favoured that supported a particular storyline, while other facts were carefully omitted or overlooked.”

If this is the case, if Gordon and Cunningham did overlook or misrepresent certain facts, if in fact Billy Mitchell is not the turd and puppet master The King of Kong portrays him as, then what exactly was overlooked? One man. One grudge. Two words: Mister Awesome.

“I’ve got news for you. Bill Mitchell’s a lot worse than that movie makes him look,” Mister Awesome (birth name: Roy Schildt) tells me on the phone from his home in California. “He claims he was the first guy to get a perfect Pacman. What a lot of people don’t realise is that he was in a contest with Rick Fothergill. They were competing for the first perfect Pacman at Funspot. Neither one of them got it. At the end of the contest, they made an agreement that they were going to play for it again next year. Bill Mitchell snuck up there a month later, played and won. That’s how he got to be the first perfect Pacman — by sucker-punching the other players and conning them into not playing, so he could play unopposed. That’s a true story. I actually caught up with Rick Fothergill and he didn’t want to talk about it. Bill Mitchell’s been sucking up to him for years, sending him money, sending him hot sauce. He’s an idiot, what can I tell you.”

Mister Awesome, former professional body builder and Hollywood fitness trainer, set the world record on Missile Command in 1985, thus earning not only the world title, but the first ever place in the “Video Hall of Fame”, a laurel Mitchell considered misplaced. “He had five world records, and I only had one world record,” Awesome says. “I told him, ‘Sure, you have five records, but your records are mediocre. My record is a super record.’

“After I had the argument with Bill over who was more deserving to be in the Hall of Fame, while I was playing a game, he took my gym bag and he threw it in the trashcan. He was 19 years old at the time. He just did it to upset me. That’s the way he does things. Nothing was stolen. I had my wallet in there. They were all laughing at me. I was like, ‘Where’s my gym bag?’ I was really upset about it. Then Bill Mitchell was laughing and said, ‘I think I saw someone put it in the trashcan.’ So I went over to the trashcan and sure enough my gym bag was down there. I even had my plane ticket in there. You don’t forget something like that. The guy’s evil, what can I tell you.

“After Bill Mitchell threw my gym bag in the trash can, it was just all downhill from there. Every time I’d turn around I’d have an argument with somebody about something.” Awesome’s relationship with Twin Galaxies would continue to rot to the present day and lead ultimately to the withdrawl of Awesome’s Missile Command high score from Twin Galaxies’ records.

When I ask Ed Cunningham to explain the dispute over Awesome’s score, he explains the matter thusly: “There are six digits that keeps the score in Missile Command, so you literally cannot score more that 999,999 points. When you hit 1,000,000, it rolls over to zero, just as it does in Donkey Kong. If someone’s not specifically watching your screen for basically the entire game, your screen can read 695,000, and no one can know that you’ve actually scored 1,695,000. Roy [Awesome] claims that he did in fact roll it over and that his world record is 1,695,000. There are people [Twin Galaxies] who have claimed that he in fact didn’t roll the score over and that he only scored 695,000.”

I relay this story to Awesome. “Oh, Walter Day claims he didn’t see the rollover, is that what he says? He’s a liar. He lies all the time. I met him at California Extreme in 2007, and I asked him, ‘What’s your official reason for taking down my score?’ And he said, ‘For bad behaviour.’ He changes his story like the weather.”

Awesome acknowledges that his catalogue of published work may be considered crude. “It’s not exactly family entertainment,” he says. Indeed, Awesome’s comic book autobiography, The Comic Book Life of Roy Schilt, details a methodology for picking up and inseminating women en masse. The method is based on Awesome’s own empirical findings, having publishing photos of his own naked form in Playgirl magazine, alongside his vital statistics including sperm count, and home phone number. Awesome’s forthcoming autobiographical sequel will include a “Rich and Famous Fellatio Hall of Fame”, which catalogues all the Hollywood celebrities Awesome has captured giving him blowjobs on a secret video camera lodged in his trouser pocket. “Roy Shildt will lead the USA,” Awesome’s website states. “His Eight Year Mission: To seek out and expose new scumbags, with a camera hidden in his jockstrap.” Such behaviour, Awesome maintains, is a feeble reason to invalidate his score.

“All this bullcrap about me not having that score is complete crap created by Bill Mitchell. Let me tell you something: Billy Mitchell is the true owner of Twin Galaxies. Walter Day is just a puppet. He owns that company. He owns all the people. He basically controls everybody, and when he wants something done, he’ll just find some excuse to do it. Walter Day is just point blank lying. He. Is. Paid. To. Lie. Can I prove he’s lying? Well, I’ll leave that up to you.”

For Awesome, Steve Wiebe was a tool that allowed him to crush Mitchell’s Donkey Kong legacy, thus avenging over twenty years of fetid blood. Wiebe accepted Awesome’s financial support and indeed, according to Twin Galaxies referee Robert Mruczek, his legal representation. (Mruczek maintains that Awesome issued legal missives to Twin Galaxies demanding that Mitchell challenge Wiebe to Donkey Kong at a certain event, or Awesome himself would declare Wiebe champion by default; “The scheme failed miserably,” Mruczek says.)

The King of Kong makes clear that Wiebe’s alliance with Awesome was a “death sentence” to Wiebe’s perceived credibility to the Twin Galaxies collective, but does not make clear that it was this — specifically this — that Mitchell found so repugnant. Indeed, before Wiebe’s alliance with Awesome was revealed, Mitchell and Wiebe enjoyed amicable relations, participating in joint interviews and shared stagetime at assorted arcade celebrations.

“It’s funny, if ‘funny’ is the right word, which it isn’t,” Billy Mitchell says in an interview with MTV, after viewing The King of Kong. “I don’t have a problem with being a villain,” Mitchell tells MSNBC. “I have a problem when they criminalize others and show good people to be corrupt or dishonest or incompetent.” Mitchell claims he is seeking legal representation to avenge his honour and “quest for the truth”.

“Yeah, we’re not buddy-buddy,” Cunningham tells me. “I’m not getting Christmas cards from him, but my conscience is clear. I think going forward I would like to keep an open dialogue with him. I don’t know that we’ll ever be friends. I don’t know that he wants to be my friend, but that’s not really what it’s about. It’s complex. And in his way, Billy is a very complex individual. When I called him, I expected him to yell at me, and I was fully willing to listen to him and let him vent, and that’s not what he did. We had a very analytical discussion about the film. It was a very interesting conversation to say the least, but not what I expected, which is what Billy consistently does. Billy is consistently more interesting than you think.”

More interesting than perhaps any of this, perhaps more interesting than even the truth, is the fact that so many people’s lives can be defined by a score, the fact that so many lives can be made so miserable over Donkey Kong — indeed, the fact that anyone cares.

Read more about this issue of Nerds Gone Wild!, available to buy here.

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