Two films about old-school arcade games premiered within a few days of each other in Park City in 2007. One was at Sundance, the other was at Slamdance. Guess which one you’ve never heard of? Ironically, it’s the one from Sundance. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters was the success story when these two films unintentionally butted heads, and the sad thing is that the other movie, Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade, is a much better film. But chances are you’ll never get to see it.
Director Lincoln Ruchti and his producer Mark Verrechia set out to make a documentary not just about the height and popularity of the arcade gaming world back in the early 1980s, but specifically about a photo from a 1982 issue of Life magazine (at the top of the post — click for a bigger version). Right there in the center there is a lineup of classic video games with their record holders perched behind them and a bevy of cheerleaders in front. When they saw that image, they knew they had their movie.
The next several months were spent contacting people, tracking down names, leads, old arcade locations, all in an effort to locate these gamers. They succeeded in finding most of them, including Billy Mitchell and Twin Galaxies head referee / enthusiast Walter Day. Using archival footage along with modern day interviews, Chasing Ghosts really puts a human face to the players of the video game industry during a snapshot moment in the 1980s. It doesn’t attempt to go into game development, but just focuses on the people who played the games, and why they went after these high scores.
I could wax poetic about this for paragraphs, but if you’re really interested, you can read the review I wrote over at Joystiq last year. Instead of reviewing the film all over again, I want to focus on why it’s a better movie. One reason is that Ruchti and Verrechia’s film really shows you these characters, features appealing visuals, a killer 80s soundtrack, and a blend of nostalgia that uses Peter Hirschberg’s amazing CGI animations of the games and their cabinets in order to let the laymen know how some of these games were played. Even though these are completely faked (read: CGI) images of games that are almost 30 years old, they somehow feel completely tangible. You can almost reach out and drop a quarter in.
On the flipside of that quarter is the fact that director Seth Gordon played extremely fast and loose with the editing in The King of Kong. In fact, he made it seem like Billy and Steve were bitter rivals, and that Billy would avoid Steve in public. The truth of the matter is that they had appeared in public together before, played games in public, and even given interviews together. There are plenty of moments in the movie where you find yourself thinking, “Geez, this Billy Mitchell guy is a real douche.” Unfortunately, most of those moments were created with a few mouse clicks, deftly removing scenes that would have told you otherwise.
Now, Seth Gordon and his producer Ed Cunningham claim that some of these meetings happened before they started making the movie, in 2004, which would be forgivable. However, there’s a created scene in the film where it looks like Billy drives up to a restaurant and refuses to come in because Steve’s inside. According to Walter Day, Billy and his family actually came in and even spoke to Steve. The more you read about the way the film was put together, the more it unravels.
While Billy Mitchell is indeed in Chasing Ghosts, he’s not portrayed like the arrogant asshole you see in The King of Kong. In fact, if you go to the Twin Galaxies website, Walter basically breaks down the inconsistencies and at least provides his view and recollection of the events. Seth and Ed have their own FAQ on the website for their film, but they don’t address anything other than the 2004 meeting of Billy and Steve at the Classic Gaming Expo. Someone needs to get in here with yet another documentary crew and stage an intervention. As long as it’s not Michael Moore, I’d support it.
Now, this isn’t to say that The King of Kong isn’t an entertaining movie, because it is. My buddy Jon Gibson of I am 8 bit and Totally Nerdcore fame provides one of the commentaries on the DVD, and he sent me a copy. I’ve watched it several times, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy parts of it. Steve Wiebe is probably the nicest guy in the world, and some of the other characters like Brian Kuh and his repetitive “We’ve got a Donkey Kong kill screen coming up!” line is priceless. Hell, there’s even a t-shirt immortalizing it. It just didn’t hold up for me initially when I saw it after Chasing Ghosts, and once I started hearing about the controversy, my interest has been waning quickly.
On paper, Kong sounds much more exciting. Two rivals, one an arrogant jerk, and the other a likeable everyman square off against each other for the high score of Donkey Kong? It sounds like a Will Ferrell movie idea that Judd Apatow scribbled on a cocktail napkin somewhere. In fact, a few months after the movie was screened at Slamdance, New Line announced that they were going to produce a scripted version of the doc. Truly bizarre. Although, we’ve heard nothing since then, and it looks like it fizzled out in development. Billy and Steve continue to appear at gaming events and play Donkey Kong, though.
A worse byproduct of that proposed adaptation gone wrong is that it probably helped stomp Chasing Ghosts out of existence. I spoke with director Lincoln Ruchti at the Los Angeles premiere of the film last year, and he said that they were close to making a DVD deal with a company, but so far nothing has been announced. The website for the film is a bit out of date, with no news of a release on DVD or anywhere else. It’s unfortunate because it’s a far superior film (even without Steve Wiebe) that explores a brief history of the popularity of arcades while showing the lives, then and now, of many of the high score holders, including Mitchell and uber-ref Day.
Ruchti told me that several people weren’t happy with the way they were portrayed in The King of Kong, and if you see Chasing Ghosts it’s easy to see why. The only trouble is, you may never have the opportunity to see it. If The King of Kong is as close as you can get to this story, just realize that you’re only scratching the surface of the characters. Pixar wunderkind Andrew Stanton saw Chasing Ghosts at Sundance that same year, and flew some of the crew up for a private screening for Pixar employees. Time Out New York film writer Stephen Garrett says in his review of Kong that Ghosts explores the gaming subculture a lot better. Hopefully this movie will be out in some form, even if it’s online, and you can see for yourself. Until then, I’ll try and step off this soapbox. Just one more game, I promise.
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