Last night I watched The King of Kong on NetFlix [ "Watch Now" is the only reason I still have a windows partition! ].
This is a pretty good documentary about the rivalry between Steve Wiebe (suburban science teacher husband and father of two from Redmond, WA) and Billy Mitchell (whom the movie makes out to be an arrogant self-absorbed prick) to capture the world record high score in Donkey Kong.
I remember playing Donkey Kong around 1981 or so, at the infamous Pizza & Pipes in Tacoma. A giant pipe organ filled the front of the place. The organist took selections while everyone dined on pizza or played video games. Having had little exposure to popular music, I nominated "Amazing Grace", which was one of the better hymns often sung in the church our family attended. But anyways, my other memory of that night was getting beat rather badly at Donkey Kong, using up my lives in under a minute or so.
I wish the movie went into at least some detail about the history of the game. An amazing inside account of creating the Atari 2600 console version is available on a blog called Dadhacker.
So (Spoiler alert!) the movie ends with nice-guy Wiebe getting the top score. But take a look at the Wikipedia entry for Donkey Kong and see who (as of this post) has taken back the high score! Oh no!
