King Of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Pros: Cool look at a part of gaming few people know about.
Cons: Plays fast and loose with reality according to a lot of reports.

As videogames continue to grow in terms of mainstream popularity (they rival Hollywood in terms of earning power as a medium), there’s been something of a push to recognize the best gamers—those elite few who can do things with a joystick that most of us ...

Pros: A compelling story with thrilling drama and a mesmerizing cast of characters
Cons: The film is not completely objective in its approach, and is manipulative at times

Following in the footsteps of such movies as Wordplay and Spellbound, Seth Gordon's King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters again takes aim an non-traditional competitions, in this case competitive video gaming. In my opinion, Gordon's ...

Pros: Incredible insight into competitive gaming, very funny, very sad...
Cons: Is Billy Mitchell really that two-dimensional? One-dimensional, even?

Last night my wife and I watched "King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters." Forget Iron Man. Forget Spider-Man. My new hero is Steve Wiebe. Wiebe is a guy who's pretty normal--has a wife and two kids, teaches junior high science, and has a goal in ...

Pros: Interesting personalities. Fluid story arc that delves into a unique competitive world.
Cons: Becomes too one-sided in the 2nd half.

One of the more popular formats for documentaries these days has been following a group of offbeat individuals who have a passion for some unique style of competition. The king of this genre was Jeffrey Blitz’s Spellbound, which followed teenagers ...

Pros: Gordon's Direction, Editing, Music, Gaming History, & Personalities.
Cons: None, Though Some Just Won't Get It.

The legendary video game Donkey Kong was a huge in the 80s just as the arcade was the place for video gamers to hang out. More than twenty-years later, the video games have become a huge industry of its own while there are still those who still play ...

Pros: Fascinating, characters, humorous
Cons: Biased filmmaking, dubious facts

This Seth Gordon documentary about arcade game enthusiast/competitors is like a mixture of the geeky amusement of “Trekkies” (about the weird and wonderful world of “Star Trek” fandom), the borderline pathetic ...

Pros: Has a villain and a hero, interesting story
Cons: not everybody likes documentaries or cares about video games

If you were a kid in the 80s, you probably remember the video arcade. My husband used to spend hours there playing games. I used to go to the arcade at the bowling alley on Friday nights while my parents were bowling. Nowadays, most people have a ...

Pros: Hilarious at times - funny when it's not meant to be
Cons: There have been claims that some thing presented here were not accurate

Back in the early 1980’s, a young man named Billy Mitchell set the world record high score of over 874,000 points in the arcade video game Donkey Kong. That record held for over two decades, until Steve Wiebe, an unemployed married father of two, ...

Pros: Funny and oddly compelling look into the lives of geeky gamers.
Cons: May cause you to think that becoming a Donkey Kong master is a good idea.

Being a Gen-Xer in Seattle, it's pretty much a given that I know a lot of video game geeks, though I'm not one myself (as anyone who has seen me flail away at Guitar Hero can attest). In fact, I know a lot of pretty nerdy people. However, I'm happy to ...

Pros: An interesting human story of goals, dreams and obsessions.
Cons: How can anyone spend so much time on Donkey Kong?

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters was a documentary recently released on DVD. Some documentaries may be boring, but both my son and I really enjoyed this true tale of video game fanatics. If you are as old as I am, or if you are a true video game ...

Pros: A well made documentary takes you into the strange but entertaining world of competative gaming.
Cons: Some if these guys freak me out.

The last computer game I can remember playing, Solitaire and Minesweeper excluded, is Pac-Man on my Atari when I was six or seven. I loved that game. I spent hours mastering that game. My highest score was 840,000ish. Not bad. The world record is ...