Meet Steve Wiebe (pronounced We Be, or Wee Bee if you like to be clever). Now, here's a guy, got a wife, got some kids, makes his home in Redmond, Washington, teaches science at Kamiakin Junior High School, and he's taken it upon himself to beat the all time high score in the arcade version of Donkey Kong, which was set at 874,300 in 1982 and has since never been touched. Steve Wiebe is your lovable loser type who, for one reason or another, has come up a notch short in just about everything even though he tries his damnedest.
We like Steve Wiebe.
Now, meet Billy Mitchell. Now, here's a guy, got a wife, got a kid, makes his home in Hollywood, Florida, owns a restaurant and a brand of sauce (barbecue I think, maybe hot sauce, I dunno). Billy Mitchell has been proclaimed the World's Greatest Gamer - and by that I mean the old Arcade variety - and he's been featured in Life Magazine way back in 1982 as one of the greatest.
Billy Mitchell holds that Donkey Kong record of 874,300 points and Billy Mitchell is a scumbag piece of shit!
Twin Galaxies is a website that monitors the high scores of all the classic arcade games and they've had a hard on for Billy Mitchell since their origination because his name rings loudly as a celebrity in the competitive market of Arcade Gaming. Anybody who's anybody - and by that I mean nerds - knows who Billy Mitchell is! And now, so do I.
I saw this documentary today - very entertaining, very funny - about Steve Wiebe's quest to break the record. Now, this could've been a short and uninspiring documentary because within the first 30 minutes we see that Steve Wiebe does, in fact, BEAT the record, on his home Donkey Kong machine, with a video camera stationed over his right shoulder. In fact, Steve Wiebe SHATTERS the record, boasting a score of over 1 million points. However, after he sends the tape in to be verified, a couple guys from Twin Galaxies come to Steve Wiebe's house and invalidates the high score due to the fact that he received the Donkey Kong motherboard from an arch nemesis of Billy Mitchell - some guy by the name of Roy "Mr. Awesome" Shildt. Apparently, they feel that Mr. Awesome may have tampered with the motherboard to give Steve Wiebe an unfair advantage, and so he's disqualified from the record.
Flash forward to a Classic Arcade Game challenge in New Hampshire. Steve Wiebe is on hand, away from his wife and kids, to challenge Billy Mitchell mano-a-swine, to a Donkey Kong Off! But, pussy that he is, Billy Mitchell doesn't make the easy flight up from Florida. So, as Steve Wiebe is live, in person, BREAKING the world Donkey Kong record by snapping up 900,000+ points, Billy Mitchell sends some old lady up there in his place, with a suspicious video tape. For one day, Steve Wiebe is listed on the Twin Galaxies web site as the Donkey Kong King, and then the old lady arrives. They play the tape in front of a live audience and it shows Billy Mitchell "breaking" a million points, going 40,000 points over all zeroes. Under normal circumstances, the judges would see through the hypocrisy - I mean, they invalidated Steve Wiebe's tape! - but this was Twin Galaxies. And so, even though there's something fishy going on with the tape - like random skips up in points and the fact that the tape blurs over the score as it's supposedly hitting all zeroes (indicating a player has scored a million points, since at the time the game was made, it was never thought to be a number achieved by man) - Twin Galaxies makes Billy Mitchell the world's record holder once again. So, tears on face, Steve Wiebe goes home to his wife and kids in Redmond, Washington, a defeated man in the face of total and utter corruption.
Flash forward again! This time, it's a half a year later, and the people from the Guiness Book of World's Records are calling. They want to use the Twin Galaxies web site in their book to be the official referees of all high scores Arcade Game related. Well, once Steve Wiebe hears about this, he's not having it! No way can he sit idly by while a tainted record is being enshrined into our world's authority on all things Recordy! So, this time he decides to meet Billy Mitchell in his hometown of Hollywood, Florida; now there's no WAY Billy Scumbag Mitchell can hide! And yet, because he hasn't "prepared," the chickenshit decides that he won't compete in a head-to-head matchup. Steve Wiebe has four days to beat the record and get into the Guiness Book, but comes up a few hundred thousand points short. All the while, Billy Mitchell is on camera saying shit like, "To be the best, you have to compete in a live setting." Oh yeah??? Where was the live setting when you supposedly cracked a million, huh tough shit? You Suck, Billy Mitchell!
Vindication comes to Steve Wiebe as the people of Twin Galaxies see the error of their ways and decide to accept every tape Steve Wiebe sends them from now on. And, he DOES beat the new mark of a million and 40 something thousand! With a new high score, Steve Wiebe is YOUR Donkey Kong world champion with 1,049,100 points!!!! Woooo Hooooo!!!!!
Oh, wait. Sorry. That's how the documentary ends anyway. But, it seems, since then Billy Mitchell has taken it upon himself to reacquire his record, and he has. With 1,050,200 points on July 13, 2007. In front of an audience of hundreds apparently. Though, this is via the Twin Galaxies web site, and they could be so desperate to hold onto their boy as the Donkey Kong king that they'd fabricate a new high score because he's all they have and Donkey Kong is all this fucking twat has ... so I guess we'll never know.
Or, we will know that Steve Wiebe is and will forever be MY Donkey Kong World Champion!