The Anti-Wordplay

I enjoyed Wordplay, of course, when I first saw it screened at the crossword tournament a few years ago, but I was concerned about how it would do at the box office: The movie was just so… nice. None of the people we met were dangerously obsessed with crossword puzzles. The top competitors, it was clear, had a genuine respect for each other, and each other’s abilities. There were no real rivalries to speak of, or at least not bitter ones. Indeed, we are treated to a scene in which one of the people tied for the lead argues that one of his co-leaders should have more points. The viewer comes away from the movie with the accurate opinion that the crossword community consists of a quirky bunch of deeply decent people.

The King of Kong is the other side of the coin. Here, too, we meet an insular and slightly strange community: Videogame obsessives. And not just any videogames, but retro games like Pac-Man, Joust, and Donkey Kong. The people we meet were all teenagers when these games first appeared, and twenty-five years later they are still battling each other for the top scores.

We spend the bulk of our time with two people: Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida, who holds numerous videogame records, including a world-record score on Donkey Kong that has gone untouched since 1982. His view of himself as a successful person is tied inextricably to those records, and he feeds off the adoration of the pitifully small group of people who care about such things. In the other corner, we have Steve Wiebe, a sad sack from Redmond, Washington, recently laid off from Boeing. He has a Donkey Kong game in his garage. One day he looks up the highest score ever achieved on the machine and thinks, “I can do that.” Thus begins his obsession.

And thus begins a poisonous rivalry and a strangely absorbing documentary. Unemployed family man Wiebe is a natural underdog, while Mitchell, with his outsize ego and his puffery over long-ago achievements, is a made-to-order bad guy: He can’t believe anyone would have the audacity to try to overturn his records. Weirdly, the videogame community shares that disbelief — the people who fare the worst in this movie are Mitchell’s sycophants, small fish who view Wiebe as an interloper and actively try to sabotage his efforts. (A ridiculous little person named Brian Kuh is so emotionally invested in the outcome, you can hardly watch him on the screen without wincing in embarrassment.)

The movie, I fear, is a little manipulative: You can see, at times, how the documentarians are jerking you around. Much hay is made about Mitchell’s refusal to meet Wiebe for a mano-a-mano competition — which is puzzling, because even if Wiebe came out ahead in such a contest, he’d still be second best as long as Mitchell holds the world record. A one-on-one contest would prove exactly nothing. But Mitchell’s refusal to participate makes him seem even worse — a bad sport, and yellow straight up the backbone — which is what the filmmakers are looking for.

Mitchell, however, while an entertaining villain, is almost beside the point. This is Steve Wiebe’s movie, and the moviemakers are more successful at framing him as a genuinely decent guy who simply wants to achieve a modest goal. It is impossible not to root for him as he takes on the small-minded community of videogamers who hope to see him fail. He’s a genuine, if unlikely, movie hero.