In 1982, the video game revolution had just begun. Games like Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong were fresh in the arcades and it wasn't long before people were trying to get the world record for either finishing the entire game or getting the highest score on one of their local arcade machines.
Walter Day was an entrepreneur who had quickly seen how popular the games were at the time and saw an opening. He founded the Twin Galaxies arcade and invited not only the best gamers in the country to come down to prove their high score boasts on his machines, but also as a publicity stunt he had an entire street in Ottumwa, Iowa shut down to allow Life magazine to photograph it.
As documented in the film The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, one of those gamers was sixteen-year-old Billy Mitchell. He was the world record holder on a game called Centipede but unbeknownst to the young man standing next to him in the magazine shoot, Steve Sanders, Mitchell was also the record holder on Donkey Kong - the game that Sanders was claiming he held the record for. Mitchell almost immediately challenged Sanders to a game.
"I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted the glory, I wanted the fame. I wanted the pretty girls to come up and say, 'Hi, I see that you're good at Centipede'." -Walter Day
Sanders quickly realised he was out of his depth when Mitchell scored 874,300 points to his paltry 200,000, with Mitchell now setting the official world record in the Twin Galaxies arcade. Owner Walter Day (a local crackpot if we're being unkind, a man with a gift for random business ideas if we're being polite) named himself official referee and demanded gamers come down to his arcade to prove their scores on the record. If the gamers were like prize-fighters, then Walter was the man with the microphone telling everyone to get ready to rumble.
This is largely where the comparison to prize-fighters ends. Most of the players who attend Twin Galaxies, then and now, physically have more in common with McLovin. They are pale, some wear glasses, some talk like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons and you'd imagine the last time they saw a woman naked was in a magazine stolen out of their father's drawer. But lurking inside was a finely honed skill when it came to hand-eye coordination - a skill that could set their names in the Guinness Book of World Records when it came to arcade games.
"Competitive gaming, when you want to attach your name to a world record, when you want your name written into history...You have to pay the price." -Billy Mitchell
Meanwhile, as Billy Mitchell was opening a can of whoop-ass on the man who would end up being his best friend, an engineer's son from Washington named Steve Wiebe was busy playing Donkey Kong in his local corner shop. Loving the game so much, he later bought a machine to go in his dorm room at college. Not realising his talent, Wiebe reached the infamous Donkey Kong 'kill screen' and, thinking his machine had a bug in it, he sold it. (A kill screen is when a player has progressed so much that there are no more available circuit boards, and Mario automatically drops dead after seven seconds on the final level).
Comments
