A world-record score demands capitalizing on the one thing you can’t control: luck

Day One

Even at 11AM on a Saturday, it's basement dark in the 1Up bar and arcade, a below-ground, cultivated-dive establishment in Denver's hip LoDo neighborhood. Coors Field is a half-block away; the nearby warehouses have been transformed into pricey lofts. Inside, the bartenders are friendly and casually tattooed. A Nintendo sign hangs near the ceiling and a Centipede mural covers a back wall. "Hidey ho!" yells a pinball machine in Mr. Hankey’s signature voice. Another plays the Indiana Jones theme while nearby the Crypt Keeper titters. A poster on the wall advertises a pinball tournament on the first Sunday of every month.

Across the bar wait the Kong machines, 22 of them, all outfitted with a customized "Kong Off 3" marquee. The top 12 players, as verified by official record-keeper Twin Galaxies, have dedicated cabinets for the weekend. (Wild card players, who’ve qualified once or simply walked in from the streets, share the remaining cabinets.) The games are now more than 30 years old; each has its own unique quirks and failings, which keep an on-site repairman busy.

After careful testing, most of the top 12 have claimed their machines. One blue card reads, "Hank" — that’s Hank Chien, the New York plastic surgeon known as Doctor Kong who currently holds the world record of 1,138,600 points. Farther down the row is a machine for Vincent Lemay, a Canadian bodybuilder and motormouth and Chien’s long-standing rival. Third in the rankings, his online avatar is a crossed circle stamped over Chien's face. His signature reads, "If you can't pull a Vincent Lemay when the pressure is on … then you're definitely not good enough." Hank’s sig, in turn, reads, "World Record for most insults to Vincent."

This half-jesting bravado permeates the community of competitive Donkey Kong — a community that likely wouldn't exist without The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, the 2007 documentary that pitted two grown men against each other for the world record. It told a classic underdog story: Steve Wiebe was the humble family man just looking for a shot at the champ. The champ, Billy Mitchell, was the arrogant, mulleted alpha dog with no patience for challengers. (It's almost too perfect that he refers to himself in the third person.) The film became a cult hit, making minor celebrities of its stars and, more importantly, bringing a new generation of players to competitive Kong.

Even today, Wiebe and Mitchell still rank among the top 12. They show up Saturday morning during the pre-tournament mill-about and their appearance shifts the social gravity in the room: the next-generation Kongers slowly, imperceptibly, begin to gather around them. There’s a lot of picture taking and autograph seeking, along with keep-it-cool handshakes and small talk.

Wiebe has the amiable mien of a retired pro quarterback who's found another life; he appears comfortable with himself and his accomplishments, but content to consider them in the past tense. A fan asks about The King of Song, Wiebe's debut CD. Is there a sequel in the works? Actually he's working on a third album. "That's how I'd rather spend my time than playing video games," he says. Four young women arrive wearing blue T-shirts reading "Team Wiebe," and it's hard to tell what the man himself thinks about this. While nothing but gracious and accommodating of the fans, he also seems a little perplexed by his minor celebrity. Later, he says of a retired player: "He grew up." Someone in the crowd chimes in, "We'll all grow up."

If Steve Wiebe wears his celebrity like a fondly remembered old coat that’s now a couple sizes too small, Billy Mitchell wears his like a suit of armor. Cast as the heel in King of Kong, he arrives in his competition uniform: a dark jacket and American-flag tie, a carefully cropped beard, and a thick brow rising to a sculpted brown mullet. (His hair has its own Facebook page.) As the tournament begins, the players gather outside in a small brick-walled patio. The MC introduces each of them; they get to make an entrance, slapping hands with spectators before sitting down for what’ll be 9-10 hours of Kong.

For maximum drama, Mitchell’s introduced last. Just before he’s called, he leans down to warn a reporter: "Watch out, I'm going to knock over these Jenga blocks" — beveled two-by-fours stacked high on a pair of outdoor tables. The MC welcomes "Billy Mitchell!" and the man rears back and kicks over first one table, then the other, producing sound and fury for an audience of roughly three people.

Once inside, he doesn't appear too interested in competing. He’s satisfied to play a game or two, suffer some problems with his machine, then spend his time mingling with the audience and looming over other players. He offers complimentary bottles of Rickey's World Famous Hot Sauces, produced by his Florida restaurant. He smiles and mugs for the cameras, hamming it up. If you've seen the 1983 Life magazine photo of Mitchell sporting a wispy teenage mustache and what looks suspiciously like a hickey, you can't help but overlay that image onto his current 48-year-old self.

Billy Mitchell practically dared Shaun Boyd to take on Donkey Kong. In King of Kong, he said, "Donkey Kong, without question, is the hardest game." Shaun didn't believe it. He’d always given that honor to Battletoads, released on the NES when he was nine. A friend rented it, only to find no one could make it past the third stage. Then Shaun tried. Soon the neighborhood kids were gathered around to watch him play. They formed an assembly line: every time he died, they'd swap out his sweaty controller and replace it with a new one. "I didn't beat the game that day," he says, "but I made a lot of friends." Being good at the game brought him attention, but it was a source of satisfaction in itself, too. It was difficult — really difficult. With patience and determination, though, he could master it.

He took Mitchell's claim as a personal challenge. Donkey Kong had arrived in the US the year before he was born, and he'd never paid it much attention beyond a few brushes with ported versions. "I thought, 'This game can't be that hard,'" he says. "I was wrong. I was really wrong." It is hard. And no matter how skilled you are, a world-record score demands capitalizing on the one thing you can’t control: Luck. Randomness. Chance. "But I think that's the enjoyment of it," Shaun says, "trying to beat the odds."

Luckily, he’s not alone. When Billy Mitchell set his world record back in 1982, there didn’t yet exist a community of Donkey Kong strategists. Even in the mid-2000s, Steve Wiebe had to make his world-record run without much guidance or support. Today, though, in the wake of King of Kong, retro-gaming sites have dedicated boards for sharing arcana: the Donkey Kong Forum has almost 300 members offering tips and tricks, and the Donkey Kong Blog covers the games with ESPN-like diligence. Twitch makes it easy to stream games online, while the arcade emulator MAME enables players who don’t want to drop a few hundred dollars on an arcade cabinet. (Dean Saglio, current MAME world-record holder, plays on an aging Windows XP machine.) The game code has been dissected, its mysteries revealed. Little remains unknown about Kong, and that’s changed the game.

On the boards Shaun met Mike Groesbeck, who’d also just gotten into Donkey Kong after taking a break from some serious poker playing. They lived less than 30 minutes from one another in the Detroit suburbs and quickly bonded over their new obsession. Mike played his way into the top 12, but got bumped out just before the Kong Off. He thought he’d have to settle for a wild card, until another player dropped out.

The two travel to Denver together and on Saturday morning wait outside the 1Up for their introductions. Mike’s goes off without a hitch; he slaps high-fives with the crowd and sits down on his stool. The MC describes Shaun as being from Chicago. There’s a brief discussion. Detroit, no, he’s from Detroit. He’s from Detroit, and the MC introduces him as "Babyface Boyd" — a nom de guerre that, while accurate, is not exactly intimidating.

To the opening strains of Talking Heads’ "Burning Down the House," the games begin.

The length of a world-record Donkey Kong game — about three hours — leaves spectators plenty of time to do other things. Like ordering beer and, as with any place where men gather to play games, offering running commentary on the action. There’s not much to be said about the gameplay itself. To the casual eye it’s something less than poetry in motion. Watching the game is not playing the game, so spectators spend their time in a kind of parallel conversation: if the player’s average score per screen is this, and if he can capitalize on his deaths… much of which is rendered moot by a single errant barrel. "I gotta do a lot of practicing," comes a murmur from the crowd after a particularly deft onscreen move.

By the end of the day, nearly 10 hours later, Kong Off defending champion Jeff Willms leads with 1,096,200 points. Willms is a math and computer science student from Waterloo, Ontario; a long-time chess player, he turned his attention to Kong just a month before reaching his first kill screen, a milestone Shaun took almost two years to reach. "He doesn't say much, but he's a machine," Shaun says. The machine has achieved a monster score, frighteningly close to the world record. It sets a blistering pace for the competitors, only three of whom have ever scored higher.

Shaun’s first game ends with a death at 639,300 points. He finishes the day in 20th place. Billy Mitchell, having settled for 21st place, glides by and looks at Shaun’s score. "Nobody does well on their first game," he says.