Friday afternoon tidbits

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-News that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick regrets buying Red Octane instead of Harmonix is no suprise. What is a surprise is how little he seems to have thought about it at the time. Stephen Totilo quotes Kotick as saying, "We really didn't even think, 'Hey we should go to Boston, and meet these Harmonix guys and see what they're up to.'" I don't think it's with the benefit of hindsight to point out how stupid that was.

On the other hand, nobody in the music-game business is exactly flush with cash at the moment. This week, the Boston Globe reported that Harmonix may have to pay back some of the $150 million bonus they received from Viacom in 2007. The sad part about all this is that it was so obvious what was happening as it happened. There's still a strong future for music games, but the market got oversaturated, and we won't lament the loss of these excess SKUs.

-Great essay at Ta-Nehisi Coates' Atlantic blog about the politics of Bioshock and BioShock 2. Looks like somebody named "A. Serwer" wrote the post, rather than TNC himself, which I say in order to give due credit. Some of the greatest praise you can give to the BioShock games is that a post like this doesn't seem like it's overreaching to find relevance in them. I don't even have anything to add to it.

-The upcoming Game Developer magazine has a port-mortem of my favorite game of 2009, Borderlands, and GameSetWatch has kindly excerpted some of it. It sounds like Borderlands had a tumultous development, even more so than most games, so it's all the more amazing that they ended up with such a great final product. You wonder what they'll be able to do with the sequel, having laid down such a solid foundation.

-Another great Hardcasual piece this week, "StarCraft II Beta Puts South Korea in Economic Freefall." How do you know it worked? I shared it in Google Reader and somebody said he thought it was a real headline for a minute.

-Steve Wiebe has reached the mountaintop once more, setting a new world record for Donkey Kong Jr. You may remember Wiebe as the good guy in the incredible documentary King of Kong. I know a lot of people have accused the movie of playing a little fast and loose with the facts in order to tell a more compelling story, but it's a terrific film all the same.

The King of Kong, continued

There's an excellent, and fortuitously timed, feature over at the Onion A.V. Club: an interview with Billy Mitchell about King of Kong. I'll present it without comment, because at this point I'm not sure what value there is in my trying to apply a lie detector to the conflicting statements of the filmmakers and the film's subjects. Great read, though.

Jason Scott did not care for King of Kong

Last summer, I posted a glowing review of the documentary King of Kong, which is about the battle for Donkey Kong supremacy between two passionate players. It's a wonderful movie, drawn with the broad strokes of underdog sports films, but with a penetrating look at an American subculture most of us had no idea existed. Still, even in the original review I suspected some editorial intervention:

The film stops being a quirky look at an American subculture and becomes a baroque good vs. evil story. There's no question that some creative editing makes Billy Mitchell come off like Darth Vader and Steve Wiebe like the second coming of Jesus. We never see Mitchell with his kids, although presumably he has spawned a few. And on Wiebe's rejected Donkey Kong tape, he's interrupted by his crying son who needs his rear end wiped. Does Steve help? No -- he keeps going for the record.

Obviously, the perceived fudging of facts didn't keep me from enjoying the film (same goes for most film critics). For Jason Scott, though, King of Kong is a travesty. To choose a hilariously representative excerpt, take a look at this:

The director, Seth Gordon, is hard at work at a screenplay for The King of Kong, which he will then sell to have a fictional movie made. Or, as I am saying, a second fictional movie, but one where he can see 100% of the profits of the picture without having to cut in any of the people whose lives he just took a galactic dump on. Let me be clear: he fucked these people. He couldn't have fucked them worse than if he strapped them across a air-hockey table and sodomized them with a Wico Command Control Joystick. He interviewed them, had them retrieve archival footage and materials going back decades, recorded them at their homes, their places of work, and at events that they put up at their own expense and time, and then he painted them in clown makeup and threw pies at them for an hour and 19 minutes.

Ouch! Remind me never to get on Jason Scott's bad side. Or Seth Gordon's, really -- this makes him sound like the Marquis de Sade. Of course, if the editorializing really is this blatant -- and I have no reason to doubt that it is -- then Scott is right on point. King of Kong is being sold as a true story, and it seems as though it wasn't. But this isn't the first documentary to play fast and loose with the facts (cf. Land Without Bread), and it won't be the last.

Where does a documentary filmmaker's reponsibility lie: with his subject, or with his audience? King of Kong wouldn't have been half as entertaining as it was if Seth Gordon hadn't made the creative changes he did. It's more gripping than most sports movies that get made, all the more so because we believe it's basically true. Steve Wiebe is the underdog, the guy who always falls short, the guy who seems to provoke mostly sympathy from his friends and family. Billy Mitchell is like a cult leader, the man who's managed to situate himself at the center of his followers' worlds. If somebody told you this story in a fictional context, you would never believe it.

But Scott cites multiple instances of editing changing the context of events in the film to make Billy Mitchell seem like the bad guy. This one is jarring: "A core theme is that Billy Mitchell is an asshole, one who doesn't even deign to spend time in the same location as Steve Wiebe and won't even come in to eat lunch at the same table as him. In fact, Billy came in and paid for lunch." That's certainly not the Billy Mitchell we get to know from the film. And no, it's not fair to him that he's portrayed as an Olympic-level prick if he isn't. I can only wonder how some of the people featured in King of Kong felt after it came out. I made special mention in my review of the sycophantic Brian Kuh -- what if he was treated even more unfairly than Billy?

Certainly it doesn't seem as though Seth Gordon let the facts get in the way of a good story -- no, a great story. Before watching King of Kong, I watched a more even-keeled and less interesting arcade documentary called Chasing Ghosts. Billy Mitchell featured prominently in that one, too, and while the film's structure was more informational than dramatic, nothing I learned about him there caused me to doubt what I was seeing in King of Kong. A wise man once said that you can't carve the Mona Lisa out of crap, and Seth Gordon couldn't have made this movie without some raw materials to work with. That's the job of an artist.

And for all that Scott worries about the damage Gordon's movie might have done to some of the people involved, I'd bet my life that the Billy Mitchell brand has only been enhanced as a result of it. What bigger favor could Seth Gordon have done for him?

King of Kong

In the world of competitive video game playing, Billy Mitchell is the 800 pound gorilla. He was the first person to complete all 256 Pac-Man boards. He held unofficial world high scores in Donkey Kong Jr., Centipede, and Burgertime. His greatest achievement, however, was his world record Donkey Kong score of over 800,000. Set in 1982, the official record stood for over 20 years without any serious threat. And Billy Mitchell liked it that way.

In the documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, he's depicted as a man concerned, above all, with his image. Billy Mitchell even looks like a villain. His sleepy blue eyes gaze from under a mane of glossy black hair. His beard is groomed to perfection. A typical outfit is a black dress shirt tucked into black jeans, accented by an American flag necktie. He seems to relish his role as the heavy. The staff of Twin Galaxies, the governing body of gaming high scores, seems fully in awe of him.

Steve Wiebe, when King of Kong begins, doesn't seem to have any idea who Billy Mitchell is. He doesn't seem to care, either. He's shown as a likable, talented guy who's never really been able to put it together. We witness him playing the piano and the drums, see his skillful drawings, and home videos of his once-promising athletic career. His friends and family lower their voices when discussing all the times he's come up short. It's tough to see from the outside, though. Wiebe lives with a wonderful family in a gorgeous house in suburban Washington. But even the house came with a sucker punch: Wiebe lost his job the day he and his wife signed the papers.

Unemployed and aimless, Wiebe sets up a Donkey Kong machine in his garage and gets to work attacking Billy Mitchell's high score. Director Seth Gordon intercuts shots of Steve playing the drums, clips of his old baseball games, and little Jumpman scurrying ever closer up the ladder toward Donkey Kong. The implication is clear: this has all the potential to be another case where Steve Wiebe is almost good enough. Then a funny thing happens.

He breaks the world record.

He doesn't just beat Billy Mitchell's score; he pulverizes it. He races right on through and doesn't stop until he's earned over a million points, some 200,000 higher than the long-standing record. Having finally accomplished something in his life, he sends the tape in to Twin Galaxies to be verified.

The refs won't allow it. They think he used a modified board.

You get the impression that it isn't so much the score that matters to the Twin Galaxies crew -- it's that the challenger isn't one of them. He's an outsider. They can't even pronounce his name right. It's "wee-bee," two syllables, yet even after being corrected most of the refs continue to say the monosyllabic "weeb." It's a passive-aggressive attack that reminded me of the tendency of some right-wing politicians and commentators to refer to the "Democrat party."

Even as Wiebe flies to New Hampshire to break the record in person, the Twin Galaxies refs keep in touch with Billy Mitchell by phone, providing him nearly real-time updates. One of Mitchell's biggest sycophants, a guy named Brian Kuh, seems on the verge of tears as Wiebe closes in on the fabled "kill screen," which would make him the only person besides Mitchell ever to do so on Donkey Kong. Even so, Kuh can't help telling everybody in the arcade to come watch.

Just when you think King of Kong has gone about as far as it can go, the scheming and backstabbing suddenly escalate to an unbelievable degree. The film stops being a quirky look at an American subculture and becomes a baroque good vs. evil story. There's no question that some creative editing makes Billy Mitchell come off like Darth Vader and Steve Wiebe like the second coming of Jesus. We never see Mitchell with his kids, although presumably he has spawned a few. And on Wiebe's rejected Donkey Kong tape, he's interrupted by his crying son who needs his rear end wiped. Does Steve help? No -- he keeps going for the record. That's how you get ahead in this world.