Dethroning the king of 'Donkey Kong'

— -- In 1982, a teenager named Billy Mitchell showed up at a Life magazine photo shoot of the world's best video game players, walked into an arcade and set a world record score for Donkey Kong that destroyed what anybody else had been able to do up to that point.

He scored 874,300 points, orders of magnitude higher than anyone else's best, and that was it. The Donkey Kong standard had been set. And like Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak in 1941, it seemed like a record that might never be broken.

At the beginning of director Seth Gordon and producer Ed Cunningham's brisk-paced new documentary The King of Kong, we meet Mitchell, years later, in 2006, all grown up, but still looking a bit adolescent with his long hair and youthful air.

And no wonder. Mitchell is said to be the "gamer of the century." In addition to his Donkey Kong record, he also held the best scores in Centipede, Donkey Kong, Jr. and a couple of others. Even 24 years later, he was still milking the notoriety.

Given the renewed interest in retro games, it's not surprising that a film looking at Donkey Kong (which recently ranked third most popular '80s game in an informal poll of CNET News.com readers) would come out now. Xbox Live has released several classics, and nearly everywhere you look these days, it's Frogger this, or Pac-Man that.

Over the years, Mitchell has clearly developed a philosophy about his avocation, one time-tested through countless hours and quarters.

"There will always be the argument that video games are meant to be played for fun," Mitchell says at the beginning of the film, which opens in theaters on August 17. "Believe me, some of it's a lot of fun. Video games are meant to be played at home, on a couch, relaxing amongst friends, and they are, and that's fun. But 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."

Steve Wiebe knows exactly what Mitchell is talking about.