Steve Wiebe's Game Plan

By Mandi Bierly

Even if you haven't been inside an arcade in a decade (or two), you might walk out of The King of Kong — an absurdly gripping new documentary chronicling the battle between the world's top two Donkey Kong players — looking for one.

In 2003, perpetual underdog Steve Wiebe, now 38, was laid off from Boeing. In his downtime, he discovered not just that he was good at the arcade game, but that he was good enough to give legendary gamer Billy Mitchell, who'd held the top score for two decades, a run for his quarters. Playing on his own machine in his garage each night (one game at his level can last two hours and 15 minutes), Wiebe finally shattered Mitchell's record with a score over 1,000,000...but for reasons revealed in the movie, Twin Galaxies — the authority on player rankings — refused to acknowledge it. The King of Kong follows Wiebe's two-year quest to prove he's got game, and cocky hot-sauce-maker Mitchell's struggle to hold on to his title. Should there be any doubt that this story is an epic, New Line has plans to make it into a feature (Wiebe could see Greg Kinnear, Nathan Fillion, Mark Hamill, or Ralph Macchio playing him).

EW.com caught up with Wiebe last Wednesday, a day after he'd gotten to the ''kill screen'' in a warm-up game at Dave and Buster's in Times Square. His score of 946,500 was still on the machine in New York, but he was already back in Seattle, where the previous night's chants of ''Wiebe! Wiebe!'' had been replaced by his two kids' ''Daddy! Daddy!'' With Wiebe focusing more on family these days than Kong, it's a good time to learn what it takes to become a World Record-holding gamer. So we asked him.

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