Steve Wiebe is the King of Kong Again

Anyone who watched 'The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters' knows the epic struggle for global Kong dominance waged by Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell. Wiebe took back the crown by scoring 1,064,500-points which was officially verified. And if you haven't seen the movie, go watch it. You won't be sorry.

Comments

Is this with or without the patch??

[dmgxmichael]

Is this with or without the ROM hack that removes the kill screen and restores the programmer's original intent for the game?

Re:Is this with or without the patch??

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this with or without the ROM hack [jeffsromhack.com] that removes the kill screen and restores the programmer's original intent for the game?

No patches permitted. The idea isn't to see who can play best against what the programmer intended - it's to play against the same code that's shipped since 1981, because that was the code against which the first records were set.

If you wanted to see who;s currently the better player (that is, who has the best stamina/endurance/reflexes), you'd play the patched version, even if it meant that the game lasted for several days.

But the patched version never shipped to any arcade. The patch itself wasn't discovered until decades after most of the arcades had closed. If you want to see who will get the highest score in an arcade, you play the unpatched version and try to maximize your score before the kill screen or other gamebreaking bug hits.

Playing unpatched code neatly solves all questions of what constituted the "programmer's intent". The programmer of Space Invaders probably intended the distribution of scores for the saucer to be absolutely random, but because he didn't have a hardware random number generator, and because the hardware was too slow to implement a proper pseudorandom number generator, they used the number of shots fired by the player as a PRNG. "Fix" that bug and the high score for Space Invaders drops drastically.

On Hulu.com

[zero_out]

I watched that movie on Hulu a couple months back. It is probably still on there, if it hasn't expired. Check it out.

Re:On Hulu.com

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also available to watch instantly on netflix. I watched it last night.

Re:Worth watching

[Chad Birch]

Suggested reading: Twin Galaxies' Official Statements about "The King of Kong". They probably shouldn't even be allowed to call that movie a "documentary".

Re:For anyone interested...

[dzfoo]

It's a quote from a silly scene in the movie. Some geeky guy runs around the arcade telling everybody that someone is about to reach the "kill-screen" of the game, as if it were a momentous occasion.

A "kill-screen" in a game is when the high score overflows its boundaries and corrupts the rest of memory, typically video memory, which causes the game to display in a way that is unplayable. The result is either the game crashing or the player losing a game life.

        -dZ.

Re:Worth watching

[Schnapple]

Yeah it's been stated that the movie's editing makes certain things seem different than how they went down. Stuff like how Billy Mitchell's videotaped score being rejected the following day and Walter Day apologizing to Weibe. And when Weibe's videotaped score was rejected, the record reverted to the other record he set in 2003, not to Mitchell. And Weibe has stated that the scene in the restaurant where Mitchell avoids him leaves out the part that came later where Mitchell came over and apologized for being rude and introduced his wife.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_kong#Disputed_facts

Weibe is the everyman character we all identify with and Mitchell has an abrasive personality that make for an excellent film. But both men agree that the movie doesn't portray them correctly. Still, it's a great film. What I wonder is - will there ever be a DK score that's literally impossible to beat?

Whats with these ad-whore links?

[CrAlt]

Why not just link to the original story?

http://www.twingalaxies.com/index.aspx?c=19&id=2264

Re:For anyone interested...

[ArcadeNut]

A "kill-screen" in a game is when the high score overflows its boundaries and corrupts the rest of memory, typically video memory, which causes the game to display in a way that is unplayable. The result is either the game crashing or the player losing a game life.

        -dZ.

You're a little off. Scores overflowing don't usually cause this type of issue. They could, but it's less likely.

Kill screens are typically because of either the number of lives or the level of the game goes beyond 127 (or 255).

PacMan for example has the issue when you go beyond Level 255, the level goes back to 0. The level is used as an offset. Well, for the normal game (when the game starts), the offset is 1. Think of it as accessing an Array outside its bounds. So what you wind up with is the famous split screen that you can't get past.

Gravitar (and a whole host of other games) has an issue with the number of lives if you go beyond 127 because it uses a signed integer to track the number of lives. So once you hit your 129th extra life, the game actually thinks you have -2 lives. Then you die, it subtracts 1, you now have less then 1 life left and you die, game over.

In the case of Donkey Kong, it's based on the number of levels as the game dies in the same exact spot every time.

Re:Worth watching

[cgenman]

Twin Galaxies also has an interesting writeup on the creative license taken by the movie. Don't forget that the apology letter Weibe received was actually immediately after the FunSpot videotape incident, and not years later as implied by editing.

It's a great movie. It takes the rather dry world of competitive video game playing, and turns it into something eminently watchable. But don't pillory Mitchell for how the filmmakers edited him to seem.