If you're a gamer or not, King of Kong is one of those documentaries that makes you think about how far technology has come, and what drives our obsession with it.
The film is now up over on ABC iView as part of ABC 2's Sunday Best documentary series. In it, Steve Wiebe attempts to beat the world's highest score on Donkey Kong.
The film is now something of a nostalgia piece for a bygone era - players insist that the official high score attempt be performed on one particular Donkey Kong machine, believed to have its own idiosyncrasies: "People think that the machine is possessed. Really."
The ultimate accolade (apart from the high score) is reaching the kill screen. As one of the speakers in the film explains: "It's called a kill screen because basically there's no way to finish the level. Some sort of random data or code inside the program ends up getting used for what you see on the screen. Donkey Kong is really strange in that it actually lets you play the kill screen level for five or six seconds or so. Everything looks normal and then suddenly, Mario just up and dies on you."
No, it’s not Mass Effect 3.
