Gone off or what?

by Phil Day

Those were the days.

Recently (last weekend in fact) I was in New Jersey at Richie Knucklez video game arcade for the first, and what sounds like will be, the annual Kong Off. An incentive put together by Richie Knucklez and Billy ‘Video Game Player of the Century’ Mitchell. Together they invited the top Donkey Kong players in North America to compete against each other on Donkey Kong. For those who like classic arcade games I’m confident they would have enjoyed this event immensely. I know I did, but I was disappointed by one thing. I was really hoping someone would bury Donkey Kong. Probably a bit naïve of me, now that I have a better sense of the difficulty of this game, Donkey Kong simply refuses to lay down and die.

The weekend played out in an order of event that seemed equally as random as the barrel board. The first Kill Screen was reached by Eric Howard, not Hank Chien, Steve Wiebe, or Billy Mitchell. I say this not to put these three champs down, I’m simply pointing out how surprising this game can be. For example, Wiebe was on about 600,000 points and hadn’t lost a man. Then, he lost all four men on the same stage, he still managed the second highest score at the Kong Off – Hank Chien finished first. No one passed a million points, but I remember seeing many score over the 800,000 mark (or very close to it). Which got me thinking: not that long ago, wasn’t 800,000 a really high score on Donkey Kong? Of course it still is, but seemingly not anymore when it comes to the top ten players in North America (which in the case of Donkey Kong means the whole world). So I thought I’d visit The Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard to have a look-see at how high some players have climbed over the last five or so years – mistake right there. The Twin Galaxies web site has been changed. I clicked on ‘scoreboard’, then I was asked to ‘browse by letter’ so I clicked on ‘D’. I now could see 1 to 14 titles beginning with the letter ‘D’, but there were another 4516 titles. So I clicked ‘O’ thinking I might have to spell it out. … nothing … nothing … still, nothing. Finally, the site delivers ‘O’Riley’s Mine’ or some such game. What happened? Is this an improvement on the score-board? I'd have more luck navigating through the barrel board. I gave up. Thus ends this article. Game Over.