Click here to go back to Part One of our interview with the makers of The King of Kong.

I’m curious to know, especially in terms of a remake, if you guys have talked to Nintendo (the makers of Donkey Kong). Are there potential rights issues there?

Cunningham: They (Nintendo) loved the documentary. They’re very supportive. They’re actually helping. They absolutely loved it. And you know in the documentary world it’s fair use so there’s no legal issues there. We would love to keep the film The King of Kong, not The Prince of Pac-Man. They love it, they get it. Yeah, we’re going down that path for sure. Nintendo has reinvented itself and obviously it was a huge risk that’s now paying high rewards for them. So this is something. One thing that Nintendo’s doing and why this movie and the remake fits, is they – I forget the exact name of the book – but they were all interested in a book called Big Blue Ocean – I think that’s what it’s called -- where it’s a business book that says most of the time 10% of the ocean is red from everyone in there fighting for it. Go for the 90% that’s a big blue ocean and that’s what Nintendo’s trying to do with their gaming and they’ve been highly successful. So this opens up to an audience they may not be able to get to. A 35-year-old guy who remembers Donkey Kong so he goes to see the movie may be propelled to go buy a Wii because he knows he can play it on a virtual console. And they may not get to that guy if it were not for branching out through things like The King of Kong.

Gordon: It’s an occasion to remind him of what he already loves.

What do you think of the successors to Donkey Kong, Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros.?

Gordon: Perry Rogers is also the champ I think on Super Mario Bros.

Sanders: On the first Mario Bros. See I feel better because back in the day when it was Billy versus Steve and I was the Steve, back then I told Mitchell, I said, “We’ve got to play, we ought to match their Mario Bros. doubles, you know, because it's a doubles game, and then you be Mario and I’ll be Luigi and all this and he wouldn’t have anything to do with it so I’m still doing it.

You even offered him Mario?

Sanders: Exactly. Well I had to. I mean he beat me so…

[to Sanders] How do you feel about you you were portrayed? Because they sort of cast you as not a villain but sort of as a cohort of the villain.

Sanders: Well I definitely am Billy's friend. In fact, Billy and I refer to each other as best friends and so there’s no question that I’m his cohort. Billy’s a great guy. As far as did the film portray me accurately, I’d say yeah, it did.

So you really did lie about your Donkey Kong score?

Sanders: I really did.

3 million, was that it?

Cunningham: 3,165,300 to be exact.

Sanders: One of the most embarrassing times of my life was that whole incident 25 years ago. That was sort of the good news, bad news of “Hey, we’re making a movie about your friends and you.” And I knew that I couldn’t get by with not talking about that. So now everyone who sees this film is going to know what a liar Sanders was and I hope they don’t think that… [laughs]

What do you guys feel about the video that Billy submitted of his own high score? It’s appears pretty specious in the movie.

Gordon: We’ve seen a copy of it. We have a copy of it ourselves that doesn’t play well on any VCR. What’s interesting to me about it is not whether or not the tape is any good but the way that the events transpired at Fun Spot in the sense that there’s definitely a double standard in the way Steve was regarded versus the way Billy’s regarded by Twin Galaxies. To me, that’s the thing that was really interesting. And I’m not even saying there’s anything bad or good about that as much as isn’t this interesting the way this all unfolded.

Sanders: There definitely was a double standard. I mean I as sort of an insider at Twin Galaxies I’ll be the first to say that there was a double standard for Billy and Steve Levy. But there’s also in my mind, however, a good reason for that, and that is what Steve had no way of knowing was that there was a person names Roy Schilt who long ago Twin Galaxies had written off, long, long ago. Somebody today said, “Hey I’m Osama bin Laden’s buddy.” Nobody in America would then say, “Hey, well then you’re my buddy then too.” Consequently when it became evident that Steve had unknowingly aligned himself with the very guy who was on our blacklist, that’s why there was a double standard. Not because we had anything against Wiebe personally. It was all about Roy Schilt and I know that several folks tried to encourage Steve to leave Roy behind and that’s where all that came from. As far as the video tape that you asked about, Mitch Gerson just did an article where he quotes Walter Day about that video tape. I would urge you to read that article because I agree with Walter’s comments about that.

Gordon: For the record also, that tape at Fun Spot, it was accepted that night and then later more carefully reviewed and then officially accepted again by Robert. Robert's has been critical to this whole process. He did at one point some 40-page article comparing Steve’s performance on one of your many tapes to one of Billy’s record performances. He’s very careful and thorough about his work.

Cunningham: We tried very hard in that section of the film to present it as not black and white -- is it a good tape or a bad tape – but that what we witnessed watching was: there’s questions. And if there were questions of other people, it wouldn’t have been so easily accepted and so that’s in the tape. That’s what we were attempting to portray. What we saw was, "Wait a minute.It wasn’t watched consecutively and there’s all these hiccups in the tape," and then five minutes later it’s accepted seemed very odd to us at the time in witnessing how that transpired. That’s what we tried to portray in the film – just the oddity of it. That’s different than what we’ve been led to believe is the process you go through to have a tape verified.

What do you think about the whole idea that video games have now moved into the home? Lots of people grew up going to arcades and it seems sort of tragic that that social place really doesn’t exist anymore.

Wiebe: We had the Atari 2600. We had those (consoles) but we still went to the arcade and when that closed, we went home and played on our Ataris. So it was able to co-exist then. But I don’t know what the deal was, if arcades people are into it, obviously not otherwise there’d be arcades nationwide again or worldwide.

Cunningham: I think one of the things that attracted us to – because we actually branched out… We cast a really wide net. We had no idea what we were going to end up with. We started going towards – I don’t know if you know the name Jonathan “Fatality” Wendel. He made $287,000 last year playing Quake. I think that’s his game. We went and interviewed him.

Gordon: One of the pro-gamers?

Cunningham: Yeah. What we kept coming back to was – and people have tried to make films about that world, you know, with the head set and mouse and all of that – but it’s this world that just becomes very singular.Not that that’s bad. There’s been studies that show that they are socializing with each other there. I’m not arguing that. But for us, as a film it’s much more interesting if it’s a community. It’s much more interesting if there is actual human interaction. To me, the most interesting part of the film is when Steve is at Fun Spot and a contender, Brian Kuh, is there and how he interacts with Steve. He’s a little jealous that Steve is about to get the kill screen. You wouldn’t have that if you had a dude in his living room in St. Louis battling a guy in Albany in his basement.

Gordon: Plus Dwayne Richard saying like, “You’ve redeemed yourself” by showing up and playing. There’s a brotherhood there and a clan. That’s interesting.

Sanders: That speaks also to the double standard thing. It goes back to my comment about how I applied. Back in ’83 we found out that there were a lot of people that were lying about their scores. In fact, the famous Life magazine picture. I don’t want to name names but I wasn’t the only liar pictured in Life magazine. And as the video games sort of began to die out and it was only the hard core few that were left, the folks that were left were folks that could trust each other. Once MAME came out and Retrocade and those late ‘90s PC emulators came out and Twin Galaxies was sort of resurrected, almost immediately people began to cheat and lie on MAME and Retrocade. If you can Google this, you’ll find that there are official Twin Galaxies versions of MAME that prevent cheating or at least try to. Well anytime somebody from outside the group would claim a world record, the guys who trusted each other would always wonder, “Now wait a second. Is this guy really real?” And that’s where Dwayne’s coming from when he says, “You’ve redeemed yourself. Now we can trust you. We’ve seen you play live.”

What exactly did Wiebe have to redeem? Had he ever lied?

Sanders: Basically it’s because of his affiliation with Roy Schilt. In your words, the taint of Roy’s involvement is too strong and Steve’s got to come and prove in person that he can do it for real. I think that’s what the Fun Spot trip was about, was showing that if he couldn’t get the absolute record that day, that he was certainly a worthy contender.

So is there going to be a video game based on The King of Kong?

Gordon: We pitched it. We would love for that to happen. I’m not even sure what that game would be at this point.

Would it have to be for the Wii?

Gordon: Yes, you could build your me and then you could go to a tournament.

Cunningham: One of our marketing ideas, and we’ve yet to find the right partner to do it, is there’s all of these game-based software packages that you can just download and we want to give avatars, post avatars up and say “Do what you will with them.” Just let 'em go wild and see what comes back. You know, have them enter a contest and winner gets a Wii or something like that and maybe we could host the game on the website or something. Yeah, we definitely talked about that for sure.

Sanders: Nintendo is porting the Donkey Kong for the Wii and the obvious answer is they’ve got to bundle the documentary DVD with the Wii game and my book.

Gordon: There you go. Everybody wins.

Steve, do you still hold the world record?

Gordon: Great question. You have no idea how timely that is.

Wiebe: I just learned that Billy has broken it. He got 1,050,200 points.

Gordon [reading from his iPhone]: "In front of an audience of hundreds including Twin Galaxies senior referee Todd Rogers, Mitchell scored 1,050,200 points -- a new world record." There was a press release issued today.

Cunningham: And the saga continues.

Wiebe: I guess that still has to be reviewed officially, but somewhere in the back of my mind I hear the "Eye of the Tiger" song. [laughs]

Gordon: But Billy has offered that if you go to Vegas this weekend and can break his record there, you can win $10,000.

Sanders: I think that according to the Twin Galaxies bylaws it's a new record, because the bylaws say if an official is there live while the game is being played live, then there’s no further need for verification needed. Todd Rogers was there when he got the score. If a TG referee is present while the game is being played, there is no further need for verification.

So how far do you take this?

Wiebe: I guess it just keeps on until I’m 90 years old, 'til I can’t play the game. This is going to be an ongoing saga. Yeah, it’s crazy. I don’t want to tell my wife yet. [laughs]

Sanders: I can understand that Steve. I’m probably in the same boat there.

Wiebe: So I’ve got the competitive juices flowing again.

Do you know when you might start filming the feature film?

Gordon: Everything is paced right now in Hollywood around the strike, which is anticipated for June 30th, so I highly doubt that this is going to be "a pre-strike movie." If we get very lucky, it could move that quickly but probably not. So we’re looking probably at the end of ’08 when we would start. That’s probably likely, assuming that they actually negotiate all of the rights for online distribution, which is the big issue at hand in the strike.

Cunningham: We’re about nine weeks out from our first draft of the script so a lot of it will be based on that first draft.

I’m really interested in looking at the two versions side by side.

Gordon: Yeah, me too. There’s a transcript of the doc. Actually, Richard Brenner paid for the film, the doc, to be transcribed like a script, like "Int. – Billy’s Restaurant – Day." And just to read the transcript of the film is totally engrossing and it’s 102 pages, just sort of the ideal length. So there really will be a true side by side moment I think.

The King of Kong opens in select theaters Friday, August 17th. 

Check out ReelzChannel.com's King of Kong page for clips, images and more!