I’ll admit, for someone who enjoyed the 2007 documentary The King of Kong as much as I did, I’ve done a poor job of keeping up with who holds the high score on Donkey Kong. I’m just now seeing Details‘ interview with the new world champ, Hank Chien, a 35-year-old plastic surgeon in New York City who took up the arcade game after seeing the film. I always wondered if I could’ve been a contender. “I was seriously addicted for the first three months. I was, like, not eating and not doing laundry,” Chien tells Details. Obsessive personality? I totally have that. In the beginning, he played for three hours a day. “It wasn’t a regular training program; there are some days I play zero, and then on some weekend days I play six.” Binge entertainment habits and the desire to say I’m in “training” for something (and since I’m afraid of walking on ice it can’t be curling)? Double check!
Really, the only thing that worries me are Chien’s degrees from Harvard in math and science. Apparently, math comes into play when you’re “point pressing — which is trying to squeeze as many points out of a board as possible.” I do enjoy sports terms like “point pressing” though… This is too close to call.
Anyone else take up Donkey Kong after seeing The King of Kong? How is your quest coming?
I loved this game when I was a kid, but I don’t think I ever made it much farther than the pie factory. I don’t see how watching King Of Kong would make anyone want to play more video games, if anything, watching those pathetic losers in the film made me want to never set foot in an arcade again. The worst was the guy that spent hours of his free time watching videotapes of Atari 2600 games, so as to verify the validity of some goofball that got the high score on Pitfall, over 20 years after that was a noteworthy event. Heck, even then, it wasn’t that big a deal.
To be fair, I think that was his official job. Twin Galaxies is a pretty big website with lots of ad dollars.
Nope, he said he did it in his free time from his regular job.