This is a great documentary about gaming, specifically Donkey Kong (yes, the original!) and two guys who battle it out for the World Record. You can learn about it HERE. It can be rented anywhere too.

haha, no i've never heard of it. have you seen it?

i've heard a lot about it but never watched it. I heard it was good stuff.

yea i have been hearing about it for so long, but never cared to watch it. the aftermath of it was more interesting i thought.
billy mitchell was always such a pompous jerk, i dont want to see him onscreen for any extended period of time... even if he is being beaten! :P
i was impressed back when he got the perfect pacman score... then i was sick of him.

Billy Mitchell, in all his pompous glory, is displayed on screen for what he is: smart, cunning, arrogant, hypocritical, and maddeningly skilled at classic games. He's the movie's villain. The guy who (temporarily) brings him down, on the other hand, is such a decent guy, a real underdog -- you can't help but root for him.

One funny element of the movie is the talk about the "kill screen" on these older games. I remember in the 80s hearing about it on Defender. But it just cracks me up that these games didn't have enough memory, and eventually crash, which ends the game :lol

yea i have witnessed (not achieved) it on pacman many times.
games began to have an end due to that. like galaga actually has a finish (i have accomplished that!)
worst thing about billy... the hair... and the models that pose around him! :smirk
i never saw a kill for defender, but i did play stargate (early 80s, similiar to defender) for over 6 hours on one quarter.

Six hours on one quarter is insane.

I like Galaga and I used to be pretty good on Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man; but I haven't played any of these old games in a loooong time.

Billy's hair is freakin' unbelievable! :heh So how do you know about him?

yes, i was once a skilled gamer, and even tournament winner (plural, im sleepy still) ... times have changed.

i was never super skilled at arcade pacman. i could play the 2600 one until it was so fast that the sprites were invisible from the blinking, then you have to fail because you can not see the ghosts! :lol
i liked mrs pac. could always get through all mazes fine on one quarter, but could not play forever. galaga i really liked. was surprised when the game ended on me!

how do i know about him!? he was in all of the mags back in his heyday. i have been reading game mags since 83 at least. his face still pops up occasionally in the gaming news.

Wow, I never got into these games hardcore like you. Just had fun with them and could beat everyone I knew :) That's about it. No tournaments. No kill screens! Didn't even know there were gaming magazines back then! I did own a book about Pac Man and studied it to learn patterns and such.

yea i had those pac man patterns, but i can not memorize things like that.
all of ability is in twitch based responces. i can not redo things over and over well.
over the years one that plays lots of games gets a feel for how they are set as well. and you can guess where the secrets are and such also...

my tourni wins were all in fighting games in the early 90s. street fighter2 and those days. i won some tetris and bust a move (not the dance one) comps too... the slowest comp there is (other than chess)... though usually like in tetris you start at level 15 or something.

matt go here and see a little:
Here
old school mag. last post i think.
my topic slowly died cause no body had much to share wiff us... :(

Cool, I never saw that topic. Your setup is excellent, by the way. That one picture of some other person's collection, however, is a little scary :lol

Does it really take 3 pages to explain about getting your ship captured in Galaga? :heh

word?

yea that mega collection guy is psychotic.

the article had loads of pictures to walk you through it. there were not nonstop games flooding the market at that time like there are now as well. to fill a magazine... they had to ramble on at times maybe... :)
i loved Joystik though. cool mag! sadly i only have like 4 of them now for some reason...
i try to keep all of my game mags... and have maybe 15,000 or some nonsense... maybe i am the psychotic one!? :lol