On the weekend a Classic Arcade Tournament with Donkey Kong was held in Denver. DK is a simple looking game but hard to master. An average beginner overlives one minute on the first screen. The game has four different screens (barrel, pie, elevator, rivet) and that was a sensation at the release in 1982. What the game makes so hard is to control barrels (barrel controling with randomness) and avoid the unpredictable flame patterns.

Since the movie documentary 'King of Kong' (wiki, imdb, movie on youtube) from 2007 was released the game got a new attraction. Since then the gamestyle has changed because it was discovered that the game has a kill screen aka end screen (youtube) and new players started playing because of the popular movie. The goal is to hit a new worldrecord. For a new highscore a good strategy is needed, and luck. DK Experts believe a score between 1,2 - 1,4 million points is possible. To do a perfect DK game the kill screen must be seen. This happens at the start of Level 22. Normaly the points of this kind of game are between 900.000 and 1 million and the game length is around 2,5 hours.

These new DK players that started about three years ago, are PC MAME players using mostly keyboard. The winner of the Kong Off 2 Tournament is Jeff Willms, coming directly from MAME. According to donkeykongblog, Willms never played before on a arcade machine and could adapt to the arcade controls. The worldrecord highscore wasnt touched this time, but the tournament got many kill screens so that alone is history.

Sidenote: If you wanna found out about the "first progamers" check out another documentary called 'Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade' on youtube. It didnt end well.

Links: Kong Off 2 Coverage, VOD's (kongoff, kongoff1, kongoff2)