Trivia / The King of Kong

• Referenced by...:
  • The penultimate episode of the final season of The Shield is named "Possible Kill Screen", after the moment where Steve Wiebe might get a kill screen and another player walks around to others saying "possible kill screen" to gather a crowd.
  • The South Park episode "More Crap" is a Whole-Plot Reference to The King of Kong. An underdog family man (Steve Weibe/Randy Marsh) sets an obscure world record (top score at Donkey Kong/world's biggest crap). But at his moment of triumph, using a video containing flimsy evidence, the record is reclaimed by the previous holder, a nastier but more well-known man with many claims to fame (Billy Mitchell/Bono) and has power over the officiant (Twin Galaxies/European Fecal Standards and Measurements Board), making it harder for the challenger to reclaim the record.
• Technology Marches On:
  • The competitive gaming scene as shown in the movie, while accurate to the time period when it was filmed, quickly became outdated within a few years of the film's release. Competitors for high scores and speed runs record their games on video tapes and mail them in for verification, as opposed to uploading or streaming them on sites like YouTube or Twitch.
  • People speak to each other over flip phones as this movie was made just before the prevalence of smartphones.
  • Even members of the documentary crew seen on screen are shown using older cameras that record on videotapes rather than cards.
• What Could Have Been: Bonus material on the DVD reveals that they were covering several different competitive arcade game players in case the story for "King Of Kong" didn't pan out; one of the ones mentioned is a Jamaican man with "an almost supernatural talent for Pac-Man".