The Kong Off Kontenders. Photo taken by Arcade-Hunters.com
What happens when you get the best Donkey Kong players in the world together to compete? The Kong Off, as what took place this past weekend at Richie Knuckles Arcade in New Jersey. Three of the most famous DK players were there to compete head-to-head for the first time, Hank Chien, Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell, along with several other up and coming DK players and the end result: Hank Chien took first place with 994,400 points; Steve Wiebe came in second with 986,900 points and Eric Howard came in third with 941,800 points. Now one question many might ask is was Billy Mitchell there? The answer: yes he was. Mr. Mitchell came in 7th place in the final scores with a total of 821,200 points. I have a feeling that fires of rivalry on DK are still far from becoming embers after this so there will probably be plenty more DK record attempt stories to talk about in the future. If there will be another Kong Off in the future, we’ll have to keep our eyes on the official site for the event @ TheKongOff.com.
For those interested in seeing the full list of sixteen players who gave it a spin and their scores, you can see that at Aurcade.com. Arcade-Hunters has posted over 150 pictures from the event that you can browse through here; and there is also this Flickr stream with even more pictures. Also, videos of the entire event (which spanned over the course of two days) can be seen in all of their glory here.
The Kong Off wasn’t the only arcade-related competition that was going down this past weekend as AH forum user Igo pointed us to some video links of the Pinburgh competition that took place. The video below is part 1 of 8 made by Classic Game Room, just in the first video they give you a perfect idea of just how big this event was. Also as an addedum to the size of the event, here is what Bowen Kerins passed along to us about the event: “173 players at $100 a head made it the second-richest pinball tournament of the year worldwide… and the same site hosts the other, larger one in August (the PAPA World Championship).”
