If you’re a gamer then you have seen King of Kong, or at least you better have. A tale of one man’s quest to fight evil and become the Donkey Kong champion. King of Kong was a quasi-documentary, really only showing probably one side of the tale, but nonetheless it is extremely entertaining (even if you’re not a gamer). But on the other side of the spectrum lies Chasing Ghosts, a “real” documentary that looks at many of the same characters found in King of Kong.

Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and has since made it’s way to the internet, where I had to go to “rent” this one as it is not yet on DVD. Chasing Ghosts is more of a documentary than King of Kong as it really doesn’t create a story as it does just catch up with the lives of the 80s best arcade gamers. Whereas King of Kong focused on Billy Mitchell as Lord Vader, Chasing Ghosts looks more at other gamers that were contemporaries of Billy. Billy is in there but he is not the focus.

This film isn’t as entertaining as King of Kong but it tells a more realistic history of each gamer. It catches up with many of the guys today and sees what happened between 1982 and now. Sadly enough, many of these world champions have found themselves in seemingly hard, average-at-best lives. We actually learn far more about each gamer than we really ever wanted.

Not to pick on the guy, but Robert Mruczek was creepy enough in King of Kong. His crazy hair, Dahmer-eqsue glasses and passion for gaming would make you cross the street if you saw him coming. In Chasing Ghosts we learn that he has a “questionable” taste for art that makes him even more 8MM than before. One record holder now lives with over 200 spiders and snakes in a mobile home, and another guy runs a casino out of his apartment. And what would a tale of arcade champions be without Roy Shildt, Mr. Awesome himself, who ends up being the only true bad guy in this movie too (I guess that means he really is a douche).

Chasing Ghosts takes a much better historical look at arcade games compared to King of Kong, which is one thing I enjoyed most. I’ve written before about what arcades offered society, let alone gamers, and this movie pretty much backs that up. It looks not only at arcades as a period in time but the effect Twin Galaxies specifically had on gaming. As it was the first and only scoreboard for gamers it pretty much fostered competition to a level beyond the local corner arcade. This of course means you should expect a lot of Walter Day in the film as well. One thing I did learn is that if you’re a champion you need a t-shirt with the game and score on it, so I’ll have to go grab some iron-ons for my Urban Champion shirt.

If you have King of Kong then you need Chasing Ghosts too. I now think of them like a set. One for the story and production, the other as a sort of behind-the-scenes. Then toss on Tron, The Last Starfighter, and WarGames and you have a night of nerd fun!