Chances are if you call yourself a gamer you’ve seen the documentary King of Kong , about one man’s mission to beat the high score on Donkey Kong. There’s a new documentary coming out June 24 called Man Vs. Snake: The Long And Twisted Tale Of Nibbler about one man trying to beat the high score on Nibbler.
Nibbler is a game you’ve probably never heard of. You control a giant snake who moves around a grid and eats pixilated dots until it eats everything or bites its own tail and dies. It’s a lot like the Snake game you played on your first cellphone.
Tim Kinzy and Andrew Seklir direct this documentary about Tim Mcvey, a child prodigy who became the first person to ever score a billion points in a video game in the 1980s. “We are editors in episodic television so we have an appreciation for great stories and we are also gamers, we came of age gaming in the 80s,” Seklir said.
While the two were editors on the Syfy series Battlestar Galactica , Seklir “brought in a multicade arcade cabinet onto the lot of Universal Studios. I felt it was like a great stress reliever, especially late at night when we were on deadline, and we stumbled on Nibbler and Tim and I started competing to see who could have the highest score.”
Kinzy added, “it was a basic game and it was infuriating that Andy kept beating me so I went online to see if there were any tips and tricks and the actual Tim Mcvey day poster came up… I printed out a picture and I put in on Andy’s door as a joke.
Everything on the poster was so perfect and yet so preposterous that we just loved it, and from there I went back and started Googling to figure out what it was, then we came across the article for the first billion point game published in a videogame magazine, and it just had those hallmarks of all those stories I love; a coming of age story, an underdog story that was set in the Midwest and it was set in the time when I was coming of age.”
Seklir lived in NYC as a kid and envisioned himself as Mcvey, trying to get a billion points on this random game, and soon wanted to find out what became of this game prodigy. “Here’s the local kid who came in with one quarter and did something nobody else can do, played for two straight days where they locked him in overnight, who did he become?” Seklir wondered.
The documentary started off small: “Initially it was just supposed to be a round of interviews about the billion point game, just do a short document about that for YouTube, just to share that story with the world,” Seklir lamented. They flew to Oskaloosa, Iowa to interview Mcvey and thought that was the end of it.
“It was easy for us to pick up a camera and keep interviewing, we weren’t looking to do a story, this was pre King of Kong , and we started shooting before that movie even came out,” Seklir said. “We needed some B-Roll, but Walter Day was presenting Mcvey with an award at the video game summit outside Chicago, that was supposed to be the last of it, Kinzy flew out to film it and I guess on the way home Walter and Tim started talking and Enrico, this Italian guy’s score came up.”
Enrico earned the unofficial Nibbler high score in the 1980s, beating out Mcvey by just a few points. Enrico’s score bothered Mcvey, so he decided to try for the score again and called the filmmakers.
“When he called it and said ‘I’m interested in setting a new world record’ we realized that this could be a whole documentary, it’s worth another trip to Iowa, we should see how he’s preparing for it and see if he could do it,” said Seklir. The story of a middle-aged guy trying to recapture his youth by playing a game for two days straight piqued Kinzy’s and Seklir’s interest and inspired them to continue documenting this story.
From there, Man Vs. Snake goes in all sorts of crazy directions. There are failed attempts, cheaters and a ton of other surprises along the way. Filming took six years to complete, and the movie never would have come out without a successful Kickstarter campaign. “Kickstarter was a scary experience, it’s basically all or nothing and we were very fortunate, I had a friend point out that it’s good it was successful because it can really hurt a movie if you go for a Kickstarter campaign and don’t get it. There’s a lot of pressure, you got to work on it every day, you got to come up with new incentives and stretch goals, it’s not an easy thing to do,” Kinzy said.
Seklir elaborated: “It’s not for the faint of heart, once you publish your campaign the clock starts ticking, you feel a constant ‘oh shit’ that can be kind of nerve wracking and a little thrilling when you do actually reach your goal.” For Kickstarter hopefuls, try working on a project that will “catch on” and cater a project for Kickstarter. If Seklir would do it again, he said that: “I would try to create a project specifically for Kickstarter.” The directors wouldn’t recommend everyone try crowdfunding though, it’s not easy; Amazon takes a large chunk of the money and if you don’t spend all your money before the year is up, “Uncle Sam” can take it all.
Man Vs. Snake: The Long And Twisted Tale of Nibbler will be available digitally on iTunes and on DVD and Blu-ray June 24.
