Film · 2007 · Films · 2000s
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
Scored from 92 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Seth Gordon's documentary follows Steve Wiebe, a laid-off Boeing engineer and schoolteacher in Redmond, Washington, who installs a Donkey Kong cabinet in his garage and begins chasing the arcade game's world-record score. The record belongs to Billy Mitchell, a hot-sauce entrepreneur from Florida who has been a fixture of competitive gaming since the early 1980s and is backed by the referees of the scorekeeping body Twin Galaxies. When Wiebe submits a videotaped run, its legitimacy is questioned, pushing him to prove himself in person at the Funspot arcade in New Hampshire. The film frames the contest as an outsider's attempt to break into a closed subculture.
Released in 2007, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is a biography, documentary and sport film. It runs 1h 21m and carries a PG certificate. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Only 92 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 97 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 7,846 other films from the 2000s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2000s (7,847 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 92.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
