The King of Kong is being turned into a musical

To some, coin-oper­at­ed arcade machines are nos­tal­gic relics – a throw­back to pre-inter­net enter­tain­ment, sym­bol­is­ing care­free child­hoods and time lov­ing­ly wasted.

In 2007, direc­tor Seth Gor­don explored the com­pet­i­tive side of arcade gam­ing and its hard­core play­ers in The King of Kong: A Fist­ful of Quar­ters, find­ing laugh­ter, friend­ship and an unquench­able desire to be num­ber one. Now, 10 years lat­er, his ode to amuse­ment arcades is being turn into a musi­cal, accord­ing to Poly­gon.

The doc­u­men­tary fol­lows the par­al­lel sto­ries of Bil­ly Mitchell and Steve Wiebe, two blue-col­lar Amer­i­cans with a strange affin­i­ty for the world’s most famous 8‑bit goril­la: Don­key Kong. An arro­gant gamer and the self-pro­fessed ​‘Sauce King’ of Flori­da, Mitchell couldn’t be more dif­fer­ent to the qui­et and reserved Wiebe who plays Don­key Kong in the down­time between his night school class­es. The two live entire­ly dif­fer­ent lives, their quest to top the glob­al high scores their only overlap.

An huge crit­i­cal suc­cess, praised for using video games as a means of explor­ing con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can life, Gordon’s film seems an off­beat and intrigu­ing choice for a musi­cal adap­ta­tion. The King of Kong has music run­ning through it’s core though, with many of its stars being ama­teur musi­cians them­selves, so per­haps the tran­si­tion is a nat­ur­al one after all.

Gor­don is cur­rent­ly pro­mot­ing his lat­est film, the Bay­watch reboot, and though there’s no word yet on when The King of Kong will com­plete its move from screen to stage, the direc­tor has hint­ed that he has already hit the Push Start but­ton on the script.