Man vs. Snake

Co directed by Andrew Seklir and Tim Kinzy, this documentary follows Tim McVey, the first person to score a billion points on the 1982 arcade game Nibbler. In January 1984, at the Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, he played for forty four and a half hours straight on a single quarter, then slept for thirty six, and the town gave him the key to the city and named a day after him. The documentary's real subject is not the record but its unraveling decades later: an Italian kickboxing champion claimed to have beaten the score back in 1984, and while Twin Galaxies initially rejected an unwitnessed score, it later adopted a policy of recognizing scores backed by sufficient press documentation and accepted his. That upended everything McVey had believed for thirty years and sent him back to the machine. He set his new verified record on Christmas Day 2011, with only his wife present. The directors stumbled onto the game while editing Battlestar Galactica, and the film's poster was drawn by Don Bluth, the animator behind Dragon's Lair. It won Best Documentary at Fantastic Fest and at Calgary Underground. Who it's for: Anyone drawn to arcade culture, record chasing, and what obsession does to a person. Who it's not for: Not for viewers indifferent to video games, since the film goes deep into technical detail and record verification disputes.