Unwinnable’s Coverage of the Worldwide Video Arcade Championships is VERY Late (Sorry!)
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #183. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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A tongue-in-cheek but also painfully earnest look at pop culture and anything else that deserves to be ridiculed while at the same time regarded with the utmost respect. It is written by Matt Marrone and emailed to Stu Horvath and David Shimomura, who add any typos or factual errors that might appear within.
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A little more than a decade ago, on Aug. 28, 2014, I was on site for the July 26, 1982, Worldwide Video Arcade Championships.
That sentence will make more sense in a minute.
The WWVACs were held at the Sheraton Centre Toronto. I snapped a few photos of the signage and the consoles and the check-in table from my perch a floor above. I was in town for the Yankees-Blue Jays series at the Rogers Centre, so I wasn’t in attendance when Eddie “The Fire Blaster” Plant beat Sam Brenner to famously claim the worldwide Donkey Kong title.
We’ve since learned “The Fire Blaster” cheated his way to victory – but by then it was too late to keep the defeat from becoming a devastating moment in the life of the young Sam. Flash forward to the present and Sam, now being played by Adam Sandler, is a member of the Nerd Brigade, installing home entertainment systems for people far more successful – though perhaps no less unhappy – than him.
When Sam is summoned to the White House by his best friend – Will Cooper (played by Kevin James), who was with him at the WWVACs and happens to grow up to be POTUS – I am sitting on the couch in my living room watching with my two boys during a family movie night. We ultimately learn that video of the WWVACs was shot into space and intercepted by an alien race, who take it as a challenge. They have come to Earth in the form of classic arcade game villains and only Sam, “The Fire Blaster” (played by Peter Dinklage) and Ludlow Lamonsoff (Josh Gad) have the skills to save humanity.
The film set that had been a footnote in my Toronto trip can now be seen streaming on Netflix. The move is called Pixels. Neither of my children had been born when I took the photos at the Sheraton but they were loving Pixels and we joked about how their dad was standing above all the action at the WWVACs and if you had X-Ray vision could you use it to see through walls in movies, too? My youngest, Peter, said, “This movie is cool because it’s in the ’80s.” I decided that statement officially made me successful as a father.
Sam ultimately saves the world, of course, in what is a fun, charming movie I never would have watched except it was the only movie the three male Marrones could agree on after almost enough bickering to call the whole thing off. My oldest, Jacob, was still talking about it the next morning, about the Pac-Man chase in New York City, the Centipede blasting in London, even the wacky interactions between President Kevin James and the British Prime Minister. When Jacob asked me what my favorite battle scene was, he informed me I wasn’t allowed to choose Donkey Kong because “everyone knows that’s the best one.”
Apparently, at least to my kids, Pixels had become an overnight sensation. It had taken more than a decade for me. I’m pretty sure I knew it was called “Pixels” at the time of the filming, as I snapped those faraway photos. What I didn’t know was that, one day, I’d have two kids named Jacob and Peter, and that we’d watch it for the first time, together.
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Matt Marrone is a senior MLB editor at ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @thebigm.
