Steve Wiebe (King of Kong) Live Chat

The latest in my series of live chat sessions at Coinopspace.com, Steve Wiebe is going to be joining us on April 15th 2009. The only requirement to chat with Steve is to be a member of the website and you can ask any respectful question you want.

Getting ready to draft a promotional release on Steve hasn’t been easy, and I certainly was a bit naive and tremendously lucky when he agreed to do the session. Instead of repeating everything that everyone already knows about Steve – He worked for Boeing, he’s a math teacher and all the details surrounding his many attempts, I thought I’d share a little bit into my own timeline in arranging a chat session. Certainly the more interesting insights have the potential to be revealed when the fans get to connect with him in real time.

Steve Wiebe is a bigger icon right now than Billy Mitchell

A bold proclamation, but I think it’s true. If nothing else, Steve edges out Billy because of his authentic likeability, the important x factor that the great minds of any time possess. I am not a huge fan of Donkey Kong, it’s not one of my favorite games and as a result I didn’t make seeing The King of Kong a huge priority. But when I sat down last December to watch it, I couldn’t pull myself away. From start to end, the story is riveting and told in such a way that any person that has experienced any adversity in their life can relate to it. Regardless of how the movie paints Bill Mitchell, and there is some skewing of facts to tell a good down and out story, some of the things Billy says…wow.

Steve is current, everyone loves him and his iconic status and reach grows everyday. When I sat out to start a new community in Coinopspace.com my main goals were to – bring the focus back to the games and to give us arcade game collectors a reason to be even more geeky about our passion. I knew that getting Steve to come and chat on the site would be huge for us, the biggest name at the best possible time.

But when I first reached out to him, I really was clueless. All I knew was that he made a guest appearance in ‘Four Christmases’.

Since then, I’ve figured out that Steve has made appearances on late night (Craig Ferguson), he’s been interviewed a million times online by different Coin Op and gaming media outlets (G4, Coin-op.tv) and he’s flown all over the US (New York, Los Angeles) making different attempts and appearances (Spike TV) signing autographs and meeting a wide variety of people. Vince Vaughn specifically asked Seth Gordon to put Steve in ‘Four Christmases’. Every bigtime website has contacted him for interviews (Movieweb.com, Kotaku.com) and the story of the battle for the best Donkey Kong score in the world has even made it’s way to the homepage of MSNBC and been mocked a little bit on Howard Stern.

Sheesh. And here I am asking him for his time to come and do an hour chat at my website. How crazy must I be!

Hello, this is Steve Wiebe

I tried to get a hold of Steve in January. Late one night in February I was sitting on the couch, ‘working’ late and the phone rang, it was like 11:00 pm and I was like, “Hmm, who is that?” I pick up the phone and it’s Steve Wiebe. How weird was that? I had to get my bearings.

I was out of sorts, just so happy he got back with me that we initially scheduled a date in February to do the chat. I hung up, and couldn’t think straight I was so geeked. I made a couple of calls, sharing the great news. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized the impact of things.

I really wanted to try to promote the chat, and I knew that at the least I wanted to get a mention of the talk with Steve into Gameroom Magazine. This meant that I was at least a month out at any given time, and the deadline for Gameroom Magazine submissions is around the 5th of every month.

I missed March to submit a story. So sheepishly, I emailed Steve back and asked if we could reschedule. Wow. Crazy. Plus I had to wait about a month and a half patiently in that time before I made an announcement to the arcade game social community at Coinopspace.com before I had absolutely confirmed that Steve was going to be chatting.

A few weeks later, Steve dropped me a line to let me know that this would be ok and we settled on a date of April 15th.

So, that my little story getting Steve Wiebe to chat on the site. It hasn’t been until the last month that I realized that I was probably 1 of about 50 people at any given time asking him for an interview or some sort of information in relation to King of Kong.

Steve Wiebe – The best stories / interviews

There are thousands of mentions of Steve Wiebe, and Google returns the best results, but I have compiled a short list from my acclimation of the best information you should check out. Think you know everything about Steve, read and listen to some of this stuff, there might be one or two items you missed.

• Condensed Timeline of Steve Wiebe Attempts / Events at Latinoreview.com
• Solid Steve Wiebe interview at Movieweb.com
• Kotaku audio interviews with Steve Wiebe
• G4 X-Play interview with Steve in Washington
• Steve Wiebe King of Kong promotion on Craig Ferguson (Entertainment value only)

The rest of the information is readily available and tends to repeat itself, these are my four favorite links that I came across for Steve in relation to King of Kong. Many of the live interviews are rubbish, either the interviewer is too interested in hearing themselves talk, or they don’t really ask questions instead stating facts and steering far away from the controversial questions concerning the movie.

Join us. Meet Steve Wiebe for yourself.

Again, that’s a live chat (we’re using a standard messenger style system) with Steve Wiebe April 15th on Coinopspace.com at 7pm PST. I can’t wait.

Here are some similar arcade posts

• King of Kong chat transcript now online at Coinopspace
• Coinopspace chat with Steve Wiebe a success
• Back on top of Donkey Kong Junior
• Chat with Tim Skelly – Group Event at CoinOpSpace.com
• Interesting Arcade Links – 2009-04-19

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