On Saturday, hundreds of people packed into a Chicago record store to watch a guy play a video game.  That alone would probably be worthy of an Antenna post, but the fact that the man was Steve Wiebe and the game was Donkey Kong turns it into a surprisingly heated cultural event.

Late last year, indie record store Logan Hardware added an enormous back room full of classic arcade cabinets.  To celebrate their grand reopening, they invited Wiebe, hero of Seth Gordon’s 2007 documentary King of Kong, to teach a “DK 101” seminar and attempt to beat his Donkey Kong world record.

King of Kong chronicles the intense battle for the world DK title, with Wiebe, an unassuming junior high teacher from Washington, as a sympathetic protagonist.  His adversary, “Video Game Player of the Century” Billy Mitchell, is a smug Florida hot sauce salesman who had held the record since 1982.  At the end of the film, Wiebe’s record stands—but the battle for Kong kinghood has continued to rage off-screen.  Mitchell retook the title in 2007, lost it to plastic surgeon Hank Chien in early 2010, and beat Chein’s score last July.  However, Wiebe regained the title on September 20 with a score of 1,064,500—a record that stood when the Logan Hardware event was announced.

The stakes for Wiebe’s Chicago game were raised exponentially, though, when Chien’s DK score of 1,068,000 was verified as the new record on January 10.  Now, less than a week later, everyman hero Wiebe wasn’t playing to beat himself—but to reclaim his title.

According to an email from Logan Hardware, 150 people RSVPed to watch Wiebe’s first record attempt on Saturday.  It was clear, though, as the line snaked out the door, that significantly more showed up.  Most were under 30 and apparently unfamiliar with the basic gameplay of Donkey Kong.  I did a lot of explaining what Wiebe was doing—how many lives were left, how many levels there were before the infamous “kill screen” (the rarely seen end of the game, where the on-screen graphics morph into code), how scoring worked, even the fact that the conveyer belt board was supposed to be a pie factory.  While a few people wore semi-ironic retro-gaming t-shirts, they were like the guy who wears the band’s t-shirt to the show: trying too hard. Most, rather, were twenty-something hipsters enthusiastically watching an event they barely comprehended.

Wiebe was impossible to see through the crowd; most spectators watched the game projected on large screens in the back room and arcade.  Whenever he finished a board, got himself out of a tight spot, or executed a tricky maneuver (triple barrel jump!), the audience cheered.  The crowd favorite was Wiebe’s score-building strategy of “taunting” Donkey Kong on the rivet board by repeatedly jumping next to the ape while running down the clock: DK showboating.  When Mario started jumping, there was invariably a sustained cheer, like Wiebe was a punt returner running 90 yards for a touchdown, or a guitarist performing a particularly intense solo.

In the end, he didn’t beat the record.  After more than two hours of play, Wiebe died on level 19 (two levels/10 boards before one could reasonably tweet “Potential Donkey Kong kill screen coming up!”), with 872,600 points—not a record game, but an impressive run.

Even though we didn’t see a new record, though, it was worth watching, if only as a way to think about video games as spectator sports.  Despite Wiebe’s status as a “gaming star,” the crowd’s support, and the high stakes, and our growing homicidal rage at the too-drunk-to-stand frat boys chugging smuggled cans of PBR, the actual experience was relatively boring.  Classic arcade games were designed for short play; the average DK game lasts less than two minutes, not two hours.  Even though there are four different “boards” (barrels, rivets, elevator, and pie factory) and increasing levels of difficulty, it’s a repetitive game, even when played by one of the best.  If it wasn’t for the presence of Wiebe and the world record stakes, the room would likely have cleared within twenty minutes.

In South Korea, Starcraft is essentially the national sport; in the US, though, spectator gaming is a niche event, taking place at conventions like GDC or on the struggling G4 network.  But a retro gamer with renown beyond the gaming world can clearly draw a crowd.  That it consisted of hipsters who seemed to be there non-ironically is striking.  However, people weren’t there for the Donkey Kong per se; they were there to see Steve Wiebe’s potential record game, to continue the King of Kong narrative, to see a real-life protagonist’s triumph.

It’s hard to say what it would take to make competitive gaming more relevant in the United States.  More mass-appeal players like Wiebe?  More heated competition?  Pretty much everyone under the age of 40 in the United States has grown up playing video games and, likely, watching others play, but both have yet to take hold as non-domestic pastimes.  However, if Steve Wiebe, Folk Hero, can draw a crowd bigger than many indie bands, gaming as a public event may very well lie in our collective future.

Unlike many of his child-star brethren, including his Diff’rent Strokes TV siblings, Gary Coleman never had substance abuse issues that derailed his career.  This did not mean, though, that he quietly assimilated back into the real world after Diff’rent Strokes went off the air in 1986.  Every few years, it seemed, Coleman re-emerged with a new sad story—whether it was suing his parents and former manager for mishandling his trust fund in 1989, declaring bankruptcy a decade later, his tumultuous marriage to a woman 18 years his junior, or even the series of commercials he did for shady payday loan firm CashCall in 2008, where Coleman claimed that not even his own relatives would lend him money (but CashCall would!).  Every time we saw him, it seemed, we were fundamentally re-reminded of how hard it must be to actually be Gary Coleman—a sentiment encapsulated in the Avenue Q song sung by the (fictional) Coleman, “It Sucks to Be Me.”

It’s impossible for most of us to imagine what life must be like as a 13-year-old with two TV series, a merchandising deal, and a weekly paycheck larger than most adults’ annual salary.  It’s equally difficult to imagine what happens when that 13-year-old becomes a 20-year-old with limited job prospects and parents who have liberally helped themselves to your trust fund.  But imagine navigating this transition while being 4’7, needing daily dialysis, and having one of the most quotable catchphrases of all time.  It’s no wonder that Gary Coleman appeared to be an angry, cynical man in so many of his recent media appearances.  Coleman stormed off the set of The Surreal Life in 2004, for example, when Vanilla Ice held him over a deep fryer after Coleman refused to ask Todd Bridges what he was “talkin’ bout”—a request he probably heard every time he left his house.

Gary Coleman’s biggest problem was that he could never stop being Gary Coleman.  Some child stars can just slip away, re-enter the non-Hollywood world, and grow up quietly.  Apparently, VICI from Small Wonder is now a nurse in Colorado, and Sixteen Candles heartthrob Jake Ryan makes furniture in small-town Pennsylvania.  Both of them can almost certainly buy groceries without anyone talking in a robot voice or asking about Molly Ringwald’s underwear.  But that was a luxury Gary Coleman probably never had, and it’s one that almost certainly wore on him.  Part of the problem is that he was aesthetically distinctive; part of the problem, though, was that, for about a decade, he really entertained people—and he stuck with us, even though his career may not have.

Coleman became a laughingstock through no fault of his own.  He was funny in 1983, he was out of work by 1993, and the “joke” seemed to be that Hollywood didn’t let him continue his career into adulthood.  In my own dissertation, I chronicle the woes of the Diff’rent Strokes kids, and lump Gary Coleman’s string of bad luck and moderately poor choices in with Dana Plato’s overdose and Todd Bridges’s miles-long police record, which is ultimately unfair to him.  Gary Coleman’s real tragedy is that, really, he did was he was supposed to.  For almost a decade, he did his job well—and because of that, it became impossible for him to do anything else.  It’s a shame he didn’t have more time to reinvent himself, and to rediscover the dignity he had, by all means, rightfully earned.

To give us all a sense of perspective, though, before we start throwing around the inevitable terms like “has-been,” “washed up,” and “former”: At one point in time, Corey Haim was a very talented actor.  That talent may have vanished in, or at least been obscured by, his decades of substance abuse, but at one point in time, it was there.  Roger Ebert’s review of Haim’s 1986 film Lucas becomes especially prescient, and especially poignant, in this light: “If he can continue to act this well, he will never become a half-forgotten child star, but will continue to grow into an important actor. He is that good.”

Unfortunately, he didn’t continue.

By the end of the 1980s, he was an addict.  By the end of the 1990s, his addictions had so isolated him from Hollywood (and a reliable source of income) that he tried to sell his hair and teeth on eBay.  Haim’s 2001 E! True Hollywood Story showed the 30-year-old heavily under the influence of something—unable to walk or speak in complete sentences—while being interviewed for the episode.

Most THS episodes (at least those of living celebrities) focus on narratives of redemption, ending with the actor/singer/model having successfully battled his or her demons, serenely playing Frisbee with a devoted golden retriever on the beach at sunset.  At the end of Haim’s interview, though, we saw him at home, in an unfurnished two-room guesthouse he shared with his mother, sitting on the floor with a Casio keyboard, talking about his future in “music.”  There was no illusion of redemption here; instead, the story ended with the apparently unredeemable portrait of a clearly broken man.

What’s so heartbreaking is that that portrait stuck.  Even the A&E reality series The Two Coreys (2007 – 2008), which was supposed to help revive the careers of Haim and his 1980s “Corey” counterpart, Corey Feldman, concluded with Haim’s friends and therapist begging him to return to rehab.  That he seemed to be an unwilling participant in his own redemption is undeniably problematic, but it underscores the saddest thing about his death this week: Corey Haim’s decline was long, drawn-out, highly visible, and apparently unstoppable.

We’ve become accustomed to watching celebrities spiral out of control.  Who doesn’t enjoy a good train wreck, after all?  But the problem is that we don’t really want to see the casualties.  Celebrities who can come back from the brink like Drew Barrymore or—I say this tentatively—Britney Spears earn our devotion.  We know how cruel the entertainment industry is, how easily it can crush you, so to see someone un-crushed becomes a testament to her strength and resolve.

But what about those who don’t have the strength or resolve?  I would argue that we don’t really want those train wrecks to end up at their seemingly logical conclusions.  It would be nicer to pretend the celebrity in question has moved to rural Idaho, taken up carpentry, adopted a golden retriever, and taught it to play Frisbee.  Crisis averted, and everyone’s hands are clean.  Instead, though, we’re left having to deal with the carnage.

The 2004 single by The Thrills, “Whatever Happened to Corey Haim?,” asks a great question, albeit one without any real answer.  It’s hard to say what happened to him, how he went from talented child actor to teen heartthrob to unredeemable addict.  But the fact is, we watched it happen, and we were unable to stop it.