Terrific documentary about one man’s efforts to defeat Nibbler.
By Chris Tilly
Man Vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler is the sequel to King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters that you didn’t know you wanted. It’s not actually affiliated with the 2007 documentary, but shares more than an unnecessarily elongated title with the cult classic, featuring several of the same talking heads in a similarly gripping tale of conflict, controversy, and triumph in the face of gaming adversary.
Rather than revolving around arcade classic Donkey Kong however, the subject here is Nibbler, a 1982 game that featured a snake navigating a maze while consuming dots and endeavouring to avoid colliding with itself. It’s fiendishly difficult, and remembered with little fondness aside from the fact that it was the first game that allowed players to achieve a billion points.
But Tim McVey – a nice, wholesome, sweet-natured nerd from Iowa – was good at Nibbler. Really good. So much so that on January 17, 1984, he became the first player to reach that billion point Holy Grail.
News of his achievement quickly spread through the gaming community, with Tim given the keys to the city, his own Civic Day, a Nibbler arcade cabinet, and a place in the history books.
Cut to the present day, and McVey is a modest Guitar Hero addict who makes machine parts for manure spreaders and sometimes gets confused with the Oklahoma bomber of the same name.
Tim McVey Day is now no longer celebrated; the Nibbler cabinet was sold when money was tight, but mercifully he still holds the record. Or does he? Long after the fact, an Italian named Enrico Zanetti claimed to have beaten the score in September 1984, meaning that in reality, Tim might have only held the record for eight months.
The hotly contested Italian figure isn’t officially verified, but does bring McVey out of retirement to prove his gaming brilliance and settle the matter once and for all.
What follows isn’t quite a story of man vs machine, though such conflict does play its part, a billion-point game taking two punishing days and meaning that calluses, fatigue and pains in the ass all add drama to each Herculean effort.
