Nibbler involves guiding a hungry snake around a maze, gobbling up food and avoiding the increasingly lengthy serpent’s own tail. Remember Snake, that game Nokia used to put on its mobile phones? It’s that with bells on. An arcade wizard like Tim McVey can get a score in the low billions – a feat which takes a punishing 40 hours to achieve. Feature-length documentary Man Vs Snake is about McVey and a couple of other gamers who possess the stamina, fleet fingers and psychological fortitude to tussle with an arcade machine for almost two days straight. McVey first made his world record of 1,000,042,270 in 1983 when he was still a teenager. Can he break his own record now he’s in his 40s, and with another pretender to the crown – wild-eyed bad-boy of retro gaming, Dwayne Richard – attempting the same challenge? King Of Kong worked not just because of its nostalgia for the 8-bit era, but because of its endearingly odd characters, and some of those reappear here. Most notable among them is Walter Day, the Twin Galaxies arcade owner who set up his own global high score table over 30 years ago. The self-styled referee and mentor of the classic gaming scene, Day’s an endearing character, and it’s interesting how he becomes such a prominent figure in both Man Vs Snake and King Of Kong; his mixture of easy-going self-promotion and zen positivity set him apart from the laser-focused gamers tapping away at their arcade machines. This is just as well, since Nibbler isn’t a particularly exciting game to watch, and certainly doesn’t appear to be as nuanced in terms of strategy as Donkey Kong. Directors Tim Kinzy and Andy Seklir do, however, reveal some amusing insights into the tricks of the seasoned marathoned gamer. How do you find time to go to the loo if you’re playing a game for almost two days straight? The answer, Man Vs Snake teaches us, is that you store up a huge stock of lives (about 90 or 100 should do the trick), then leave the game to run itself for a few minutes. Sure, you’ll lose a few lives, but you’re at least afforded a few precious moments to relieve yourself or dip your aching elbow in a bucket of ice. While Man Vs Snake looks a little modest when compared to that earlier coin-op documentary, it’s nevertheless a warm, diverting film about tenacity,endurance and the revitailsing power of macaroni cheese. Retrogaming fans will likely eat it up as readily as Nibbler’s relentlessly hungry snake. Man Vs Snake: The Long And Twisted Tale Of Nibbler was playing at Glasgow Film Festival.
