“When you want your name written into history, you have to pay the price.”

So says a video-game champion in “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters,” Seth Gordon’s funny and surprisingly profound documentary about the competitive retro arcade-game subculture that makes its theatrical premiere on Friday. The price in this nearly all-male world is nothing as serious as death — just endless hours spent mastering “Donkey Kong,” a notoriously challenging video game that has a pivotal place in the history of electronic entertainment despite the fact that most people haven’t seen it since the Reagan years.

Early-1980s arcade culture is the subject of another recent documentary, “Chasing Ghosts.” But while that film (which screened at the Sundance but has yet to be released) offered a nostalgic overview of the period known as gaming’s “golden age,” 1979–82, Mr. Gordon’s film focuses on a twoman battle to be the best in the world at “Donkey Kong,” a game that involves guiding a pixilated little blip named Mario up ladders and over rolling barrels.

“We honestly didn’t know it was going to be ‘Donkey Kong’ and only ‘Donkey Kong’ for the narrative structure until we were in post-production,” the film’s producer, Ed Cunningham, said. He and Mr. Gordon tried adding other story lines — including “an absolute Zen master on ‘Ms. PacMan'” from Queens and a Florida woman who set out to reclaim her “Q*Bert” title at age 79 — but “it just wasn’t as interesting,” he said.

One reason was the timing. Through a friend, Mr. Cunningham met Redmond, Wash., resident Steve Wiebe, who had recently set out to beat the highest “Donkey Kong” score ever documented. Since 1982, the record had belonged to Billy Mitchell, the most revered figure in the retrogaming world. When the filmmakers started rolling, the gaming world was abuzz with talk of Mr. Wiebe’s challenge.

And the match-up — the black-maned champ, cunning and unshakably confident, versus the guileless challenger — was straight out of an ’80s sports movie. Throughout his life, “The King of Kong” argues, the odds have always been against Mr. Wiebe, who is now 38. They certainly will tonight, when he will publicly attempt to break the “Donkey Kong” world record at Dave & Buster’s arcade on West 42nd Street.

“He never gets the gold, he always gets the silver,” the director, Mr. Gordon, said. Mr. Mitchell (now 42), on other hand, smirks his way through the film and clearly enjoys the view from the top.

As it turns out, that’s pretty much the way “Donkey Kong” works. Using a four-direction joystick and a single button, the player must steer Mario through various construction sites while Donkey Kong, a grinning ape who’s abducted his girlfriend, throws hazardous barrels from on high. The idea is simple; the game itself is a different story.

“The average ‘Donkey Kong’ game doesn’t last a minute. It’s absolute brutality,” Mr. Mitchell declares, with evident relish, in the film. Mario must dodge randomly routed barrels, but brushing up against a fireball, a cement tub, or a bouncing spring-weight also spells instant death.

“The king of the arcade — whoever it was in your neighborhood — that guy would walk over to ‘Donkey Kong,’ and it would win,” Mr. Cunningham, 37, said.

Arcade owners charging 25 cents a play liked it that way. “They wanted you on and off the machine in under a minute,” Steven Kent, the author of “The Ultimate History of Video Games,” explained. “But they wanted you walking away thinking it was worth it.”

In 1981, the year “Donkey Kong” was released, plenty of people did. Americans spent $5 billion and 75,000 man-hours that year on games like “Defender” and “Pac-Man.” “Donkey Kong,” which sold 60,000 units and earned $180 million in its first year, was perhaps the most enduring. According to Chris Kohler, the author of “Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life,” “Donkey Kong” was “the first game to incorporate realworld physics. You’re running this guy around and jumping, and gravity has an effect on you.”

But Mr. Kohler added that of the game’s many novelties, the most influential was its narrative element: “‘Donkey Kong’ was the first game that feratured human characters and attempted to build a game around a story,” he said.

The drama is primitive but poignant, with a decidedly Sisyphean component. Mario (who would be granted top billing and superhuman powers in subsequent Nintendo games) jumps unexceptionally and wields nothing more than a hammer. Each time he successfully completes an obstacle course, a pink heart pops up on screen. But then Donkey Kong drags Mario’s sweetheart up the ladder to the next board, and the heart breaks in two. Unlike “PacMan,” Mr. Kohler noted, the objective in “Donkey Kong” pertains to human experience.

“It’s not, ‘I want to eat as many dots as I can without dying.’ It’s ‘I want to save the girl,'” he said.

But the best “Donkey Kong” players know otherwise. Due either to a design glitch or an exhaustion of machine memory, Mario meets a sudden, meaningless death at the first board of the 22nd level. According to Mr. Wiebe, who began reaching the “kill screen” regularly in the early ’90s, jumping wildly allows Mario to stay alive, but only for a few extra seconds.

“I think of beating the game as getting to the kill screen, but there’s really no way to beat it,” he said. “I’ve tried everything.”

But Mr. Wiebe, who said it takes more than two hours to reach the kill screen, prefers some closure to none. “That wouldn’t be very fun, a game that could be played forever.”