GAMES ARE
EATING THE WORLD

2026-08-18

Steve Wiebe: the first Donkey Kong million lived in a garage

Steve Wiebe scored 1,006,600 on Donkey Kong on 4 July 2004, the first million on the game. The cabinet was in his garage. The number outlived the movie that made him a victim.

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Steve Wiebe is the American player who, on 4 July 2004, scored 1,006,600 on Donkey Kong. It was the first time anyone had crossed a million on the 1981 Nintendo cabinet. He did it at home in Redmond, Washington, on a machine he had bought after Boeing let him go.

That is the heaven. A garage, a kill screen, a number that had not existed.

The cabinet in the house

Wiebe was born in Seattle on 3 January 1969. He took mechanical engineering at the University of Washington, worked as a test engineer at Boeing from 1996 to 1999, then tested software at Bsquare until 2001. The next years were thinner. He trained as a teacher, finished a Master of Education at City University of Seattle in 2004, and put a Donkey Kong board where a second car might have gone.

He played the barrels as patterns. The film later sold this as underdog poetry. The more useful description is engineering: find the cycle, write it on paper, execute. Nicole is in the room. The children learn that the garage makes a particular sound. On Independence Day 2004 the counter rolled past seven digits.

Twin Galaxies did not keep the million. The printed circuit board had come from Roy Shildt, a Missile Command claimant and a standing enemy of Billy Mitchell. Referees smelled a trap Wiebe had not set. The tape went on a shelf. The first million became, for a while, a rumour with a date.

Deep Feel: the finished thing in a year of unfinished ones, the need to have one column that adds up. Deep Care: the teaching job he then held for years at Redmond High School, the family that let a loud cabinet live in the house, the Christian album The King of Song in December 2009. Unaligned: he flew to Funspot alone and asked Mitchell to sit down, in public, on a machine with witnesses.

He did sit down. On 3 June 2005, at Funspot in Laconia, with Walter Day refereeing, Wiebe reached the kill screen at 985,600. Brian Kuh pulled a crowd. Hours later Kuh played a VHS of Mitchell at 1,047,200. Twin Galaxies took the tape. Wiebe asked to watch it and was refused. On 3 August 2006, back in the garage, he posted 1,049,100. He later took Donkey Kong Jr. as well, 1,190,400 on 17 February 2010. On 30 August 2010 he put up 1,064,500 on Donkey Kong itself and held the title until Hank Chien's 1,068,000 on 10 January 2011.

The first million, the one from 2004, only became official again on 12 April 2018, when Twin Galaxies stripped Mitchell and wrote Wiebe back in as the first person over 1,000,000.

The film made him a character

Seth Gordon's The King of Kong (2007) needed a hero the way westerns need a quiet man. Wiebe is soft-spoken on camera. He cries. He goes home. The edit is affectionate and it is also a cage. Once you are the designated good person in a 79-minute film that 97 percent of critics liked, every later sentence you say is heard as a line from that script.

Wiebe has been careful in public. The Variety interview after the 2018 ruling is dry, almost administrative. He did not dance on Mitchell's grave. He has said, in more than one place, that the rivalry the trailer sold was colder and smaller in the house. He voiced himself on Code Monkeys. He took bit parts in Gordon's Four Christmases and Horrible Bosses, and a DARPA-scientist blink in Pixels. Topps put him in an Allen & Ginter set, the way they put Mitchell in one. The victim-casting became a side career.

That is the middle of this file, and it has to sit in the middle. Being filmed as the decent one is a gift and a theft. The gift is that strangers still buy him a beer. The theft is that the garage, the degree, the lesson plans, the 1,106,200 he submitted on original hardware on 24 June 2020, all arrive in conversation as sequels to a documentary rather than as a life. In 2026 Lego put him in the trailer for the official Donkey Kong arcade set. Even the bricks remember the movie first.

Mitchell has spent years saying the edit was unfair to him. The quieter cost was on Wiebe's side of the cut. A teacher who wanted a verified number became a symbol, and symbols do not get to be boring. He kept being a maths teacher anyway.

End on the number

1,006,600.

Say it without the soundtrack. A man in a garage, 4 July 2004, first seven-digit Donkey Kong. The board was later called unclean because of who had touched it, not because the play was shown to be fake. The Funspot game was clean and a little lower. The 2010 game was clean and higher. The 2020 game, 1,106,200, sits far down a modern list that now lives above 1.27 million, in the hands of Robbie Lakeman and John McCurdy. Wiebe is no longer the king. He is the first person through a door.

The movie will always be louder than the cabinet. That is fine, as long as the cabinet keeps the date. Competitive Donkey Kong after 2007 is a public sport because Wiebe made the million visible, and because Gordon pointed a camera at the visibility. The second fact is famous. The first fact is the one that belongs to Wiebe when the credits finish.

He still lives in Redmond with Nicole and their two children. The high school still has a maths department. The first million is still 1,006,600, still 4 July 2004, still a garage. Everything after that, the tapes, the referees, the settlement of 2024, the Lego minifigure energy, is commentary. The number does not require it.

Fact, hypothesis, folklore

BasketClaim
FactWiebe scored 1,006,600 on 4 July 2004, the first million. Twin Galaxies recognised him as first to a million on 12 April 2018 after removing Mitchell. He submitted 1,106,200 on original hardware on 24 June 2020.
HypothesisThe Shildt board was a political problem, not a loaded one, and the 2004 million was honest play on dirty provenance. Confidence: medium. The 2018 ruling restored the title without a new hardware autopsy of that specific PCB.
FolkloreThat Wiebe "won" the movie and therefore won the sport. He held the record in bursts. The film froze one burst and sold it as a coronation.

Sources

Retrieved 18 August 2026.