Film
Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade
A documentary about the champions of early 1980s arcade gaming—the players who were superstars before the industry crashed. It's a affectionate, funny look at obsession, celebrity, competition and aging, following men who once had it all and have spent decades chasing that feeling. For anyone curious about forgotten subcultures, the nostalgia isn't cloying; the real story is about what happens when your moment passes.
If you liked this
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters2007
The definitive arcade documentary. Follows two men battling over the Donkey Kong high score, mixing genuine tension with the absurdity of grown men competing at a thirty-year-old game. Essential viewing.
But The hero and villain dynamics are played for drama in ways that feel manipulative if you think about it too hard. Some viewers find it exhausting.
Wrinkles2011
A Spanish animated film about two elderly men in a nursing home discovering friendship and rebellion. It has the same melancholy about aging, memory, and recapturing lost vitality, but trades arcade cabinets for adventure.
But The animation style is deliberately unglamorous. The pacing is slow and contemplative, which suits the subject but won't appeal to anyone wanting energy or plot momentum.
The Last Blockbuster2020
A documentary love letter to Video Rental Culture and the people who lived inside it. Same nostalgia DNA, same theme of a vanished world, but focused on the stores and the people who worked there rather than high scores.
But It's more celebratory than critical. If you're looking for perspective on why this era ended or what we lost, you won't find much interrogation.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
O.J.: Made in America2016
Both films are elegies for American celebrity and the specific loneliness of being famous in a world that has moved on.
A five-hour ESPN documentary that starts as celebrity biography and becomes a meditation on fame, how it isolates people, and what happens to icons when their spotlight fades. The structure mirrors Chasing Ghosts: examining glory, obsession, and the impossibility of recapturing the past.
But It's a project about a man convicted of murder, which casts a shadow the entire film cannot and should not illuminate away from. Heavy material.
More like this (6)
Indie Game: The Movie2012
Three indie game developers pursuing their art and their dreams with the kind of single-minded intensity you see in arcade champions. It's about the creative obsession behind games rather than playing them, but the spirit is identical.
But Heavy on the self-sacrificial suffering angle. If you find the 'tortured artist' narrative exhausting, this leans into it completely.
Pumping Iron1977
Follows bodybuilders training for the Mr. Olympia competition. Swap arcade machines for dumbbells and you have the same documentary DNA: obsessive subculture, male competition, the hunt for validation, aging champions protecting their legacy.
But It's a product of the 1970s in ways that will feel quaint or uncomfortable depending on your tolerance. The gender dynamics especially feel dated.
The Toys That Made Us2017
Netflix's loving history of toy lines. Episodes about 1980s properties tap the same nostalgia vein and approach vintage culture with genuine affection rather than mockery.
But It's essentially extended commercial content dressed as documentary. If you're allergic to brand mythology, you'll find it insufferable.
Man vs. Snake2015
A single man's decades-long quest to beat Nibbler, an arcade game few people ever cared about. It's smaller and stranger than King of Kong, more introspective, about obsession when there's literally no one watching.
But The man at the center is not entirely likeable. The film doesn't sand down his difficult edges or make him more comfortable to root for.
Overnight2003
Both films explore men unable or unwilling to evolve past their moment of success, but from opposite emotional registers.
A documentary about a filmmaker's descent into failure and ego, shot by his own friends documenting his self-destruction. It's caustic, uncomfortable, and haunts you. The tone is completely different from Chasing Ghosts—where that film is warm, this is clinical and cruel—but both explore obsession and the inability to accept change.
But It's deeply unpleasant. This isn't a feel-good movie about a flawed person; it's a clinical autopsy of ambition eating itself. You will feel uncomfortable for the entire runtime.
Ghostland2018
Both films are about the past asserting itself on the present, about memory as a place you can become stuck, about ghosts—metaphorical or otherwise—refusing to stay dead.
A horror film about two women returning to the house where they survived a traumatic attack thirty years earlier. It shares Chasing Ghosts' obsession with the past refusing to stay buried, and the way memory—real or invented—can trap you. A wildly different genre and tone, but genuinely unsettling in ways that illuminate something about time and trauma.
But It's a brutal horror film with graphic violence. If you're watching Chasing Ghosts for warmth and nostalgia, this will feel like a betrayal of tone. Also: genuinely disturbing.
People
Cast
Billy MitchellSelf
Walter DaySelf
Steve SandersSelf- Todd RogersSelf
- Darren OlsenSelf
- Ronald BaileySelf
- Sam BlackburnSelf
- Leo DanielsSelf
- Kent FarriesSelf
- Ben GoldSelf
Directing
- Lincoln RuchtiDirector
Production
- John PanichelloExecutive Producer
- Lincoln RuchtiProducer
- Michael VerrechiaProducer