“The King of Kong” came and went last spring. It played on just a couple of Tampa-area screens, and only for a week, maybe two. The movie’s run was so short that even a video game geek like me didn’t have time to catch it.

That’s a shame, because it turns out director Seth Gordon’s documentary deserves a really wide audience. Even people who think they’d be bored to death by a film about a video game competition should be pleasantly surprised. (In fact, the flick was rated 96 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.)

I finally got a chance to check out “King of Kong” last week and really dug it. Very few documentaries I’ve ever seen have enjoyed the luxury of such a compelling narrative or such willingly cartoonish characters. And it was all a happy accident.

Gordon thought he was making a documentary about a historic head-to-head battle between the two greatest “Donkey Kong” players in competitive gaming. Instead, he unwittingly stepped into the middle of a long-established but insular subculture, just as it was suddenly being penetrated from the outside and starting to crumble.

In the arcade boom of the early 1980s, there was no better player than Billy Mitchell. He achieved record high scores on most of the classic games, including racking up 874,300 points on “Donkey Kong” in 1982. (And if you’ve ever played “Donkey Kong,” you’ll realize how impressive that is.) Mitchell’s “Donkey Kong” record stood for over 20 years … until Steve Wiebe came along.

The film follows Wiebe’s attempts to have his “Donkey Kong” scores officially acknowledged by the powers that be in competitive gaming. Trouble is, Mitchell turns out to be their ringleader. And he’ll go to extraordinary lengths to keep his records from being toppled. (I don’t want to include any spoilers, but you will not believe this guy.)

What transpires is a surprisingly captivating struggle between good and evil that just about anyone can relate to — geek or not. Gordon uses just the right touch, making you actually sympathize with a dude who literally sheds tears over a video game, and giving the bad guys just enough rope to hang themselves.

Even if you don’t give a damn about video games, it’s definitely worth checking out. But if you do, it’s essential.

“The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters” comes out on DVD today.