This week we have given you A LOT of coverage of the players who competed at The Kong Off 2011 at Richie Knucklez Arcade Games. And while all the Donkey Kong play was great, there were some other cool stories that were playing out too. One of those stories was 11 year old Zach of PA who was working on beating his own world record score of 177,440 on Ice Cold Beer. Us n00bers were introduced to Ice Cold Beer for the first time while up there and it’s a pretty cool game – I kind of equate it to the old Labyrinth game where you try to navigate a marble to the end goal but avoiding the holes along the way. Only this time it’s straight up vertical instead of being parallel to the ground.

When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time playing Labyrinth so I was hoping to get a chance on Ice Cold Beer when Zach was done. Unfortunately for me, he was on the machine for the entire time we were up in New Jersey! And in case you were wondering – He DESTROYED his old score posting a new record of 300,320!

What’s interesting about the above footage is that we never got Zach speaking on tape! We got Steve Wiebe, Hank Chien, Vincent Lemay, Eric Howard… And we couldn’t get this guy. When we approached his machine, it was clear that Zach was there for business and there was no chance we were going to be the ones to throw him off his game.

We did however talk to his mom Lora for a good bit and it was SO cool to see a mother that supportive of her son playing video games! And by supportive I’m talking about Lora staying by the cabinet for the entire length of the game, (which lasts for hours in their case) and constantly jotting down Zach’s score, because as you can see in the video – There’s only space for 4 digits, which also had Lora constantly calling for an official to come over and verify every time the score rolled over.

So later on after The Kong Off when we heard about Zach’s new world record, we had to send him some accolades and weren’t we surprised when he and his mom put together for us to share on the site… Finally we get to hear the man speak! Congrats to Zach and his awesomely supportive parents!