Yea that is strange. I mean every time the DK arcade WR is broken, every news channel covers the story...heck there was news coverage for Steve Wiltshire going to the KO2 as a wildcard...but nothing at all for Dean's latest score.
You have to be careful to not mistake the occasional 2 minutes of drive-by mainstream gawking at competitive DK for people actually caring who has the highest score. Because they don't. They're tickled by
the idea that DK is played competitively, and that's what the point of the stories are. Nobody outside of the community actually cares about the state of the competition or who has the highest score(s) at the moment, except for those who just finished watching KoK and want to check in and see where Billy and Steve are since the movie.
Competitive DK is interesting to people, in a "wht da?" sort of way. You have the nostalgia/familiarity element, where everybody remembers the game from their childhood and throwing in quarters to play it for five minutes at a time, and, hey, weird, look at that, now you have these guys reviving this now-ancient game in competitions, going for hours on a quarter.
Hank made the news the first time he broke the record because the movie was somewhat recent and very popular, and Hank is interesting because he doesn't really fit the profile of a typical gamer. So it was "wow, this doctor came out of nowhere and beat the guys from the movie!" and that was the angle.
I don't know the circumstances, but I would say that Steve got on his local TV because they saw a fun human-interest story in it. (Actually, if ANY of us going to the KO wanted to push our local news we'd stand a pretty good chance of getting in there - DK/KO really works as a cool curiosity because of that universal familiarity.)
But again, you have to understand the true nature of public interest in DK and how/why it gets attention when it does. I'll put it this way: there were dozens of mainstream stories on the Kong Offs. How many stories were there about the
results of the Kong Offs? The story isn't "who won the Donkey Kong tournament", the story is that a Donkey Kong tournament happened.
Dean beating himself by 20K (on an emulator) is not something anyone in the real world would even understand, let alone have the slightest bit of interest in reading about. To be a story, there'd need to be something else to it.
