The community of retrogaming enthusiasts – that is, those who play old video games today – was recently shaken by the undoing of some historical records made by Billy Mitchell, who in 1999 was called “the video game player of the century”. Mitchell, now 52, was considered the first to score more than a million points in Donkey Kong, a popular platform arcade video game from the early 1980s, where you must overcome several obstacles to save a girl from the clutches of a child. bad gorilla.
An internal investigation by Twin Galaxies, the reference organization for retrogaming records, nullified Mitchell's records by claiming that he did them through an emulator – a program that recreates old games on new platforms or on recent computers – and that , perhaps, he cheated in other ways as well. Mitchell also had records in other video games, most notably a very important one at Pac-Man – they were all canceled.
For a record to be validated by Twin Galaxies, you need to put a video of the game online, respect certain rules (for example, play the original version of the game, not an emulator) and wait for the approval of other experienced users of the game. Mitchell's records at Donkey Kong had been considered valid for several years, but have not been for a few days anymore. Twin Galaxies is the benchmark for many Guinness World Record video game records, which consequently took away the accolades it had given to Mitchell.
The story is rather complicated and the Washington Post and the New York Times have also dealt with it, which wrote: “It is clearly a case for which the phrase” it's just a game “is not at all appropriate”.
To begin with, two things to know about how Donkey Kong works: the protagonist – the one who would later become Mario – must pass various levels to reach and defeat the gorilla. It is a game that although it has a “kill screen”, a screen where everything ends, does not have a maximum score beyond which it is impossible to go: depending on the development of the game you can score more or less points. As Polygon wrote, the game “still fascinates today because, even if you can't make a game last indefinitely, you still don't know what the maximum possible score is”. In Pac-Man, on the other hand, there is a score beyond which it is impossible to go: there is no way to do the 255 “levels” provided by making more than 3,333,360 points. Doing so means playing the “perfect match”.
Mitchell, who now runs a restaurant chain and produces a hot sauce, made his name in the gaming community as early as 1982 when, the year after Donkey Kong's release, he was the first to hit the “kill screen”. moment in which «the programming of the videogame exceeds the limits of the hardware it uses to function». In 1999, at a live event in Japan, Mitchell was the first to make the perfect match at Pac-Man, and in 2005 he broke the million points at Donkey Kong for the first time. Mitchell then became a stranger in the video game community, but also a little outside: some video game documentaries talked about him – Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade (2007), The King of Arcades (2014), and Man Vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler (2016) – and, in particular, a 2007 documentary, The King of Kong, which chronicled the rivalry between him and Steve Wiebe, a professor who managed to surpass one million shortly after Mitchell.
The documentary was clearly rooting for Wiebe, a quiet dude, and featured Mitchell as a braggart. Mitchell is known for a great passion for patriotic ties and the three letters he uses to score his video game charts are USA. Wiebe often challenged Mitchell to live matches, but Mitchell never agreed.
Already the documentary spoke of the doubts of many about certain Mitchell records. But things started to move in February 2018, when Jeremy Young, a member of Twin Galaxies, talked about the possible fraud in a dedicated community forum. On April 12, the decision came: Twin Galaxies says it has ascertained, by analyzing the videos posted online by Mitchell, that the game was played with an emulator and that perhaps the videos have also been modified in various ways. So not only were the records made on an “illegal” platform, perhaps they were never even really made. The decision concerns three different scores over a million points, all in Donkey Kong: it came after having the videos analyzed by several independent parties (a proposal by Mitchell) and after having ascertained the absence of reliable witnesses. The question, with all its technicalities, has also been much debated on the Donkey Kong Forum (yes, it exists).
Mitchell responded to the disqualification by saying, in a video posted on YouTube, that he has never used emulators and that it is a “stupid” decision. He also said that while he hasn't played Donkey Kong in a while, he'll work hard to show that he's capable of over 1 million points.
Wiebe, the 49-year-old professor, has meanwhile officially become the first to score more than a million points in Donkey Kong. He said: “It is a great pleasure to finally see me recognized the thing”.
