Mitchell's perfect Pac-Man score dropped by Guinness

LACONIA — Deposed Donkey Kong King Billy Mitchell has now also lost his place in the Guinness Book of World Records for becoming the first person to achieve a perfect score of 3,333,360 points on Pac-Man, the arcade video game.

Mitchell set the record on July 3, 1999, at Funspot, and it was regarded as the signature achievement of his long and now controversial gaming career, which gained him a cult following and saw him described by many as the greatest arcade video game player of all time.

All of Mitchell’s records on Twin Galaxies, an organization that tracks video game records and high scores, were removed last week. They included a 1,062,800-point score for the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong, as well as scores set between 2005 and 2007.

The action came following a dispute earlier this year claiming that many games were performed using an arcade emulator. The ruling, which came after a lengthy arbitration process, also bans Mitchell from further participation on the leaderboards, bringing an end to the King of Kong star’s high-score glory.

Using an emulator is explicitly against the rules for Donkey Kong arcade scores, which require proof that the player was using a legitimate arcade cabinet as well as showing footage of the player using the cabinet during play. The recording must also show that the cabinet settings have not been altered to give advantages, something that can be done easily with emulated gameplay.

“Based on the complete body of evidence presented in this official dispute thread, Twin Galaxies administrative staff has unanimously decided to remove all of Billy Mitchell’s scores as well as ban him from participating in our competitive leaderboards,” the staff said in a forum post.

Speaking from a video gaming event in Milwaukee Sunday, Mitchell vowed to set the record straight and provide proof that he had not used an emulator.

Officials at Funspot declined to comment on the Mitchell-Twin Galaxies dispute.

“It’s between Billy Mitchell and Twin Galaxies. We’re not involved in it at all,” said Gary Vincent, a member of the management team at Funspot and president of the American Classic Arcade Museum, which has more than 300 classic games from the 1970s and 1980s available to the public at Funspot, which is the world’s largest arcade.

On May 8, 1999, during Funspot’s First International Classic Video & Pinball Tournament, Rick Fothergill, of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, grabbed headlines with CNN, Associated Press, the Boston Phoenix, Boston Globe, and CBS Radio Network News, when he fell a mere 90 points short of a perfect game, scoring 3,333,270 points.

“This is, possibly, the most difficult feat to accomplish in the world of video game playing,” said Walter Day, chief scorekeeper at the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard, after Fothergill’s achievement.

Vincent recalls that Mitchell showed up less than a month later at Funspot, determined to have an American hold first place.

“It was unbelievable,” said Vincent at that time.  “Mitchell purposefully arrived on July 1st — Canada’s Day — and won the title in time for the Fourth of July. He even wore a red, white and blue, a Star Spangled Banner tie to emphasize the patriotic sentiments behind his efforts.”

Mitchell, who refused to eat until he beat the Canadians for the world record, went hungry for nearly two full days.

“I had to be first,” Mitchell explained afterwards. “It’s like Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. No matter how many people accomplish the feat afterwards, it will always be Armstrong who will be remembered for doing it first. And, best of all, he was an American.”

With a camcorder supplied by Funspot bearing down over his shoulder, Mitchell’s every last move was taped for posterity — if not, at least, for irrefutable proof of the achievement. After the exhausting six-hour game was over, Mitchell backed away from the game in disbelief and then did the improbable: he announced his permanent retirement from playing Pac-Man.

“I never have to play that darn game again,” he sighed in relief. “There’s nothing more I can accomplish.”

Throughout the early 2000s and 2010s, Mitchell was a frequently sought-after interview subject for documentaries on the worlds of competitive gaming and retro gaming.

He was the subject of the 2007 documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, which tells the story of newcomer Steve Wiebe's attempt to surpass Mitchell's high score at the game Donkey Kong, which Mitchell had set in 1982.

Mitchell never showed up to play the game in the film, though he states the importance of playing in public, saying, “To me, most important is to travel to a sanctioned location, like Funspot that makes it official; if tomorrow Tiger Woods golfs a 59, big deal. If he does it at Augusta, that’s where it counts.”

Throughout the film, Wiebe traveled to various locations, including Funspot, to play him publicly, and each time Mitchell refused.

More controversy arose when, at Funspot, Wiebe set the Donkey Kong live score record and was given official recognition, something he did not receive for sending in a tape in which he scored the first million-point game on record. A few hours later, Mitchell submitted a tape in which he scored more than a million points, and Wiebe lost his record.

In Mitchell's hometown later on, Wiebe waited for four days to play Mitchell, who showed up one day and refused to play against Wiebe. Mitchell offered no explanation for his behavior toward Wiebe but later explained that, at the time of filming, he had not played video games for “more than a year” and that the filmmakers had not given him enough advance warning to train for a public record-breaking attempt

At the film’s conclusion, Wiebe beats Mitchell’s score to gain a new Donkey Kong record on tape.

A VHS tape that Mitchell gives to Wiebe during the course of the documentary proved to be instrumental in the investigation into Mitchell's 2007 score, with the team that led the investigation citing the film’s DVD extras as a crucial piece of evidence.

Jeremy Young, the person who challenged Mitchell earlier this year, said his claim centered on the fact that arcade cabinets load Donkey Kong levels from one side of the screen to the other, while MAME loads them in large chunks. Looking at level transitions, he concluded that Mitchell’s level transitions were consistent with those occurring in MAME.

Using that evidence, Twin Galaxies determined that at least two of Mitchell’s scores were achieved via emulation. Among those scores are the infamous “King of Kong” score of 1,047,200.

In 2005, Mitchell sent a low-quality VHS tape with that score to Funspot shortly after Wiebe had surpassed Mitchell’s earlier first-place score. Twin Galaxies also specifically voided a 1,050,200 score achieved live on July 13, 2007, at the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers in Orlando, Florida.

Mitchell has denied Young’s charges.  Speaking on the East Side Dave Show, he said, “I’ve never even played MAME. I don’t have MAME loaded in my home.”

Mitchell continues by saying, “The film footage that he has, that Jeremy has, shows MAME play…. I’m not disputing what he says. What I’m disputing is the fact that I want him to have the original tape.”

Mitchell has criticized Young’s analysis as being from an altered tape that otherwise matches Mitchell's gameplay pixel-for-pixel, to which Young responds, “The amount of foresight, patience, and technical knowledge required to make such tapes would be staggering.”