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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Guinness Strips Billy 'King of Kong' Mitchell's World Records (engadget.com) 58

In February, legendary arcade gamer Billy Mitchell was accused of cheating his way into the record books for high scores in Donkey Kong. As a result, he was stripped of his 1.062 million score on the Donkey Kong Forums. Today, Kotaku reports that "Guinness World Records will remove Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong scores, as well as his records for Pac-Man, from their database following Mitchell's disqualification from the Twin Galaxies leaderboards yesterday." From the report: Mitchell is one of the world's most famous arcade game players, at one time holding world records in Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, and Pac-Man. Yesterday, all of Mitchell's records were removed from the leaderboards at Twin Galaxies, an organization that tracks video game records and high scores. The decision came after a lengthy arbitration process determined that Mitchell used the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) to achieve some record scores that had been said to be performed on arcade machines, a violation of Twin Galaxies' rules. In light of this, Guinness World Records will also remove his records.

"The Guinness World Records titles relating to Mr. Mitchell's highest scores on Donkey Kong have all been disqualified due to Twin Galaxies being our source of verification for these achievements," a representative of Guinness told Kotaku via email. Mitchell did not return request for comment. Guinness continued, "We also recognize records for First perfect score on Pac-Man and Highest score on Pac-Man. Twin Galaxies was the original source of verification for these record titles and in line with their decision to remove all of Mr. Mitchell's records from their system, we have disqualified Mr. Mitchell as the holder of these two records. Guinness World Records will look to update and find the appropriate holder of these records in the next few days."

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Guinness Strips Billy 'King of Kong' Mitchell's World Records

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  • Timely (Score:2, Funny)

    by Frosty Piss ( 770223 ) *

    I see Slashdot is right on top of the important things in tech!

    • Re:Timely (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 13, 2018 @04:36PM (#56433961)

      On the bright side, this definitely IS news for nerds.

    • slashdot hosts news for nerds and the majority of speedrunners are nerds.
      lately it started being a safe place for something-gender-something, but those who are still thinking outside of their gender are mostly nerds.

    • Re:Timely (Score:5, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday April 13, 2018 @06:31PM (#56434427) Homepage Journal

      It is timely, actually. Competition for these kinds of records has really heated up in the last decade or so, with the rise of video streaming and communities and events.

      Tech has got better too. A lot of the games have been disassembled and understood, enabling players to develop new techniques.

      It's been there since the 80s but the popularity and rate at which records have been broken is at an all time high.

      And now one of the biggest names from the old guard has fallen, thanks to advances in fraud detection.

  • The top achievement in the PacMan android app [google.com] happens to be titled "Be Like Billy!".

    Something tells me this app might be updated soon...

  • Twin galaxies have been giving settler to both Billy and Todd for over 20 years. Now that the truth is out TG is treated as if nothing has happened.
    Those two were helping each other to have their records verified without any proof for so many years and nobody from TG suspected anything.
    Billy and Todd have milked the cow that they were offered by those fake scores, they earned money, they f'ed itches, and they had a good life.
    What about TG? TG is still here, they have taken no blame from various famous speed

    • Twin Galaxies is part of the high scores community, not the speedrunning community. There's actually less overlap than you'd think - partially because TG was widely seen as not up to the standards of the speedrunners. (Other reasons are just the different game eras - TG/highscores tend to be pre-NES while speedruns are primarily NES and later)

      The new crop of management at TG definitely seems to be headed the right direction, but I don't think most people have forgiven them yet. It's been a common criticism

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Twin Galaxies is part of the high scores community, not the speedrunning community. There's actually less overlap than you'd think - partially because TG was widely seen as not up to the standards of the speedrunners. (Other reasons are just the different game eras - TG/highscores tend to be pre-NES while speedruns are primarily NES and later)

        The new crop of management at TG definitely seems to be headed the right direction, but I don't think most people have forgiven them yet. It's been a common criticism

  • He beat Pac-Man on camera at Funspot. That record is not in doubt.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I don't think any of this is official. Or any of it matters. At all.

    • Re:Pac-Man (Score:5, Informative)

      by gman003 ( 1693318 ) on Friday April 13, 2018 @07:26PM (#56434609)

      Some of the faked DK runs were *also* on camera - but they were indisputably faked. It seems that Billy was recording runs in MAME (editing either recorded inputs as in a TAS, or just splicing the video) and then playing them back on a screen while pretending to be playing. There's no proof the Pacman runs were faked but there's also no proof they were legit, since Billy is clearly not above cheating. Given the nature of the contest, it seems prudent to err on the side of caution and revoke all his records.

  • He didn't reply in detail, but promised proofs in the future.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

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