Until recently, Billy Mitchell was a legend in the old school game world. But now his name
has disappeared from the ratings of gamers-record-holders, who scored a large number of points in various kinds of games, mainly arcade games. The organization that ranks and keeps them up to date is called Twin Galaxies.
Representatives of the organization last week said they would remove the name of Mitchell from all their registries. The one-of-a-kind record will be removed - three million points in Donkey Kong. Mitchell will not be taken into account in the preparation of ratings in the future, no matter what record he set.
The ex-record holder is a fairly well-known figure in the game world. In 2007, he even starred in the documentary
King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (“King
Kong: A Fistful of Quarters ”). In it, he talked about his love of games and how exactly he manages to set records.
But as it turned out, most of the narration is not true. The fact is that he was caught using the modified hardware that was used to achieve all new records. As far as can be understood, the ex-record holder also worked with modified software, called Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (
MAME ). The video below clearly shows what is said above.
Records in old games are governed by strict rules, due to the peculiarities of software and hardware of slot machines of the time. In the same game, you can achieve a variety of records, depending on the software version and platform.
In some cases we are talking about the minute difference in the achievements of two different players. In this case, it is carefully checked that it was used by gamers to achieve high results. The use of emulators is strictly prohibited, since the game process on such a system is different from the original. The rules of Twin Galaxies prohibited the use of emulators and copies of the hardware of the original systems. Only hardcore and original slot machines.
As far as you can understand, Mitchell broke the rules and did not use the original machine gun to achieve high results. For the first time a problem was noticed in a video recorded by Mitchell. Players noticed unusual artifacts when moving from level to level. These artifacts do not exist when using original systems. But if you work with emulators, they appear.
In Twin Galaxies they didn’t chop off the shoulder, but understood the problem in detail. And when the evidence has accumulated more than enough, then the name of Mitchell and it was decided failed from all the annals of the game world. “From the point of view of Twin Galaxies, it is very important to know whether the record was reached on the original software and hardware, or not. This allows you to maintain the competitiveness of the players, ”- stated in the final decision of the group.
Representatives of Twin Galaxies said that they are confident that Mitchell used non-original systems, so his records can not be taken into account. By the way, the first person to score more than 1 million points in the game Donkey Kong was “King of Kong” Steve Viebe.
Slot machine Donkey KongBut the record is already broken - Robbie Lakeman showed the best result with the number of points in 1247700. He set his record in February 2018.
By the way, Mitchell still remains the champion in the number of points scored in Pac-Man. Perhaps this record will be verified. Championship title in Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. He was lost by Mitchell earlier, when he had not yet been convicted of fraud. And then he returned it, reaching 1,062,800 points in Donkey Kong. As for Donkey Kong Jr., here Mitchell's record was 1,270,900 points.
The game
Donkey Kong was developed by Nintendo in 1981. She became one of the first projects of the then novice game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. It was the first use of the “save a girl out of trouble” script in video games, which later became a template and featured in many other computer games.