Author: Colin Dwyer / Source: NPR.org
Billy Mitchell, an arcade virtuoso whose symphonies with the joystick once won him the title “Video Game Player of the Century,” has been cast down from the heights of the high score lists.
The organization that tracks video game world records announced Thursday that it is removing his records and banning him from future leaderboards.Twin Galaxies has concluded — after an investigation lasting more than two months — that Mitchell set some of his best-known records on improperly modified software, not the original, unmodified arcade games mandated under the organization’s rules.
Among those stripped records is the one that arguably gained him his greatest fame: his 1,047,200-point performance in Donkey Kong, which made him the first to crack a million points in the 1981 classic and which played a pivotal role in the 2007 documentary The King of Kong.
That score gave him the advantage in his rivalry with Steve Wiebe, the man who had been striving to topple Mitchell from the top spot he had owned off and on for some two decades. But it never quite quieted skeptics’ suspicions, especially given the fact that it had been recorded in private.
Now, more than a decade…
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