Author: Jeff Grubb / Source: VentureBeat
He once was the king of Donkey Kong, but one of the world’s most famous gamers has just lost all of his records in the wake of a cheating scandal. Score-keeping site Twin Galaxies has finished its investigation of Billy Mitchell, who was the subject of the hit documentary King of Kong, and it has determined that he did misrepresent how he played Nintendo’s arcade classic in his three highest-scoring runs.
“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,” reads a statement. “We have notified the Guinness World Records of our decision.
”Mitchell came to prominence in the 1980s for his arcade skills. He was the first person to ever accomplish a perfect game in Pac-Man, which means he earned the maximum points allowed by the rules and the programming. But he broke into the mainstream as one of the primary stars of King of Kong, in which he battled over the world record for Donkey Kong with upstart player Steve Wiebe. In that film, Wiebe scored over 1 million points, but he faced resistance from a Twin Galaxies organization that was close and protective of Mitchell. By the end of the film, Mitchell was able to recapture the high score, but more than a decade later, Donkey Kong fans were able to prove that run was at least dishonest and potentially cheating.
The core infraction in this case is that Mitchell submitted three scores played on emulation software that he claimed he played on original Donkey Kong arcade hardware. That misrepresentation is enough to pull his scores, but it also opens a massive window for cheating because emulation software has built-in tools to make games easier.
Donkey Kong player and fan Jeremy Young submitted the evidence with a detailed technical breakdown. He was able to show that Mitchell’s recorded gameplay footage rendered in way that is divergent from original arcade hardware but exactly the same as certain versions of the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) that were in use at the time.
“Twin Galaxies has meticulously tested and investigated the dispute case assertions as…
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