Billy Mitchell Has Been Stripped Of All His Donkey Kong And Pac-Man High Scores By Twin Galaxies
Polygon- All of the high scores of Billy Mitchell, the longtime Donkey Kong and Pac-Man champion, have been thrown out by Twin Galaxies, following a review of seven-year-old footage that determined three of his million-point high scores had been falsified.
Twin Galaxies, the high score-sanctioning authority whose history practically begins with Mitchell’s career in the early 1980s, announced the decision early this morning. It concludes a lengthy review of a challenge brought in early February against Mitchell’s 1,062,800-point performance of July 31, 2010, which had long raised suspicion in the Donkey Kong high score community. “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,” Twin Galaxies said in a statement.
The challenger, Jeremy Young of Donkey Kong Forum, alleged that Mitchell had produced his scores — including the first million-point game in Donkey Kong history — using an emulator instead of an original Donkey Kong motherboard. The implication was that Mitchell had spliced in videotaped footage of an emulated playthrough and passed it off as a performance on an original Donkey Kong cabinet. The emulation allegation is important because, with an emulator, a player could modify the game’s parameters, preserve save states and revisit them to undo an adverse outcome, or alter other variables that are not part of the game on its original hardware. The evidence Young presented came in a frame-by-frame analysis of how the game Mitchell was playing rendered the stages during the transition between levels. Young alleged that the way in which objects appeared in the girder stages are only drawn that way in emulated versions of Donkey Kong. On a native motherboard, they are rendered differently.
DOWN GOES MITCHELL!!! DOWN GOES MITCHELL!!! Since I am on paternity leave the next two weeks, I’ve been trying to avoid blogging and going on social media too much since the baby and the wife need my attention. There were only a certain amount of stories that would get me on the blog since free time comes and goes at a moment’s notice and I’m pretty close to Noodle Status. Jeff Hornacek getting fired as Knicks coach qualified as one of those stories. So would the Giants trading the number 2 pick or Odell Beckham Jr. And Billy Mitchell getting erased from the Twin Galaxies history books is definitely another. Today is a day that will live in infamy in the gaming industry akin to Barry Bonds somehow being stripped the home run record after captivating the baseball world because people didn’t like him and pretty much everything that was written in Game of Shadows.
Now I understand that this is kind of a niche blog with technical gaming terms that will cause some Stoolies’ brains to bleed. But for anybody that has had the privilege of watching The King Of Kong knows that Billy Mitchell is the greatest villain in video game history. And those that haven’t watched King of Kong need to watch it if they have 80 minutes to burn. Watch it right now even if you don’t 80 minutes. If your boss or teacher has a problem with it, have them tweet me @TheClemReport so I can weaponize social media against them. Okay don’t do that. But watch the movie at your earliest convenience.
Anybody that has watched that movie knows that Donkey Kong ain’t got SHIT on Billy Mitchell. Same goes for Bowser, Ganon, Dr. Robotnik, M. Bison, or any other video game villain you can come up with. I mean listen to these quotes.
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Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Steve Wiebe guy. #WiebeHiveForLife. The malfeasance that occurred to him in King of Kong rivals almost anything that has happened in cinematic history. But a great villain moves the needle. And Billy Mitchell not only moved that needle, but he stuck it in Steve Wiebe’s eye and up Steve’s ass then dumped some of his incredible hot sauce in the open wounds. If you can’t appreciate that, you probably rooted against The Rock when he was a heel, get angry every time LaVar Ball causes a shit storm, and yell at your computer whenever Pres laughs at another sport site’s misfortune. Seeing Billy Mitchell lose his records and high scores is great for everyone that loves when the bad guy loses. But it’s terrible for anybody that can appreciate the bad guys like Tony Montana, who will stunt on the Rose Bowl Parade in while wearing All White Everything.
I can’t wait to see what Billy Mitchell has up his sleeve for a comeback since Billy Mitchell always has a plan. Putting him in a corner only makes him more dangerous, like a wolverine or a badger. If Billy wants to kick off that comeback on an episode of Gametime, I will have Office Manager Brett order a Donkey Kong arcade game for HQ right this moment. Seems like the least we could do for the greatest video game villain we will ever see in pixelated or real life form.
#Gangsta