Twin Galaxies, the long-running video game high score tracker recognized by Guinness World Records, has banned Billy Mitchell and removed all of his past scores from its listings after determining that two million-plus-point Donkey Kong performances he submitted were actually created with an emulator and not on original arcade hardware as he consistently claimed. The move means that the organization now recognizes Steve Wiebe as the first player to achieve a million-point game in Donkey Kong, a question central to the 2007 cult classic documentary The King of Kong.
Nearly two months ago, Mitchell's scores were also removed from the leaderboards at Donkey Kong Forum. Forum moderator Jeremy "Xelnia" Young cited frame-by-frame analysis of the board transitions in Mitchell's Donkey Kong tapes, which showed visual artifacts suggesting they were generated by early versions of the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) and not original Donkey Kong arcade hardware.
[...] The ban has no effect on the current world record in Donkey Kong, which currently sits at the 1.247 million points [score] set by Robbie Lakeman in February.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 13 2018, @01:09PM (3 children)
The Soviets didn't lose the space race, the moon wasn't the goal until the US moved the posts and said it was.
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Friday April 13 2018, @02:27PM (2 children)
More accurately, the Soviets didn't lose the space race because every "space first" (first satellite, first manned flight, first manned orbit, first probe to the moon, first probe to another planet, first useful space program that actually did something besides explode, etc.) except "first man on the moon" was achieved by the Soviets. They were simply space awesomesauce.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday April 13 2018, @03:05PM (1 child)
Including the first people to die in space [wikipedia.org] :/ And a few dogs.
If the N1 [wikipedia.org] had worked better instead of its innards ripping apart and catching fire whenever they launched it they would've had half a shot at beating us to the moon, even.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday April 13 2018, @05:29PM
To be fair, there have also been quite a few American lives lost in our efforts to master space travel. Difficult and dangerous objectives come with a risk attached. That the Russians have had casualties - perhaps in their haste to beat the US, or simply because of accidents that could not be foreseen - doesn't diminish their achievements in space.