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Billy Mitchell Stripped of Scores, Banned from Premiere Scoreboard

posted by martyb on Friday April 13 2018, @12:26AM   
from the what-a-wicked-web-we-weave-when-first-we-practice-to-deceive dept.

DeathMonkey writes:

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.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/04/premiere-game-scoreboard-bans-billy-mitchell-in-donkey-kong-cheating-scandal/

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Original Submission

• Re:There's a lesion in here, kids: (Score: 1, Redundant) by Osamabobama on Friday April 13 2018, @05:46PM

  by Osamabobama (5842) on Friday April 13 2018, @05:46PM (#666542)

  I'm afraid I don't get the joke (whether or not it exists). If the MAME version used for cheating was current at the time of the cheat, how would keeping up to date have helped?

  There are three eras of MAME releases that are being referenced in this discussion, intentionally or otherwise:

  1. A version that was out of date at the time the fraudulent record was set
  2. The version that was up to date at the time the record was set
  3. The latest version of MAME

  Any updates would have meant the difference between 1 and 2. But possible glitches that provided evidence of cheating could also be in either 1 or 2, at least how that evidence is described in the summary.

  A passible joke would be to suggest that he could have gotten away with cheating if only he had updated to 3, because the glitch was fixed in that version. But it wasn't available at the time! (Get it?) Well, I suppose I get that joke, but I was assured it wasn't there.

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