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Guinness reverses decision to strip Billy Mitchell's Pac-Man and Donkey Kong records:
Guinness World Records has reversed a 2018 decision to strip notorious arcade game figure Billy Mitchell's Pac-Man and Donkey Kong records. Mitchell, who was at the center of revered documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, says it's "a long time coming."
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Guinness Reverses Decision to Strip Billy Mitchell’s Pac-Man and Donkey Kong Records
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The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @03:44PM (5 children)
From the article:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @06:28PM (3 children)
So we wait for the Twin Galaxies suit to be over and see if Guinness changes its mind once again. This forum post [donkeykongforum.com] convinced me pretty well, which someone else referenced the last time this subject came up. They'd probably be better off just leaving the section blank.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @07:17PM
As far as Guinness goes, one of the issues there is that they trusted a 3rd party to make the determination. Regardless of whether or not Twin Galaxies was operating in good faith based upon the evidence in hand, it seems illl-advised for Guinness to rely so much on a 3rd party certification when they can and do have their own judges for other records.
I also realize that there have been other cases where the hardware just wasn't functioning properly just by chance giving people an unfair advantage. I can't recall the specific game, but I think it was one of these Pac Man records that had to be rescinded due to the matching operating more quickly than it was supposed to. The result being that there was less endurance required to hit a given level than normal, the result being that as long as the player could physically keep up with the faster play, that there was a greatly reduced demand for being awake to complete the record attempt.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @07:44PM (1 child)
The old argument was pretty convincing, yes.
The rebuttal in the new press release [apnews.com] however is not particularly convincing. It seems to center around the following quote from Todd Tuckey:
Assuming a typo and they meant emulation board instead of emulsion board... I can't believe this is the cornerstone of the argument. PC to JAMMA converters have existed for years, for instance here's archive.org's listing of one such converter from 2013 [archive.org]. Now, Donkey Kong isn't JAMMA... Donkey Kong PCB to JAMMA adapters are pretty easy to find but the reverse, JAMMA to Donkey Kong cabinet adapters, are a bit harder. But I found this video, also from 2013 [youtube.com] showing someone running a non-Donkey-Kong JAMMA board in a Donkey Kong arcade cabinet using a series of adapter boards.
I'm not sure these links are 100% solid proof that there "has never" been something that plugs into a Donkey Kong machine, but this is as much effort as I care to put into searching for something so trivial at the moment. It's also worth noting that 2013 is a lot more recent than the times the alleged cheating occurred, which are 2005 and 2007, and possibly also 2010 (I see some reference to hesitation to declare the 2010 score as obtained by cheating).
I will be somewhat disappointed if nobody bothers to more solidly disprove the "will never" part of the argument by hooking up modern hardware to a Donkey Kong arcade cabinet in 2020. Bonus internet points for specifically hooking up a PC running the version of MAME allegedly used to perform the cheating. Even more bonus points if the modern hardware somehow uses a mixture of oil and water for cooling, just in case they try to say "emulsion" isn't a typo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:10PM
That was an interesting post.
The "will never" part of the quote is not terribly relevant to the particular situation, but if it proves to be wrong, it may be an issue for future record attempts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @07:06PM
From the summary I found on Wikipedia, the allegations appear to be questionable. I don't know whether or not his attempts were legitimate, but it's clear that he is a player of the caliber necessary to achieve those scores. Achieving a perfect Pac Man score isn't an easy accomplishment, but is consistent with somebody that's capable of turning out a world-record performance of other arcade games.
They claim that it was played on a MAME set up, but it doesn't appear that it was ever proven and Billy did submit additional documentation on the run that was apparently discounted.
TBH, it does look, at least on the surface, like the record was inappropriately revoked by Twin Galaxies, and having the Guinness record returned is appropriate. Using information that wasn't publicly available about the referee as evidence that there's something questionable going on is rather dirty. Same goes for making a statistical analysis of a rare event and concluding that because it's unusual to score at that rate, that there is a problem. If you set a record, then it should be an unusual performance, otherwise, it wouldn't be a record.