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Guinness Reverses Decision to Strip Billy Mitchell’s Pac-Man and Donkey Kong Records

posted by martyb on Wednesday June 24 2020, @10:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the is-pluto-a-planet-or-not? dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

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."

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @07:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @07:06PM (#1012101)

    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.