Billy Mitchell, The Gamer Made (In)Famous By 2007's 'King Of Kong,' Is Now Banned From Competitive Gaming
Update: On the morning of April 12th, Twin Galaxies announced that the organization's administrative staff chose unanimously to strip Billy Mitchell of all his record scores in "Donkey Kong" and other games, as well as ban him from submitting scores in the future. The decision came after a lengthy review process spurred by the evidence of foul play detailed in the article below. Twin Galaxies, which only accepts scores achieved on original arcade hardware, determined that Mitchell's 1,047,000 point "Donkey Kong" score (from "King of Kong") and his later 1,050,200 score were both achieved on unofficial hardware.
In their official statement, Twin Galaxies Administration added that they now recognize Steve Wiebe as the official first million point record holder in "Donkey Kong."
In Seth Gordon's 2007 documentary "The King of Kong," which chronicles the mid-2000s "Donkey Kong" high score rivalry between Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell, there's one part that reeks of a lack of sportsmanship on Mitchell's part. Now, over a decade later, it might show a proven instance of cheating.
The moment in question: Wiebe, in front of dozens of witnesses at the Funspot Family Fun Center arcade in New Hampshire, achieves a new "Donkey Kong" high score of 985,600 points, as recognized by the record-keeping organization Twin Galaxies. Upon receiving news of Wiebe's feat, Billy Mitchell — the cocky "Donkey Kong" prodigy with his own hot sauce brand — sends a video tape to New Hampshire. The tape purports to be footage of a 1,047,200 point game played by Mitchell. Despite the fact that Wiebe flew to New Hampshire to prove his abilities in a public forum after his tape of a 1,000,000+ point game was rejected, Mitchell's similarly documented score is immediately accepted as genuine by Twin Galaxies.
Last week, Mitchell was publicly accused of faking this and two later "Donkey Kong" high scores. The matter is currently being adjudicated by Twin Galaxies, which just settled another high profile score-faking scandal. To understand how Mitchell could have faked his scores and why it took so long for damning evidence to come to light, you've got to know how "Donkey Kong" really works and what's at stake.
What Is Twin Galaxies?
Twin Galaxies began keeping scores in 1981, making it one of the oldest organizations devoted to video games. Its founder, Walter Day, also ran game competitions at his new Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa and maintained a centerpiece "International Scoreboard" of high score records. Apart from Twin Galaxies, high score records were kept sporadically by game manufacturers and enthusiast magazines, often with a promotional tie-in hook (e.g. beat this score in our game and we'll send you some swag). Day and his collaborators were both guardians of competitive video game integrity and outgoing boosters for the scene.
As arcades closed up shop across the country, collectors and competitors started to scoop up genuine game cabinets, and Twin Galaxies work began to take on a more preservationist edge. Scorekeeping at Twin Galaxies had already progressed to the point where verifying the legitimacy of arcade hardware was a normal part of the process, but the insular community had to self-police. They did so well-enough and long-enough that Twin Galaxies eventually became an official partner of Guinness World Records.
Still, many reigning scores from the early days were sketchily sourced. Going into the '00s the vetting process for scores wasn't always consistently applied for established players… as with the case of Mitchell submitting his first million-plus "Donkey Kong" score on tape.
Why Are Billy Mitchell's Scores Being Scrutinized Now?
In the late '90s, the release of MAME (short for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) presented an alternative to buying original arcade machines. While MAME and other forms of emulation are a boon to game historians and casual players, by their nature emulators don't do perfect 1-to-1 recreations of the game experience generated by original hardware. On top of that, emulators commonly allow for easy manipulation of gameplay — cheating in MAME is a lot easier than cheating on an arcade machine. For scorekeeping purposes, scores achieved on an emulator are either put in a different category or at least accompanied by a caveat.
When Billy Mitchell submitted his taped 1,047,200 game that immediately dethroned Wiebe as the "Donkey Kong" world record-holder, he claimed the video was direct feed footage from an genuine arcade machine. There was no doubt about Mitchell having access to a genuine machine, but getting direct feed footage out of a "Donkey Kong" arcade cabinet is no small feat. You can't just plug a cable in the back and spit the feed out to a TV with a VCR — you've got to modify the machine. Doing so wouldn't compromise the legitimacy of the score, but there's got to be accompanying proof that the modification was done at all. Even the current world record holder Robbie Lakeman (who, funnily enough, was crowned just last Friday) streams playing the game on Twitch just by pointing a camera at the screen.
For years, Billy's claim of direct feed footage on this and his two subsequent world record scores remained suspicious to some. Still, the scores were only troubling for their relative lack of supporting evidence than for a betraying sign of foul play. That changed last week.
Jeremy Young, a Donkey Kong Forum moderator known as "xelnia," compiled a comprehensive breakdown of video evidence suggesting that Mitchell's three highest scores were generated in MAME. Young posted his breakdown to Twin Galaxies and the Donkey Kong Forum on February 2nd — that same day, he removed Mitchell's three games from the Donkey Kong Forum's own high score list. The post shows how the elements of a "Donkey Kong" stage first appear on screen in a different order depending on whether they're being generated by MAME or by real hardware, with snippets of Mitchell's games for comparison. In a few instances the difference is easy to spot: on MAME and in Mitchell's footage, Donkey Kong blinks into existence a frame too early or late.
On top of all this, for Mitchell's last two scores the only Twin Galaxies-associated witness present was Todd Rogers. Last month, Rogers became the first person to have all his high scores removed from Twin Galaxies records after a lengthy dispute process established that his long standing record in the Atari 2600 game "Dragster" was impossible to achieve.
Though Mitchell's "Donkey Kong" scores were far from impossible — today Mitchell's highest is nearly 200,000 points below the new world record — the way Mitchell racked up the points has also been called into question. Former world record holder Wes Copeland pointed out that a large percentage of Mitchell's end score came from an element of the game tied to random number generation (RNG):
It's plausible that Mitchell didn't just use MAME to play his high scoring games: he could have manipulated the randomness in the game or spliced together a seamless run from individual instances of good luck.
What Happens If Mitchell's Scores Are Disqualified?
At Kotaku, Heather Alexandra interviewed former Twin Galaxies officials in light of Young's evidence and Copeland's RNG analysis. One claimed to recall Mitchell making threatening remarks over the phone while his most recent score tape was evaluated. The idea that Mitchell took advantage of his good reputation in the arcade community (or worse, that he unscrupulously built that reputation) was popularized by the "King of Kong" documentary and director Seth Gordon's comments after the fact:
There was a whole sort of rehearsed legend of Billy that we were very persuaded by, and very excited by. And when we were putting the piece together, we arced out our own experience of him, including, as time went on, the sort of hypocrisy of his actions[…] Also, we were part of an elaborate chess game that he's been playing for 20 years with this group of guys, and we were uncovering stuff that I don't think he wanted uncovered.
Removing Mitchell's "Donkey Kong" scores would be a gesture towards Twin Galaxies' ultimate integrity, but not to its relevance — the organization is still synonymous with retro scorekeeping, but it has struggled to keep up in modern competitive gaming scenes like e-sports and speedrunning. The benefits of a central scorekeeper are hazy: redundancies exist in the sports world, and games as a medium have long-matured past the need for headline-grabbing world record boosterism. The Todd Rogers scandal was also overdue: people had long suspected Rogers of cheating but the organization took no significant action, allowing Rogers to reap the benefits of his prestige in the community for decades. If the same is true of Mitchell, Twin Galaxies will have to work doubly hard at repairing its reputation in the short term.
If Twin Galaxies rules that Mitchell faked these scores, they may also decide as they did with Rogers to remove all of Mitchell's high scores in other games, including "Donkey Kong Jr." and "Pac-Man." Last night, Mitchell took to an obscure live webshow to respond to the allegations of cheating but offered no hard evidence of his "Donkey Kong" scores' legitimacy. Instead he announced he's making a "sequel" to "King of Kong." If Mitchell is deemed guilty of any wrongdoing he can expect that his regular invitations to conventions and signings — at least high profile ones — will dry up. He stands to lose a source of income on top of his reputation.
Mitchell was, by all accounts, a legitimate video game prodigy in the '80s. At the Donkey Kong Forum, the last high score Mitchell achieved in public remains on the leaderboard. It ranks 47th.
This article was originally published on February 7th, 2018 under the title "Billy Mitchell, The Gamer Made (In)Famous By 2007's 'King Of Kong,' Might Have Cheated For His Best Scores".
