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One Of The Greatest Arcade Video Game Players Has High Scores Stripped

One Of The Greatest Arcade Video Game Players Has High Scores Stripped

Billy Mitchell achieved a lot in the 1980s and 90s but now that video game legacy is in tatters

Stewart Perrie

Stewart Perrie

Billy Mitchell was probably considered to be 'the greatest arcade video game player of all time'. That's not a title that's thrown around lightly.

While you might be killing it in Call of Duty, God of War, Fortnite, PUBG or whatever modern-day video game, it's a completely different skill to be the best at old school arcade games - and Billy was the guy.

For those that are wondering what the hell an arcade game is: 1. I pity you and 2. It includes the likes of Donkey Kong, Frogger, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Pong, Tetris and many, many more.

Instead of controllers these days, which have more than a dozen buttons, these relics from the past usually had just a joystick and two buttons to use. The graphics were absolutely shite if you compared them to modern games, but for kids and adults in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, it was revolutionary.

Billy Mitchell made a name for himself for notching incredibly high scores.

Datagod/Creative Commons

His first achievement was notching the highest overall score on Donkey Kong 886,900 in 1982. He was also the first ever player to reach the kill screen of the game. A year later the 52-year-old set a record by getting to level 256 in Pac-Man (he also managed to achieve a perfect score on the game with 3,333,360 points).

Billy also achieved records for Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong Junior and BurgerTime.

The dedicated bloke was selected to be one of the 'Video Game Players of the Year' by Twin Galaxies and the U.S. National Video Game Team and was even crowned 'Video Game Player of the Century' in 1999 by none other than Masaya Nakamura, the Namco founder.

But his legendary status has been torn down quicker than a millennial noob on Pac-Man because he's been found to have cheated.

via GIPHY

Twin Galaxies, an organisation that tracks video game world records, has concluded a months long investigation after a player called out Billy for messing with his system to get an advantage.

Jeremy Young lodged a complaint that Mitchell's high scores on Donkey Kong were bollocks - which is a pretty big accusation to level against the champ of arcade video games. Mitchell refused to play against Donkey Kong competitor Steve Wiebe in person and instead, to prove he was the king, he sent through a VHS tape showing he managed to get 1,047,200 points.

A Twin Galaxies statement says: "Jeremy's assertion concluded that not only can original Donkey Kong arcade hardware not produce the board transition images shown in the recordings, but that these transitions were actually generated through the use of MAME (emulation software.)

magnusdigity/Creative Commons

"The rules for submitting scores for the original arcade Donkey Kong competitive leaderboards requires the use of original arcade hardware only. The use of MAME or any other emulation software for submission to these leaderboards is strictly forbidden.

"Twin Galaxies administrative staff has unanimously decided to remove all of Billy Mitchell's' scores as well as ban him from participating in our competitive leaderboards."

While Mitchell hasn't been the actual record holder of Donkey Kong since 2010, he's considered one of the best because he notched those scores in the 1980s and 90s. But now that's all been undone, and his video game legacy is in tatters.

Featured Image Credit: Datagod/Creative Commons

Topics: video games, GAMING, News, Interesting, Technology