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A Guy Seems To Have Gone To Great Lengths To Fake Video Game Scores
Gaming culture is serious business these days, so being known as the world's best Donkey Kong player can earn you some decent cash, if not large piles of sex. Some of you already know that back in 2007, we got the famous documentary film The King Of Kong, about one man's valiant effort to take the title of World's Greatest Donkey Konger away from another man. That other man was Billy Mitchell, presented in the film as a bit of a villainous type, but dammit if he wasn't good at what he did.
The first guy, Steve Wiebe, played an amazing high-score run before a live audience. His incredible score was 985,600! Is that high? Yes! It is! But then Mitchell, who didn't bother to attend, sent in a VHS tape of his own run in which he achieved a score of 1,047,200. Ahh, shit nuggets. He's the champ and his title holds up and he literally gets into the Guinness Book of World Records.
Now fast-forward to 2018, and Billy Mitchell's score has been booted out of any official accounting of Donkey Kong records. Not because it was beaten (though it was), but because it was utter bullshit. Mitchell was not the King of Kong, he was the King of Dong. Or Con. Con's a better joke. But he also sounds like he was being a bit of a dick, too.
Twin Galaxies, the organization that tracks video game world records, dropped Mitchell like a hot potato after people started investigating his record more closely. High scores recorded on video aren't supposed to be allowed, so this was already a shady play. But people began to pick through the video with a fine-toothed comb, literally frame by frame, and discovered irregularities. It gets a bit technical here, but in the split-second the levels loaded, it appears he was using an emulator -- software designed to look like the original but programmed later with newer technology. If so, that meant he hadn't played on a legit arcade machine, even though what he was playing on looked like one.
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