Cheating in video games is nothing new. Heck, cheating in any competitive environment isn’t exactly a recent phenomenon. When it comes to video games, there are a number of people who take high scores and record times very seriously. Modern Twitch streamers develop followings and revenue for their abilities and prowess. Before livestreaming, arcade high scores could lead to notoriety and fame.
Enter Billy Mitchell, who used to hold the record for the highest score in Nintendo’s arcade classic “Donkey Kong.” Yes, he’s who Peter Dinklage‘s “Pixels” character is based on. Mitchell has been facing allegations of cheating for decades (including being stripped of his records). But a recently unearthed photo is adding new fuel to that fire.
In the 2007 documentary “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters,” Mitchell is featured as the reigning champion of “Donkey Kong.” His record is being threatened by Steve Wiebe, who is ultimately thwarted by Mitchell via a videotaped play session. The docu itself features some question about the tape’s validity but ultimately Mitchell retains his crown and is given a place in the “Guinness Book of World Records.”
Losing the Record (kinda)
Since then, numerous critiques of Mitchell have come into play which eventually led to Guinness removing his records along with Twin Galaxies (the official supplier of video game records to Guinness) in 2018. Mitchell sued for defamation. While Guinness relented and reinstated his records, Twin Galaxies has not. They have been standing by their belief elements of Mitchell’s play indicate his records were achieved via an emulator, and not on original hardware.
This has also been the position of video game speedrunner Karl Jobst, who has made numerous videos on the subject. He too is also being sued by Mitchell.
New Evidence of Cheating
The most recent piece of evidence comes from an unearthed photo of Mitchell attending the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers (FAMB) Convention in 2007. The 80s theme of the event featured Mitchell playing “Donkey Kong,” and allegedly getting a new record score. Mitchell even cited this event as “proof” Twin Galaxies was in the wrong for removing his scores. Fellow gamer Todd Rogers was in attendance, and claims the machine used was an original “Donkey Kong” cabinet.
This would be a good time to note Rogers has also been accused of cheating, and also had his scores removed from Twin Galaxies.
The Joystick
So what’s with the photo that suggests something’s up? The joystick. An original “Donkey Kong” cabinet has a short, black topped, four directional joystick. The one in the photograph of the cabinet Mitchell used on however is a longer reddish joystick and eight directional. How does this matter? Well, if you’ve played “Donkey Kong” you know that a lot of movement in the levels involves ladders. When you have four directions to move in, up, down, left, and right, the transition from moving vertical to sideways can be a bit stiff. But with a joystick that can register diagonal movement, this can smooth that out. Advanced “Donkey Kong” players know that by pressing left or right on the joystick, you can alter the path of Donkey Kong’s barrels to go down or bypass a ladder as the obstacles come towards them.
The different joystick also begs the question of what else could have been changed? Arcade circuit boards can be swapped in and out of cabinets. If the joystick is different, is it possible that a modified ROM of the original game was being played? Even if it wasn’t altered, the joystick alone would provide an advantage that playing on original hardware would not.
The gaming community is pretty adamant about rules like this where barring certain exceptions, you can’t use modified software or hardware to obtain a record for specific versions of a game. In other words, if you’re emulating “Donkey Kong” on the MAME emulator, your record gets put into a different category than the arcade version. And if you’re doing things that the original input device for the game would not allow you to do, your run doesn’t count for the arcade version either.
Even MORE Evidence
There are more allegations and pieces of purported evidence that are more complicated than the joystick. It’s suggested that the way the screen transitions load from level to level are proof that Mitchell was playing on an emulator for his taped world records. The levels load onto the screen differently when emulated as opposed to when loaded on the original game board. Again, all of these pieces of “evidence” are not proof of cheating and we’re not saying that Mitchell’s scores aren’t legitimate. The differing joysticks is an anomaly though that could significantly alter the course of this case.
Or in other words, this thing could really throw a barrel into the proceedings.
