After months of investigation and research, Twin Galaxies accepts a dispute claim against Donkey Kong record holder Billy Mitchell and strips him of his records.
Donkey Kong record holder Billy Mitchell holds a few big score records for the original arcade game: 1,047,200 (the King of Kong “tape”), 1,050,200 (the Mortgage Brokers score), and 1,062,800 (the Boomers score). However, back in August, Twin Galaxies member Jeremy Young (@xelnia) filed a dispute claim against the validity of these performances.
Young argued that the original Donkey Kong arcade hardware can’t produce the board transition images shown in the recordings and that the transitions were actually generated through the use of an emulation software called MAME, which is strictly forbidden when submitting scores to the competitive leaderboards. The official dispute thread contains Young’s evidence and is open to public scrutiny and review.
After many months of research, testing, and debate, Twin Galaxies’ administration has accepted Young’s dispute and Mitchell’s scores have been removed from its leaderboards. Mitchell has also been banned from participating in Twin Galaxies’ competitive leaderboards – a unanimous decision. Twin Galaxies has also informed Guinness World Records of its decision.
According to the official statement from Twin Galaxies, at least two different third parties also conducted their own research and came to the exact same conclusions. One of these third parties was Carlos Pinerio, whom Mitchell asked to help examine the dispute case claims on his behalf.
During the evidence gathering period of the dispute, various experts, hobbyists, and casual observers also participated and contributed to the investigation. Below are Twin Galaxies’ specific findings:
For Twin Galaxies, the most important takeaway from all this research was that the score performances were not from an original unmodified Donkey Kong Arcade PCB.
Throughout the entire investigation, Mitchell was given the chance to answer questions and contribute to the public dispute thread, but was under no obligation to participate and he chose not to.
In its statement, Twin Galaxies emphasizes it is evaluating score performances, not people, and that “we care very much about our scoreboard integrity and will continue to improve it step-by-step, no matter how painful or public it might occasionally be.”
Twin Galaxies will now recognize Steve Wiebe as the official first million point Donkey Kong record holder.
