Re: Pac-Man Perfect Game Fifth Anniversary
Robin Brouwer
Robin
"Kurt Evans" <everythin...@hotmail.com> schreef in bericht
news:c0bb1b1d.04070...@posting.google.com...
> * This afternoon I was visiting with one of my friends from church
> and discovered we had a common interest in early video games. My
> interest is primarily in classic coin-ops while his is more on the
> side of home systems, and he hadn't heard about Billy Mitchell's
> perfect game of Pac-Man.
>
> As I started to tell the story of how Billy viewed his endeavor
> as an effort to put the "Johnny-come-lately" Canadians in their place,
> I remembered that he'd intentionally scheduled his attempt at the
> perfect game around the Fourth of July holiday.
>
> Lo and behold, the date of the perfect game was July 3, 1999:
> exactly five years ago today.
>
> So what's everyone doing to celebrate? :-)
>
> Kurt
>
> ====================
> Wall Street Journal
> July 12, 1999
>
> In baseball, a perfect game is 27 batters faced and 27
> retired--no hits, walks or errors. It's been done 15 times in
> history, and usually takes between two and three hours.
>
> In the classic video game Pac-Man, a perfect game means
> maneuvering the title character (a phosphorescent pie with a missing
> slice for a mouth) so that he eats every dot, every enemy blue ghost,
> every energizer and every fruit on the game's 256 boards to achieve
> the highest score possible--3,333,360--using only one man.
>
> While aficionados estimate that Pac-Man has been played more than
> 10 billion times in its 19-year history, a perfect game has now been
> recorded exactly once. Billy Mitchell, 33 years old, of Fort
> Lauderdale, Fla., accomplished the feat in a nearly six-hour marathon
> earlier this month at the Funspot Family Fun Center--billed as the
> world's second-largest arcade--in Weirs Beach, N.H.
>
> Mr. Mitchell, a hot-sauce manufacturer, is no stranger to
> video-game glory. He has held, and lost, high-score records for such
> classics as Ms. Pac-Man, Centipede and Donkey Kong Jr. (He still
> holds the world-record high score, 874,300, for Donkey Kong.)
>
> Mr. Mitchell was nearly beaten to his place in history: On May
> 8, a Canadian rival fell short of a perfect game by just 90 points,
> and a Canadian team was training hard. That rekindled the forgotten
> flames of video-game obsession. He says he trained for three hours a
> week to recapture skills and strategies honed with friend Chris Ayra,
> the world-record holder for Ms. Pac-Man, during video gaming's golden
> age in the early 1980s.
>
> "I just had to be the first one to play the perfect game, and I
> didn't want to be beaten by the Canadians," Mr. Mitchell says.
>
> On July 1, the first day, he was well into his game when a
> curious tot--Mr. Mitchell claims he had a Canadian accent--decided it
> would be fun to pull plugs out of the wall, cutting off the video
> camera, the Pac-Man machine and the first attempt all at once. Later,
> hunger became a factor; Mr. Mitchell refused to eat while playing
> during the two-day stretch.
>
> The first twenty boards were a threshold, he recalls. "After
> that, my playing was flawless up to two million points. Then I
> started making some bad turns. I had played over 100 boards, but I
> knew there were more than 100 to go. I nearly fell apart."
>
> But Mr. Mitchell endured, prevailed and celebrated his
> victory--by retiring on the spot. "I never have to play that darn
> game again," he says.
VaxX
sounds strangely familiar to me when I was around 12 years old. 1981. The
start of the golden age of video games. Going into town to 'watch the
movies' and spending most of the day in the arcades. I had gotten good
enough to be able to make five dollars worth of change last most of the day.
I wish I could play like that now! Still I've had reasonably dangerous jobs
and haven't had any serious injury, not even a bad back.
"Kurt Evans" <everythin...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:c0bb1b1d.04070...@posting.google.com...
: * I wrote:
: >>Lo and behold, the date of the perfect game was July 3, 1999:
: >>exactly five years ago today... So what's everyone doing to
: >>celebrate?
:
: Robin Brouwer <rbro...@chello.nl> wrote:
: >play on my pacman lol
:
: Considering the "America First" overtones Billy Mitchell
: ascribed to his feat, it's interesting that the perfect game
: would be celebrated in Holland... but good for you! :-)