Player of the Century
SKY
rationale or justification. It's an end in itself. :)
William James "Billy" Mitchell Jr. was born on
July 16, 1965. By 1984 he'd been recognized by Life
magazine and the Guinness Book of World Records for
his mastery of some of the biggest coin-operated video
game titles of all time, including Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man,
Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior and Centipede.
While Tim Collum was the actual contest winner,
Mitchell was named an honorary video game player of
the year in 1984. As an original member of the U.S.
National Video Game Team, Mitchell had been one of the
elite players who toured the nation in 1983 to promote
the contest.
On July 3, 1999, with his 1985 Donkey Kong world
record still standing, Mitchell set a record that can
never be broken by becoming the first player to achieve
a perfect score of 3,333,360 points on Pac-Man.
Providentially, this accomplishment came just six
weeks before the first annual Classic Gaming Expo, which
cosponsored awards recognizing Mitchell as the player
of the century and Pac-Man as the game of the century.
The following month Pac-Man creator Namco Ltd. flew
Mitchell to the Tokyo Game Show to receive a similar award.
Kurt
SKY
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.
==============================
None of us *have* to play the game again, Billy.
We do it because we *want* to. :)
Kurt
SKY
> On July 3, 1999, with his 1985 Donkey Kong world
>record still standing, Mitchell set a record that can
>never be broken by becoming the first player to achieve
>a perfect score of 3,333,360 points on Pac-Man.
CORRECTION: According to the 1984 edition of the
Guinness Book of World Records, Billy Mitchell's score
of 874,300 on Donkey Kong was achieved during the Life
magazine competition, which was held November 8-9, 1982.
This score, which now ranks third all-time, stood
up for nearly 18 years before being surpassed by Timothy
Sczerby on August 17, 2000:
http://classicgaming.com/features/articles/dkscorer/
The mistake wasn't entirely my fault, as the date
Mitchell set his record has been widely misreported.
Kurt
SKY
>Subject: Re: Player of the Century
>Date: 2003-03-13 23:10:57 PST
>
> CORRECTION: According to the 1984 edition of the
>Guinness Book of World Records, Billy Mitchell's score
>of 874,300 on Donkey Kong was achieved during the Life
>magazine competition, which was held November 8-9, 1982.
The material below is excerpted from Life magazine's
"The Year In Pictures" special issue for 1982:
==============================
Video Game V.I.P.s
It has become a $5.7 billion industry, and Ottumwa,
Iowa (pop. 27,381), a town 85 miles southeast of Des Moines,
is the unlikely video game capital of the world.
Shortly after opening Ottumwa's Twin Galaxies Arcade
a year ago, entrepreneur Walter Day, 33, realized that no
one was keeping track of the nation's high scorers. To remedy
this, he set up a 16-by-18-foot International Scoreboard
that displays the names of all the current record holders
on TV screens.
Onetime champ of the game Make Trax, Day receives an
average of 20 phone calls a day from hard-core players eager
to know how they rate... Recently 16 of the country's top
"vidiots" converged on Ottumwa for three days(*) of fun
and games.
==============================
(*) Although the actual competition was held November 8-9,
players arrived on November 7.
On March 19, 1983, Governor Terry Branstad attended a
ceremony at Twin Galaxies formally recognizing Ottumwa as
the video game capital of the world. He cited video games
for helping youth "to learn about computers in a fun way."
According to the Twin Galaxies record book published
in 1998, Governor Branstad was then defeated by Mayor Jerry
Parker in a Pac-Man showdown. :)
Kurt