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Billy Mitchell's >1m scores in Donkey Kong were done on emulator, not standard hardware, maybe faked
- Thread starter ItWasMeantToBe19
- Start date
To this day I dont know if Billy Mitchell is a ass or if he just likes playing the heel.
I mean, every new person in this documentary is more outlandish than the next. Who are these people.
Edit: This is making my soul cringe.
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Some guy who worked in twin galaxies told us here that the movie was heavily edited to make Billy the heel, and in the middle of the production he learned about that he decided to go all in with it
Billy plays a character, both in real life and in film, however he is deceptive. During the First "Kong Off" contest he called me and asked me to help him get out of appearing. This was one of only two occasions that he answered my phone calls and didn't play phone tag. The second occasion was also when he wanted something.
Brian Kuh is my favorite. A friend of mine told me he is very secretive, got fired from gamestop because he kept advertising himself as the guy from King of Kong, and also his apartment was built into a rock quarry, so one of his apartment walls was a boulder. That is a 100% true story.
I didn't get the chance to meet him when I was with Twin Galaxies, but I would have loved to.
Mark Alpiger (The guy that says everyone, even grandma, games) runs a site called CAG and is also an odd duck. Most of these people participate in the CAG forums over at www.classicarcadegaming.com. They'll answer your questions too.
Do we trust Twin Galaxies at this point?
I've heard an explanation of Mitchell's infamous tie though. He claims to have started wearing it in response to a Canadian competitor who wore a Canadian flag cape.
If you enjoy the weirdness and outlandish stuff in King of Kong, there are a couple of other documentaries that involve some of the same folks and touch on similar issues with obsession, games, growing up, chasing perfection, being weird af, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_Ghosts:_Beyond_the_Arcade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_vs_Snake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_vs_Snake
One of my favorite scenes from one of these movies, can't remember which one, is when the Napoleon Dynamite-type dude who works for TG says that that he's invested a lot of his money in art, then he breaks out the pieces that he's collected, and they're all these super tacky and gross porno paintings of naked girls spreading their legs...what the christ. And the guy acts like this is some high art that should be hanging in the Louvre, smh.
The ref dude always got me, dude took his job really seriously
Walter started the company. He worked hand in hand with Guiness World Records. He's a dear friend of mine. he does take it very seriously.
TG wasn't always as it is now. When I partnered with Nintendo and Microsoft there, they trusted us implicitly. While there's no denying some of the oldest scores are erroneous, the knowledge that the refs had when I was there was astounding.
It's a good thing that technology can prove or disprove the older scores that weren't able to be audited back then. There were a ton of scores that were thought to be impossible. however, over the years some of those scores were made and proven.
After watching Dwayne Richard's videos it seems as though there is some evidence that Billy was the/a founder of the company as well. Do you know any details behind this? Billy funding TG/Walter would actually explain a lot of why some of these efforts to falsify records happened.
Billy was a ref/part owner (stockholder) back in the day. he's always been intimately involved because of his close relationship with Walter. He was just a kid when tg started so there's not a whole lot of ownership confirmation back then. It was a little later when all of that started.
He is definitely legit... but he is also almost certainly a cheat.
Unfortunately that case wasn't noticed by us until I joined in 2009. Our EiC at the time, Blaine Locklair tried like hell to get his records pulled, but for some reason the requests were ignored.
Billy
They make guys like Tom Cruise and most other sub 6' male actors look tall every movie.
I know Steve and his wife. She is extremely supportive. The movie makes it look as though it all took place in a short period of time, but it took place over a pretty lengthy period.
Walter Day never really came off well in that documentary, either. It just seemed like he was hopelessly under the spell of Billy and didn't want anyone threatening the regulars. And yes, I know the documentary was made a certain way so we'd think that, but it always made me doubt TG as a whole.
He seems well intentioned (I think the film actually pushed this angle to a degree) but between the film and what's happened at his company there seems to be an abundance of evidence that he actually sucks.
It's important to note that while Walter is credited with and shown in the film as THE TG guy, he has always had around 10-15 people on staff, and those on staff were located all over the world. There wasn't ever a central location other than the arcade and the office now in California.
Walter is an amazing person, and he would give you the shirt off of his back. His mistake was trusting a bunch of scumbag referees that were only out for themselves. As far as his relationship with billy, the scene where he puts the score up right after watching that tape, that score was up for two hours and at that point he realized he shouldn't have done that. In addition, Billy, despite what the film shows and despite how I feel about my experiences with him, has done a lot for Walter. As I've said before, Walter will give you the shirt off of his back and Billy shows him the same type of gratitude, therefore Walter really feels compelled to stick up for Billy whenever he can.
He has made a statement regarding the cheating saga. I'll post it, I just need to get it from Joel West.
I don't want to defend Billy, but the biggest claim here is the missing "ghosting" of his recordings right?
So, is it even proven that every single arcade board on different monitors or TVs does this "ghosting"?
From what I get it's how the arcade boards actually render that makes it so clear.
It's not fair to judge an entire organization based on the actions of a few. Many of the scores in the database were once thought to be impossible but were later cracked and when a lot of these scores were set the world wasn't so connected.
It's not the ghosting, it's what's visible for each frame while the stage is being built. Because of how an actual DK machine renders to screen, footage from an actual machine and MAME is very different, and Billy's footage is 100% identical to how MAME (from that era) renders.
Someone made super awesome gifs of the actual technicalities of how an arcade machine and MAME render. It really explains how/why things appear as they do. An actual arcade machine scans the VRAM from left to right while it is being written to. MAME takes a single snapshot of what has been written to VRAM at every frame. It produces a different render:
That's a great gif. Really explains the glitch and how Billy's con was detected.
For those not seeing it amidst the jumble of pixels, the arcade machine builds the level somewhat haphazardly (top-left screen). And then an active "sweep" (that pink line) takes the work-in-progress construction and transfers it to the arcade screen (top-right screen). MAME builds the level in the exact same haphazard way (bottom-left screen), but MAME waits a moment and then takes a fullscreen picture of the progress, then waits and takes another picture, and so on, as it sends those pictures to the computer monitor (bottom-right screen).
Billy Mitchell's VHS tape, of the high score game which he played behind closed doors but was which he insists was played on the arcade machine which he owns and not on MAME where it would be entirely possible to cheat... does not build it's picture with a side-to-side sweep, it builds it's picture with a series of snapshots, as only MAME can produce.
This flaw in MAME's emulation was not known at the time but it is known now. Oops, Billy Mitchell's old VHS sample was caught by retroactive drug testing. And his tape was not tampered with, as he's right there on camcorder footage of his reveal, passing MAME footage off as the real thing. There was no reason for Billy Mitchell to be using MAME and lying about it, besides cheating. Billy Mitchell is a cheater.
A cheater, a liar, a manipulator, and a narcissistic little piece of shit.
He cheated, he lied about about it, he threatened Twin Galaxies employees who dared bring his scores into question, he sued a TV show for making fun of him, he constantly gloats about his "superiority"... he's a colossal gigantic jerk.
It's crazy to think that if it wasn't for those quirky transitions, he probably never would have been found out.
And now according to Appolo Legend, he and his team are scrambling to come up with ways to prove that his footage is somehow legit, by reportedly trying to modify a DK arcade machine to directly output a MAME-like render. If this is true, I have no words...
also if i'm correct there was no way to capture the footage the way billy did off of the arcade with the equipment he used. they tested it and could not reproduce the results.
Yup. Anyone who's tried, even Billy's own go-to tech guy, to record direct feed PCB footage have been unable to get footage that looks anywhere near close to Billy's. The gig is up at this point. He used MAME.
Welp, there it is!
https://www.twingalaxies.com/showth...ayer-Billy-L-Mitchell-Score-1-062-800/page326
After spending a lot of time analyzing all available footage by many independent 3rd parties and themselves, Twin Galaxies have officially concluded that Billy Mitchell's tapes were not from an authentic DK arcade machine, but most likely from MAME.
His scores have been removed from the database and he has been banned for life from competing on TG ever again. They have also notified the Guinness world records of their decision. Same fate as Todd Rogers.
Justice has been served. Man does it feel good. Get fucked, Billy!
https://www.twingalaxies.com/showth...ayer-Billy-L-Mitchell-Score-1-062-800/page326
After spending a lot of time analyzing all available footage by many independent 3rd parties and themselves, Twin Galaxies have officially concluded that Billy Mitchell's tapes were not from an authentic DK arcade machine, but most likely from MAME.
His scores have been removed from the database and he has been banned for life from competing on TG ever again. They have also notified the Guinness world records of their decision. Same fate as Todd Rogers.
Justice has been served. Man does it feel good. Get fucked, Billy!
That's crazy. TG does pretty extensive investigations nowadays, so it's good to see that they are using the tech available today to investigate. Although it stings a bit, having been employed with the organization so long. I was not on the ref side of things, but I sort of wish I was now.
Part of this is saddening to me because a lot of people, myself included, found his appearance and the way he presented himself as pretentious and arrogant and it's not hard to associate him with the stereotypical used-car salesman. The fact that his records were, during this time, considered legitimate lend him some credence and proved those that judged him by his appearance wrong and I think there is value in people who do that. It seemed like he wasn't just all-talk.
It's sad that he proved our suspicions were right and its sad that he helped delegitimize, or at least ridicule, competitive gaming.
It's sad that he proved our suspicions were right and its sad that he helped delegitimize, or at least ridicule, competitive gaming.
As much of a prick as he is, dont forget he's still super talented and did achieve the perfect pac man game. He just got greedy and lazy.
About how much money do people make off of this stuff? I can understand if someone is a streamer with a huge following but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
It's completely irrelevant whether or not he has or had any talent to begin with. What he destroyed over the years is far larger and greater than any high score.