Guinness World Records will remove Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong scores, as well as his records for Pac-Man, from their database following Mitchell’s disqualification from the Twin Galaxies leaderboards yesterday.
Mitchell is one of the world’s most famous arcade game players, at one time holding world records in Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, and Pac-Man. Yesterday, all of Mitchell’s records were removed from the leaderboards at Twin Galaxies, an organization that tracks video game records and high scores. The decision came after a lengthy arbitration process determined that Mitchell used the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) to achieve some record scores that had been said to be performed on arcade machines, a violation of Twin Galaxies’ rules. In light of this, Guinness World Records will also remove his records.
“The Guinness World Records titles relating to Mr. Mitchell’s highest scores on Donkey Kong have all been disqualified due to Twin Galaxies being our source of verification for these achievements,” a representative of Guinness told Kotaku via email. Mitchell did not return request for comment.
Guinness continued, “We also recognize records for First perfect score on Pac-Man and Highest score on Pac-Man. Twin Galaxies was the original source of verification for these record titles and in line with their decision to remove all of Mr. Mitchell’s records from their system, we have disqualified Mr. Mitchell as the holder of these two records. Guinness World Records will look to update and find the appropriate holder of these records in the next few days.”
Mitchell had supposedly achieved the first perfect score in Pac-Man on July 4, 1999, at Funspot Family Fun Center in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire. He was declared “Video Game Player of the Century” at the 1999 Tokyo Game Show later that year and presented an award by Namco founder Masaya Nakamura.
Guinness previously removed the records of Atari player Todd Rogers last January after his record score in the Atari 2600 game Dragster was deemed “impossible” and removed from Twin Galaxies’ leaderboards. Rogers previously held the world record for “longest-standing video game record,” which he’d supposedly achieved in 1982.