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.
“Twin Galaxies was the original source of verification for these record titles”, a Guinness World Records spokesperson said in a statement to NPR on Friday, “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”.
The organization is widely respected as the authority on gaming records worldwide, and the administrative board has voted to strip Donkey Kong player Billy Mitchell of his world record scores. Back in 2007, the documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters directed the worlds attention towards Billy Mitchell.
In the film, which was directed by Seth Gordon, Wiebe attempts to wrest the world high score for the Donkey Kong arcade game from Mitchell, who comes across as the bad guy.
Members of Donkey Kong Forum had previously made a strong case that Mitchell’s recording came from an emulated version of Donkey Kong, and stripped Mitchell of his Donkey Kong scores in February. The group discovered Mitchell’s famous 1,047,200 score was not achieved through an arcade machine, which is a requirement for Twin Galaxies.
This would mean testing all other emulators other than MAME across all other platforms to eliminate the possibility that a different emu was used. Twin Galaxies’ decision replaces Mitchell with Weibe as the first player to reach one million points. The challenge was to get the first ever million point score in Donkey Kong.
Twin Galaxies, the premiere tracker of global gamers’ success, will also not recognize any of Mitchell’s future scores. This tape is the one referenced above, has now been struck from the record, amongst others, because it can not be definitively proven that an emulator wasn’t used.
“We now believe that they are not from an original unmodified DK arcade PCB, and so our investigation of the tape content ends with that conclusion and assertion”.
“I’ve never even played MAME”, said Mitchell, according to the video-game website Kotaku. Just a couple months ago Todd Rogers, who held the most gaming records in history, had his records removed after decades of work. But how can you watch it?
Steve Sanders, a record holder for the game Joust, explains in a special feature from the DVD why, basically saying that everyone knows and trusts Billy because he’s been doing this for twenty years and has no reason to lie.
