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Longest-standing Video Game Record Declared 'Impossible,' Thrown Out After 35 Years (polygon.com)
Twin Galaxies, the video game record keeper and official source for Guinness World Records, has declared one of the oldest gaming world records invalid after 35 years. From a report: Player Todd Rogers has been stripped of his world record for finishing the simple Atari 2600 racing game Dragster, after months of debate over his completion time. "Based on the complete body of evidence presented in this official dispute thread, Twin Galaxies administrative staff has unanimously decided to remove all of Todd Rogers' scores as well as ban him from participating in our competitive leaderboards," reads a post on the Twin Galaxies forum from the organization's staff. That's a major blow to a prolific record holder, whose career stretches back to the earliest days of console gaming. Rogers courted controversy with his oldest record, however -- and it directly caused his ban. In 1982, Rogers submitted to Activision's official fan newsletter a time of 5.51 seconds, which the company recognized in print, awarding Rogers a patch Twin Galaxies later added Rogers to its own leaderboards in 2001, and Guinness World Records awarded the player with the honor of holding the world's longest-standing gaming record in April 2017.
Tool-assisted means in an emulator. The vast majority of emulators are at most cycle-accurate, which in some cases changes observable behaviour. Also, it's possible it was a different version of the game -- a lot of game rips are not bit-to-bit identical; versions for different markets notoriously have slight or not-so-slight alterations beyond just translated messages. Likewise, PAL vs SECAM vs NTSC have different timings that often alter the game.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Basically he said he did it back in the day and sent a photo to Activision (which is how it was done back then). Activision published it in their newsletter so everyone assumed it was legit. He also claimed to do it publicly a few times but no one could say they witnessed it. Fast forward 30+ years later and people started digging into the code because they suspected his score wasn't possible. They determined that the game code doesn't allow for anything less than 5.57 so he must have lied. He tried to avoid the question and I think at one point he was supposed to do a new live event to prove his score was legit but obviously none of that happened. So basically it was just old school lying and less than adequate fact checking back in the day.
Many of his other scores were under suspicion too because they were either outrageously high (like 1,110,500 in Fathom where the next highest score was 152 and the game ends after 7 rounds so you can't cheese it for points) or outright impossible (his Barnstorm score was proven bogus when someone removed all the obstacles in the game and they still couldn't come close to the score he claimed). He also submitted a lot of scores that ended with the wrong digit (like ending in 50 when the game only awarded points by 100's). So after a lot of reviews they determined that he cheated once too often and banned him for life. I'm sure some of his scores were actually legitimate (he's a good player from what I've read) but when you cheat once then all your scores have to go.
Well, all games run on a fixed set of rules. Think of Monopoly etc. Video games are no exception. And the rules put in place by Dragster do not allow getting any faster than 5.57. One could argue maybe the analysis was incomplete or flawed but there's a whole lot more sketchy stuff about Rogers that makes it probable there's been no mistake (imo). I'll post some videos in a top level comment that go into detail about this stuff.
If the 2600 was clocked up the video signal would also be clocked up and the timer would also be clocked up.
The 2600 does not have a real-time clock. The game only tracks time according to how many video frames were generated.
If you want more info these videos are great.
Some more info about the other sketchy high score stuff this guy has been up to. Dragster is just the tip of the iceberg.
Ben Heck builds some TAS hardware to attempt to verify the 5.51 Dragster record, using feedback from Todd Rogers himself. The attempt ultimately fails, with Todd's help only getting a 5.6-5.7 while plugging data in from deniers of Rogers' record worked first try for a 5.57 (not counting a data entry mistake).Part 1- Building the hardware Part 2 - Trying to reproduce the record Interestingly, nobody comments on camera about the failure.
Watch "The King of Kong" if you want to get a flavor for what the competitive video game community is like. The people who make up the players and judges are, oh, how to say it politely, different.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
The guy was a prolific cheater who use a friend (who's now in jail for fraud) to verify his scores or submitted them himself (he worked for Twin Galaxies). If you watch the video in the article there's a lengthy and thorough pile of evidence.
The STELLA chip in the 2600 only had enough RAM to hole ONE SCAN LINE of video.
If your program didn't keep up, very bad things happened.
Hi, I'm Omnigamer and I initially investigated this score back in April/May 2017. I performed the reverse engineering on the game code, and developed the spreadsheet model. You can find more information in my initial post on reddit, which also includes links to the Dragster simulator spreadsheet: https://www.reddit.com/r/speed...
Just to answer a few other technical questions being brought up in the comments: .0334 every gameplay frame per player. A faster system clock would also impact video output, as other commenters have noted.
-Accuracy of emulators isn't part of the equation here, since the models were drawn up from machine code. You can argue that there may be some other anomalies in the system, but so far none have been discovered or observed in the wild. That said, the game lives almost entirely within the MOS 6507 in the Atari, which is among the most studied processors on the planet.
-Changing the system clock would have no effect on the end time; the displayed timer increases by a fixed
-The currently available "optimal" solution for in-game parameter of distance is known, and cannot reasonably be performed by human hands. This time is a 5.57, and is about 150 distance units from being a 5.54. The best available human strategy is about 220 distance units from a 5.54. Covering that remaining distance would require a breakdown of multiple game mechanics.
I'm happy to answer other technical questions as well, either here or on my Twitter ( @TheOmnigamer ). Thanks!
Interesting seeing people's incorrect perceptions on 1970s/1980s TV technology.
Sorry to disappoint you, but there were very strong standards for signal timing precision - a bit of Googling found: https://antiqueradio.org/art/N...
Colour Burst frequency tolerance is +/-0.0003% which works out to roughly 10hz (I guess I mis-remembered or was thinking in terms of practical values).
It wasn't all capacitors back then - lots of silicon, although they were fairly discrete functions at the time. You can get an idea of what a Sony Trinitron TV had inside it here: https://www.manualslib.com/pro...
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Old time TV sets were fully analogue.
There is no 'tolarance' for frequencies, everything that goes through the capacitors ends up on the screen.
As long as all the signals are coherent in relation to each other (the electron beam jumps to the next line at the end of the line and not in between) a TV will render a screen or a sequence of screens just fine in a HUGE soectrum of frequencies.
I had a NEC myltisynch 3D and an Arcon Archimedes, we run that combo in any thinkable weird screen set up the NEC could handle.
Wrong again, angel'o'sphere. Why is it you always show up to spout off on bullshit you know nothing about?
There's plenty of tolerance. There has to be. Blymie covered it very well. If you need a good overview of how analog TVs work and handled the addition of color, check out Technology Connections on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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This is an excellent time to make an exception to that otherwise-sacred rule. The video was awesomely damning, entertaining, and infuriating. Other "accomplishments" it documents:
- Getting high scores of exactly 15,000,000 on two different games whose scores increment by 100 each time. Not 14,999,900 or 15,000,100, but exactly 15,000,000.
- Beating the second highest scores on those games by factors of like 30x. He got 15,000,000; #2 got 500,000.
- Beating the Barnstorming game by an unlikely margin. Summary: every time you move up or down in that game, you lose a bit of horizontal speed: the fewer movements you make, the better your time. Testers hacked up a copy of the ROM to remove all obstacles, then timed flying from one end of the course to the other in a perfectly flat line. Rogers beat that machine perfect time by over half a second.
- Scoring 1,698 in a game that increments by 5 points at a time and that caps at 1,300.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?