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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.
Thanks to this, my record of 5.52 seconds is now on top.
That's Arthur Sullivan Smith. Just the initials are fine.
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.
For having the longest standing video game record being declared impossible.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
All of that was investigated and discussed in the 271 page Twin Galaxies forum thread linked from the article, as well as in other places like TASVideos (where the tool assisted run was published.) Every known version of the game has been disassembled and analyzed, including looking for things like regional differences. 2600 emulation is very well understood at this point in time.
It's possible that all of this analysis had an error in it, of course; but you'd need to do better than some vague "what if"s against a mountain of facts.
>>Occam's razor in me says - crappy TV in 1980 and a 7 looked like a 1 :)
That was one explanation for it, but he said that he got the same score at least two other times. So even if the first score was just a typo, he ran with the lie.
So.... did anyone ever figure out how he might have created the photo?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
Maybe he altered the photo in his shop.
#DeleteFacebook
That's the weird part. Either it was a mistake on Activision's part (maybe a 7 looked like a 1), or maybe Todd said he got 5.51 and made the photo extra blurry so you couldn't tell, or it's even possible that there was no photo and Todd just said he got the score and Activision believed him (this was all new territory back then). Either way Todd ran with the lie and claimed that 5.51 from then on. I don't think we'll ever know as that photo (assuming it ever existed) is long gone. There are many who doubt the photo ever existed.
Interesting thought - I just took a quick look at the schematics of the CX2600 & CX2600A gaming systems at: http://www.atariage.com/2600/a...
and saw that there is only one main system clock which is roughly 3.58MHz - that means that this clock is not only used for the processor but for the video signal's NTSC colour burst (3.579545MHz).. I can't find a reference to the exact colour burst frequency tolerance (I thought it was around 20ppm or around 70hz) that is required for a proper TV signal output.
Having a colour burst outside of the tolerance would mean, at a minimum, messed up colours and maybe the inability for a TV set to be able to display an output at all. No way could a variation of 5% (1/20 of a second) be tolerated by a TV Set.
I guess all my NTSC knowledge/Skills/Experience are now worthless - except for trivia in cases like this.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
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."
he can't do it anymore. There are feats of videogame prowess that my younger self could do that our out of reach today, and I'm only 40.
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Not only that but speeding up the CPU would speed up the game timer so you're back to the same number.
The game counts the number of frames generated and that is translated into the timer display ( 0.016 sec per frame).
The game also runs in lock-step with the display: One game tick per frame. The game does not advances until a frame is generated and it advances by a fixed value.
No matter how fast or slow you clock the system the game will display the same number.
The system has no independent wall clock.
Not sure if you care, but the best possible score is 5.57 seconds. That's how he got found out.
So his crappy early 1980s dot matrix printer and/or used up ink ribbon lost a few dots and the 7 looked like a 1? ;-)
How about: "Jesus fuck, it's a game. A GAME, not a secret recruitment test to pilot alien spaceships for real. Play it for FUN and don't take it so seriously."
Someone had to do it.
If that were true, it wouldn't explain all the other high scores for other games that are ridiculously unattainable. He lied, and continued to get bolder and bolder about his lies. If it were an honest mistake or a bad photo only, his dragster score might be contested, but I doubt that he would be banned from the Twin Galaxies register.
No, more likely he lied. If you go read the article, and watch the video, you'll see that this guy has a HOST of dodgy "records", that have either been proven to be impossible, or are strongly suspected of being impossible. He's for example, "scored" 6000 in a game that counts its score in an 8 bit register.
There have been other cases where he claimed a transcription error, or a coffee stain causing someone to misread an error... In those cases, even the corrected version turned out to be impossible as well!
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
Citation please.
I've come across this story a few times, that he's cheated, and this is the first time anyone has ever said that it was a glitch that has been reproduced and it is known how to reproduce it.
Given that this bunch of nerds spent months debating his case, I suspect that if what you say is true, they would have known about it, and it would have been included in the subsequent articles. Instead of calling him a cheating liar, they'd be saying he got lucky with a rare glitch (which are now commonly accepted and in fact form the basis of speedrunning).
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?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Peter, I don't think you're explaining it correctly.
The NTSC colour burst MUST, MUST, MUST be 3.579545MHz and be located on the back porch of the horizontal synch for a set number of cycles (sorry, I can't remember the number). Once the hsynch/colour burst interval has past and you are into the active video period, you could set the luminance of the signal to a medium grey and then insert the 3.58MHz signal with a sub-carrier as you describe to get different colours. The problem with this method is that it wasn't very helpful to fix problems with TV sets.
A more typical method of testing TV colour output performance was to use a color-bar generator which would send a phase shifted color burst clock output in the active video period - This would allow a technician to check the position of the bars (make sure the horizontal sweep generator was working properly) and see specific colour outputs. When I was a kid, I built one of these with the colour bars generated using a 74S151 8 to 1 multiplexor with the inputs being the colour burst clock signal incrementally delayed using multiple TTL buffers.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The funny thing about how wrong this is is that the older analog TVs implemented more of the NTSC spec and were much less tolerant of bad or off-spec signals than the newer ones. Some TVs older than about 1970 have trouble displaying the output of the older 8 bit consoles, because the consoles don't do all the stuff the standard asks for.
I've been learning all about this while playing with generating NTSC signals from modern 8 bit micros. Newer digital TVs are way less picky than old analog TVs, because the new ones just match the horizontal and vertical sync signals from a software buffer, they can just ignore most of the spec since they are fast and have large enough buffers to hold everything. This is literally all you need on a modern TV. Actually modern TVs are so happy with poor NTSC signals that once my software was writing the signal to the wrong port pin, and part of the image was still showing up on the TV just from the switching pattern in the noise! And I was using the normal recommended filter caps.
Many modern TVs actually don't even know what the different PAL/NTSC screen settings are! They just look at the sync signals and calculate it. You can do that with old analog TVs if you implement the whole standard, but if you only implement parts of it then only certain settings will work well. At a minimum, analog TVs are going to need more compliant vertical blanking at the end of a frame. Newer TVs can ignore all the crap in the standard at the end of the frame, and they'll see the vertical sync without warning.
That was a lot harder to do in 1982
Ever wonder why all the tools in photoshop are named after physical activities you'd do in a darkroom? Like cut, paste, dodge, burn, mask, etc?
What is being proposed was trivial in the 1928 let alone 1982.
You really need to rewatch the movie. You don't have to take it seriously to get recruited to fly the alien spaceship, you just have to live in a trailer park and get a high score.
Source: In 1985 I had a Last Starfighter lunch box.
While I wouldn't claim to be an expert, what I remember from photography class in school in the 1970's is that it is anything but trivial.
Doable, certainly... but from what I know, it would be at a considerable expense of time and effort, and often financial resources if the result is going to be genuinely any good (that is, it is not immediately obvious to even casual observers that it was a doctored photo).
In practice, I'd expect that it was just not viable back then to do convincingly without at least *SOME* commercial-scale opportunity for profit. to justify both the expense and effort that was spent simply making the photo. For something that offered no significant monetary incentive, such as holding a video game record, I think it's improbable to the extreme that anyone would doctor a physical photograph simply to prove something so mundane.
Possible, perhaps. But not likely.
At least, IMNSHO.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
For something that offered no significant monetary incentive, such as holding a video game record, I think it's improbable to the extreme that anyone would doctor a physical photograph simply to prove something so mundane.
The human race. You new here?