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.

Comments

Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to this, my record of 5.52 seconds is now on top.

That's Arthur Sullivan Smith. Just the initials are fine.

Re:Yes, finally

[The MAZZTer]

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.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yes, finally

[JMJimmy]

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.

Re:Yes, finally

[lord_mike]

Perhaps he was playing the PAL version on an NTSC TV. It is possible to get a pal signal on an NTSC TV. It is black and white and you have to really mess with the vertical hold, but it works, especially if you have an old black and white TV. That's how I manage to get a PAL ZXSpectrum running here.

It's unlikely, of course, but certainly not impossible. What's more likely is he may have turned the power switch on and off a few times quickly (called "frying" the cartridge), causing s blip in the ram which happened to give him a nice score that time around. Noticing that it was a great score, he took a picture and sent it in. I will have to find my old dragster cartridge and see if it's possible to "fry" it into a good score.

Re:Yes, finally

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Re:Long write-up...

[Tempest_2084]

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.

Todd Rogers can claim a new Guinness Record...

[mykepredko]

For having the longest standing video game record being declared impossible.

Re:not the same machine

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I was watching some videos about this guy

[The MAZZTer]

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.

Re:Long write-up...

[DontBeAMoran]

Maybe he altered the photo in his shop.

Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output.

[mykepredko]

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.

Technical Details & Clarifications

[OmnigamerSDA]

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:
-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 .0334 every gameplay frame per player. A faster system clock would also impact video output, as other commenters have noted.
-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!

Re:Technical Details & Clarifications

[OmnigamerSDA]

I merely provided a model. The model implied that the score wasn't possible.

If other individuals believe that my model and its implications were incorrect or incomplete, the burden of proof is on them to provide evidence of cases that don't conform to the model.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[Aighearach]

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.