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Guinness Strips Billy 'King of Kong' Mitchell's World Records (engadget.com)
In February, legendary arcade gamer Billy Mitchell was accused of cheating his way into the record books for high scores in Donkey Kong. As a result, he was stripped of his 1.062 million score on the Donkey Kong Forums. Today, Kotaku reports that "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." From the report: 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."
"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."
Actually the Americans don't have a cheating culture, so cheaters are outliers and exactly because there is no cheating culture they are not caught easily. I can give you an example. I am European myself, so call me an independent third-party. I was at a US state university with a good CS postgrad program. About 1/3rd of the postgrad students at the time were from India, and this is how I found out what "cheating culture" and "world class bullshitting" means. Examples:
- I was hiring for tech support (I was a GA), so I was receiving resumes. Every single Indian had won a mathematics olympiad in a place I had not heard of. Some of them had done a major project, designing an airline reservation system. I recognized those guys from my intro db class, where one homework project was a simple program with origin/destination fields that gave you flights with intermediate stops as results (the sql being the point of the exercise). And similar "significant projects" from other simple class homework.
- In the aforementioned homework, I had a small, rather cosmetic issue in the UI and got 98 or 99% instead of 100. I was a bit annoyed because that was not the point of the exercise (it was about the sql). I gave a try to the (Indian) TA's home directory on the CS grad server and, sure enough, it was world readable (it was for some reason the default, so you could tell who was familiar with unix systems from just an ls -l), and had an excel sheet with all the grades. Opening it, I found he did give several 100% grades to Indian-looking names. The first of those 100% students who had a world readable home directory and also had her homework stored there, was an Indian girl I knew. I checked her work... NO SQL. She had actually HARDCODED the results of the correctness test examples the homework specified. It was obvious to anyone glancing at the code, so the TA knew. But, the Indian cheating culture also seems to include collusion in its arsenal. So, 1/3rd of Indian students means about 1/3rd of TAs Indian (in reality more like half, the other large group of students - Chinese - had more RAs than TAs) and they helped their fellow Indian students. The professors (apart from a couple who were Indian) were not familiar with the concept of blatant academic dishonesty, so they never seemed to suspect anything.
- Which brings me to the most interesting example, which happened a year after I graduated. An Indian student was caught cheating in an exam and got a warning. He tried cheating again and the Professor took his sheet and told him he will get an F in class. The student responded "why do I get an F in class, when all the students submitted the same course project?". I assume at this point the professor's eyes might have opened wide, both figuratively and literally, and he checked the homework that the (Indian) TA had graded. Sure enough, almost all the Indian students had submitted the same project. There was talk about expulsions, but in the end they gave the people involved an F for the class if I remember correctly.
Now, I've also known a few great Indians who were not cheaters (you don't really need to cheat if you are great), but they did know about the culture and they even showed me videos of exams in India with parents climbing to the windows of the exam centers to pass solutions to their children.
So, I'd say, compared to other cultures, Americans are fine.
It is timely, actually. Competition for these kinds of records has really heated up in the last decade or so, with the rise of video streaming and communities and events.
Tech has got better too. A lot of the games have been disassembled and understood, enabling players to develop new techniques.
It's been there since the 80s but the popularity and rate at which records have been broken is at an all time high.
And now one of the biggest names from the old guard has fallen, thanks to advances in fraud detection.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Some of the faked DK runs were *also* on camera - but they were indisputably faked. It seems that Billy was recording runs in MAME (editing either recorded inputs as in a TAS, or just splicing the video) and then playing them back on a screen while pretending to be playing. There's no proof the Pacman runs were faked but there's also no proof they were legit, since Billy is clearly not above cheating. Given the nature of the contest, it seems prudent to err on the side of caution and revoke all his records.