Chapter Eleven
The Scoreboard

Gets Tough

“There is a kid who follows me around, banging on my

Ms Pac-Man machine, causing the score to blank out right

after I’ve broken the world record … this is why I don’t

have witnesses to prove I am the best … .”

Excerpt from a letter from “The Man That Time Forgot”

(1983)

“I am very angry,” the letter began, “that you have not published my name and scores in all the magazines. This is my third letter and I think that this is not fair.”

The letter went on and on. I turned the letter over and noted the Puerto Rican return address on the back. I recognized the person’s name, he was writing nearly every month, each time with scores more and more inflated. His list included a score of two million points on Ms Pac-Man. The world’s best players – who were coming to Twin Galaxies to perform in person – didn’t reach the 800,000 mark until 1985, which was another two years away.

But it wasn’t his Ms Pac-Man claims that had caused Patricia Byrne, my assistant, to bring his letter to my attention that day. Pat and I had been opening mail for hours. Twin Galaxies’ daily mailbag had grown to massive proportions by late 1983 and, on this particular day, the letters began to blur together as I worked my way to the bottom of a gigantic stack. Pat suddenly handed me a letter she had opened and cheerfully announced that someone had broken my record.

“On what?” I asked absently, lost in thought. “Oh, Squid Search,” she answered.

This was the last straw. Squid Search did not actually exist. I had invented the game as a private joke to list in our printouts. I turned the letter back over to the first page to read the sender’s name again, wondering if Billy Mitchell, Steve Harris or some other player was the author of the letter.

But it wasn’t possible that Billy or any other player could have done this, because no one knew that Squid Search was a fictitious game. To complete the deception, I had even gone so far as to list it as a Gremlin title (“Blame it on Gremlin” was my motto. Gremlin went out of business so long ago that no one was still around who could blow the whistle on my joke.) But, here was this person in Puerto Rico claiming he had beat my fictitious high score on this game. I was personally offended.

Examining his letter even further, I found his Donkey Kong score was even more improbable, being nearly twice the official world record. I felt the same about his Zaxxon score, his Tempest score, and so on and so forth. He was a very ambitious man.

I put his letter on top of a huge mound of mail marked “fraudulent scores.” It was the biggest pile in the office and represented a staggering amount of unfinished work the scoreboard still had to deal with.

“Calling these people,” I explained during a phone call to Dan Guttman, editor of Computer Games magazine, “was a very costly and time-consuming process. Quite often, the player will hide from us. More often, they are young kids, who don’t know what they are doing.”

It was September of 1983 and Guttman and I were discussing the rules and regulations Twin Galaxies was devising to insure truthfulness in scores. The main bulk of the rules, I explained, were referred to as the Twin Galaxies Tournament Settings (TGTS).

The primary weapon of the TGTS was the challenging statement the player had to sign on the submission form. The statement had a special bite – the “player agreement,” which warns the player that he can be challenged by any other player who also plays the same game, who believes that his score may not be true, or may not be possible following tournament settings.

If challenged, players were allowed to prove themselves by re-playing their game in front of witnesses. They were given an entire year to duplicate their score. Usually, if a player could get within 85% of the claimed score, Twin Galaxies would give him the benefit of the doubt and award him the title. The only exception to this rule is when the game in question is a mature game (see Part I: The Rules of the Games).

The TGTS were not created overnight. They were crafted from experiences reported to Twin Galaxies by hundreds of players. The settings were game-specific. In other words, Twin Galaxies had to find a balance in each game that insured playability, while, at the same time, promised the game would be challenging.

In games like Robotron or Joust, for example, difficulty setting #9 – which is the toughest – is required. Then, to make it even scarier, we only allowed a total of five men. This brought the high score down to 960,350 on Robotron as opposed to marathon scores claimed in the 300,000,000 realm. Hence, the higher the difficulty setting, the less likely a game would degenerate into a marathon.

The process of cleaning up the scoreboard still continues today. Many older scores were deleted in preparation for this book. For example, Jason Smith’s 2.2 million points on Gorf has been placed in limbo until someone (hopefully, Jason himself) proves that a score this high is possible. Also, Mike Mann’s score of 4.8 million points on Frogger and Robert Bonney’s 511 million points on Robotron have been put on temporary probation until they also are proven.

And, of even greater significance, two famous groups of suspicious scores have been completely deleted – everything over 3.3 million on Pac-Man and everything over 5 million on Galaga are now believed to not be possible.

Twin Galaxies Tournament Settings improved all our competitions. From the moment we employed TGTS, the highest scores were achieved by the player who was the best, instead of the player who was able to stay awake the longest. To combat the unending deluge of false scores, a peer-reviewed system was required. The players were asked to monitor each other to verify which scores were truthful – or even attainable – and which were obviously fraudulent.

To get the ball rolling, the scoreboard had to identify the top players on every game and call on them to investigate new scores. In many cases, the process lead to a phone interrogation of new submissions.

By late 1983, the validity of high scores was now the scoreboard’s biggest concern. The “Vanity Scoreboard,” published in Electronic Games Magazine, had just fallen, and it had become apparent that many scores it listed were false. The editors, realizing that they were being victimized by their readership, pulled the plug. Not only were many of the high scores out of the realm of plausibility, but the names of some players were fictitious along with some of the game titles. The most improbably game title was “Ms Pac-Man Armor Attack,” which was carried by the “Vanity Scoreboard” for about five months.

Because scorekeeping was viewed as an impossible task, Electronic Games Magazine, one of the better magazines published during the golden age, was the only magazine that attempted to feature a scoreboard similar to that of Twin Galaxies. However, both Twin Galaxies and the editors of Electronic Games Magazine had no idea to what lengths kids would go to earn their own high score laurels.

I considered the fall of the “Vanity Scoreboard” an ill omen. EGM’s intentions were admirable, but still, they didn’t have a close relationship to the public that allowed the implementation of a peer-reviewed verification process. Even Twin Galaxies, with its close proximity to the players, found the score verification process to be a difficult swim upstream.

A year earlier, in 1982, I discovered that Twin Galaxies was doing no better than the “Vanity Scoreboard.” We were failing as a scoreboard. I was getting an A+ in promotion and having the time of my life, but I was not monitoring the scores properly and much cheating was being uncovered.

I’ll paraphrase the words of David Boehm, editor for the U.S. edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, as he impressed upon me how stringent the verification process should be before someone receives a world title: “There is nothing the public won’t do to get in any world record book!”

Well, he had warned me and I now knew Twin Galaxies was facing a serious problem. Two events in 1982 brought the status of the scoreboard to my attention. The first was the discovery that almost every score on our full-color high score poster was false. I viewed it in a positive light; it was a much-needed wake-up call for the scoreboard.

The second event was the discovery of Billy Mitchell in July of 1982. Or rather, he discovered us. It started with the phone ringing. A teenage voice at the other end said his name was Billy Mitchell and then asked about Donkey Kong. The score we were publishing at that time was submitted by Leo Daniels, of Wilmington, NC, who had registered a score of 398,000 points.

Pat Byrne, night attendant, said, “Oh no, that score no longer stands as the world record. Someone near Kansas City has registered a score of 1.3 million points.”

Mitchell barked in the phone: “No way, there is nobody in the world who could possibly be as good as me at this game. And I only have 598,000 points.” His reaction surprised Pat Byrne. “This is not right. That score is false,” the voice continued.

Pat Byrne said, “I’ll go get Mr. Day.” At this time, I was still living in “la-la” land and was having a difficult time with the idea that anyone would lie about a video game score. When I got on the phone, he told me his name was Billy Mitchell and then he denounced the score from Missouri.

“I know this person,” I said assuredly, “he is an upstanding player who lives in Missouri and who has even come to Twin Galaxies in person to play in front me.” Then Billy shook my confidence in my statement; he explained how the game worked. How there were different stages which a person simply couldn’t get through if they didn’t know certain rules and moves.

“I’ll prove to you that I am right,” Billy offered. “Give me the player’s phone number and I’ll ask him just two questions.” I gave him the player’s number and went back to my paperwork. The scoreboard was very busy that night with lots of calls coming in from all over North America and a few from other countries.

Suddenly, I found myself talking to the Donkey Kong player from Missouri. He was noticeably upset. Right off he demanded, “Who was that guy?”

“What guy?” I responded, having already forgotten about the Florida kid and his plans to ask “just two questions.”

“That kid who plays Donkey Kong. I think he’s from Florida.”

Yes, Billy Mitchell had asked his two questions – and then some –  and had gotten the Missouri kid in a worried sweat. The kid was smart and realized that Mitchell knew the game far better than he did and that the jig would soon be up. For the next ten months, the two played a cat-and-mouse game, with the Missouri player always having another reason why he couldn’t play Billy face-to-face on Donkey Kong. (Finally, in May of 1983, the Missouri kid admitted in an open letter to the other players that many of his scores were not true.)

Because of heavy phone traffic on the night Billy called the Missouri player, it took Billy an hour to get back to me. “He’s a fraud,” he said excitedly. “I guarantee it.”

“Wait a minute. He played in front of me,” I protested.

“Did you see his million points?” Billy argued angrily.

“Well, no,” I said evasively, “but he’s got to be honest because no one would lie about a video game score.” Dead silence on the other end of the line. Billy said softly, “You’ve got to be kidding. I call video game players on their lies on a daily basis. I am the enforcer down here in Ft Lauderdale at the Grand Prix arcade. I can figure out any game – no one can beat me on anything.” This was annoying. Here was the first kid I had met who wasn’t awestruck by talking to “Mr. Video Game.” And he was only seventeen years old.

“What does that have to do with Donkey Kong?” I said, desperately trying to find a comeback. “Isn’t it possible that a player gets lucky?”

Billy gave me a long lecture, that actually lasted for about a year. He opened my eyes with his persuasive explanations. He demonstrated time and time again how luck didn’t play a role in video game scores.

“Players who don’t know a game,” Billy said, “suppose that anybody can get the high score on a lucky day. Thus deluded, they feel safe in lying about their scores.”

Billy demonstrated how easy it was to spot fraud. Every game had bottlenecks in the game play, he pointed out, and a player didn’t get through by relying on luck. They had to know the game inside and out. Furthermore, at each bottleneck, a maximum number of points were possible and no more. A player who had mastered a game would know this. A fibber wouldn’t.

“Give me another player to call and I will show you what I mean,” Billy pleaded one night. By chance, a Canadian player had just called to report 402,000 on Ms Pac-Man. Normally, I would have congratulated him on his new status as the top player and send him straight to Joystik and Video Games Magazine for a listing.

“OK,” I said to Billy. “You’re on. Let’s see what you can find out about this new Ms Pac-Man score.” I felt like I was throwing that Canadian to the lions. I was already impressed with Billy’s reasoning capabilities and arguing prowess and knew that if the Canadian was lying, Billy would unmask him immediately.

I expected Billy to be diplomatic because, in a sense, he was representing the scoreboard and refined sensitivity was required. Unbeknownst to me, Billy started out by saying to the player, “Don’t you lie to me.”

The Canadian was astonished. “Oh, no,” he protested. “I really got this score. Really.”

“No chance,” Billy answered with absolute finality. Billy explained to me later, “I wanted to give the guy a chance to save face, if he was willing to just came clean with me. Eventually he did and actually turned out to be a good player. You might say I rehabilitated him.”

The Canadian was claiming 402,000. The Ms Pac-Man record was 419,000 by Tom Asaki at this time. Billy, himself, had only 401,000.

Billy said, “What board stops turning blue?”

“Uh, I don’t pay attention, I just play,” the Canadian said.

Billy Mitchell’s Golden Rule #1: Anybody who says that they don’t notice anything because “they just play,” is lying. A good player notices everything and remembers everything. They know all the signposts and dangers and execute highly complicated strategies that involve tremendous mental focus and non-stop alertness. This applies to all games, not just Ms Pac-Man.

There are no blissful “space cases” out there who “just play” and get world records. No one accidentally gets the highest score on Mortal Kombat 3 or Killer Instinct 2. A huge investment of time, money and experience goes behind each new world record. The catch-22 is that the blissful space cases – because they don’t know the game’s intricacies – have no inkling that there are intricacies and presume world records are achieved by being great guys who “just play” and get lucky.

So, Billy asked the Canadian about levels, timing, sequencing of events and, most importantly, strategies. The Canadian couldn’t answer. “I don’t remember,” he said. Billy explained to him he could not get 402,00, because of what he didn’t know and what he could not execute.

However, Billy added, “I know how good you are and I am willing to help you get better, but I want you to be honest with me. I want to know what your high score really is so I can start you on the right level.”

The Canadian confessed to 365,000 points.

“No, you didn’t,” said Mitchell. Billy then explained why he couldn’t have reached that plateau.

“Well, I actually got lucky and got 278,000,” the Canadian said cautiously, fearful of what would come next.

Frustrated, Billy said solemnly, “No one gets lucky on Ms Pac-Man. I want to know what you actually got as a high score.”

The Canadian still protested, claiming he was telling the truth. Mitchell began to instruct him, pointing out game strategies needed for the 270,00 level, demonstrating how the Canadian did not know the game dynamics needed to reach that score.

“After two hours of this, he finally admitted to 214,000 points, which I believed to be true,” Billy later told me. “To get 214,000 was unbelievable, you would turn heads in any arcade in the world. This would put you in the top one percent in the world.”

Billy then decided that there was no need to cut him down any more and started training him in the ways of Ms Pac-Man. What Billy said was true: “Somehow, when it came to video games, people weren’t satisfied. They didn’t want to be in the top one percent, they wanted to be gods, better than the best – so they cheated.”

The difference between a good player and a great player was that when the good player saw something happen in the game  and he died, he would shrug his shoulders and walk away. “The great player,” Billy lectured, “would learn from the mistake and not make the mistake again.” The great player would be a keen observer who would analyze everything to gain knowledge.

Challenging worked in reverse, too. It was not always the scoreboard that was checking on the public. We were challenged, also. When we visited Sega in San Diego, CA, in August of 1983, an arcade in town dared us to come and prove that we could get some of the high scores claimed by the team members.

One kid was absolutely hostile to Billy, refusing to believe that he could get a stratospheric score on Ms Pac-Man. I’m surprised a fight didn’t break out before Billy started his game. It took over an hour before Billy reached the higher levels that the challenger couldn’t reach himself.

Billy matched the challenger’s highest score on his first man. Then he said, “Watch this,” and grouped all the monsters, moving them all over the screen at will, keeping them under complete control.

The kid was hypnotized. He was astounded. When we first arrived, he was vocally shouting threats and swearing at us. Now he was smiling and shouting at the top of his lungs: “Everybody, look at this, this guy’s unbelievable.”

On another occasion, three kids in Bethalto, IL, called the scoreboard reporting Ms Pac-Man scores in the high 200,000 range. They challenged Billy Mitchell’s record, and even went to Florida to watch Billy and Chris Ayra, the reigning Ms Pac-Man world-champion, play in person.

“Every time we were held to the test,” Billy noted, “those of us who were under the gun prevailed. I don’t think any of the team players ever slipped through the cracks and blew a challenge.”

Since most of the details of the TGTS are in the rules section (Part I: The Rules of the Games) and don’t need to be repeated here, I am going to describe a few of Twin Galaxies’ journeys through the wide world of score verifying. To start our journey, we need to go back to the phone call with the extraordinary Dan Guttman, editor of Computer Games magazine based in New York.

In September of 1983, Guttman had expressed interest in publishing an article I would write for Computer Games magazine about a secret trip, which was planned as a score-checking tour. Dan was fascinated by my plans to do a surprise inspection of the troops and make players perform in front of me to prove their scores were genuine.

We planned to arrive in town, unannounced, and do a reality check. This approach, we hoped, would eliminate fraudulent scores. For this trip, we chose about eight scores which seemed puzzling or doubtful in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, DC.

On September 15, 1983, I left Ottumwa for Miami to pick up Billy Mitchell and head for the Japanese Embassy. As usual, on the way I stopped in arcades in Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, making contacts and handing out Twin Galaxies literature. On the way back up to DC, we visited Steve Burnett and Leo Daniels at World Class Amusements in Wilmington, NC, where we did media interviews to bring them publicity. World Class Amusements had donated some money to Twin Galaxies and we, in return, were crowning them the “Video Game Capital of North Carolina.”

While in Wilmington, NC, we were also going to check on 11-year-old Charlie Brown’s score of 303,000 on Ms Pac-Man. Interestingly, he arrived with his playing hand in a cast and couldn’t play. Before we moved on to Washington, DC, additional television coverage was obtained for World Class Amusements when Billy broke the world record on Ms Pac-Man with 557,000 points.

At the train station in Washington, DC, we picked up Tom Asaki, the star of Nibbler, who had arisen from the ashes of defeat to join our score-checking commando unit. The three of us were now prepared to knock on people’s doors and make them replay their games. We were going to start checking scores in Maryland.

In the course of one week driving around Virginia and Maryland, we learned that out of the eight scores, two people didn’t even exist, two others went into hiding, two refused to even deal with us and the remaining two couldn’t prove their scores.

The Pac-Man player in Maryland took the cake. He worked in an arcade and had received a lot of media attention for claiming twelve million points on Pac-Man. It was this meeting that lead to the Player’s Agreement on today’s high score submission form that all players have to sign. To understand why we considered this score significant you have to realize that the Pac-Man game ends at screen 256, “the kill screen.” However, during the first year and a half of collecting scores, no one knew that Pac-Man ended at screen 256 and that a score of no more than 3.2 million was possible.

Nonetheless, rumors were constantly circulating America that there was a “doorway” through the final screen that allowed a player to get through and continue onward.

Being open-minded, I thought, “Let’s go see the Maryland player and have him show us how he does it so we’ll either prove the rumor is true or spike it.”

When we walked in the door and announced we were there to check on his score, his eyes bugged out and the Maryland player went berserk. Gosh, all I asked was that he show us how he got through screen 256.

Well, it looked like he probably couldn’t prove his claims, because he really laid into us. He was outraged. He refused to play for us and berated us for being low people who had hearts filled with distrust for their fellow man. We were thoroughly denounced. He shouted, “This is not holy! You are low people.”

I said “OK” in a mild voice and we left. I saw this as a learning experience. In one way I sympathized with the players. They should know from day one that they could be challenged and be asked to replay their games in front of witnesses approved by the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard.

Not to mislead any player, I have placed a disclaimer in our modern form. When you read the score submission form now handed out by Twin Galaxies, maybe you can see the memory of the Maryland event imprinted in each word. A final ironic note: we eventually learned no one could get through screen 256. The player is faced with a final dead-end which cannot be circumvented.

Overall, I was very pleased with our trip to Maryland and looked forward to writing the article for Computer Games magazine. Unfortunately, before I took the time to write the article, the magazine crumpled along with the rest of the surrounding countryside.

Tom Asaki drove back with me to Ottumwa. On the second night home, I returned to the arcade late. I banged on the back door for quite some time but got no response. Then the door suddenly flew open with a bang. A wide-eyed Asaki hissed, “Quick, come!” and ran back to the game room. There, I discovered he had parked the Ms Pac-Man in a temporary safe place while answering my knock.

Though Tom appeared cool, I now knew him well enough to know he was absolutely wired with excitement. “Walter,” he said, “No player has ever got past 300,000 on their first man before. Look!”

I leaned over fast to see what was going on in time to see the score counter click over to 400,000 points.

“On your first man,” I breathed. “Unbelievable.” I watched for awhile then suddenly said, “Oops! I should be logging this.” I reached for a Ms Pac-Man form – specially designed to log Ms Pac-Man scores. The first entry I wrote down said 444,860 points on board 47.

He was doing great. Unfortunately, my sudden arrival had gotten him all excited – he died four boards later on board 51 with a score of 461,750. He had broken his old personal high of 419,910 points on his first man. A new threshold was conquered. I reached for the phone. I called Billy first.

“I’m here with Asaki. I mean I’m literally here, right beside him. He just passed 461,000 points on his first man.” I didn’t even have to say what game it was. He knew. The top game in the world during this era was Ms Pac-Man. In the words of Ben Gold, video game champ to the stars, “Whoever holds the title on Ms Pac-Man is the heavyweight champion of the world.”

I stood for two-and-a-half hours watching Asaki, with the phone cradled on my shoulder, giving Billy a move-by-move account of Asaki’s ride into stardom.

Finally, Tom Asaki, the ironman of Nibbler, got tired. His second man was lost at 493,870 – on board 59. The third guy lasted until board 84 at 621,470. In the ninth hour of play, he made a false move on board 98 and lost the game at 681,130 points. It was a bittersweet ending as he had only nine dots left on the board when the monsters got him. Asaki, always smooth, merely said, “Good.” He smiled and went to bed. I was too tired to talk so I also went to bed while the phone tribe hooked up their usual conference.

The next morning found me back in the groove, drowning in Twin Galaxies paperwork. Joyce and Cheryl Litch and Pat Byrne, the managers of Twin Galaxies, had done an excellent job of processing scoreboard mail and had laid out all the letters that needed my attention. By mid-morning I was reading a letter from a Ms Pac-Man player. The letter said: “There’s a person who follows me around, erasing my high scores off every game I play right after I am done playing.”

“Ah-hah!” I thought. Interference! Now, this is a new problem for the scoreboard to deal with. The author of the letter seemed about fourteen years old. His letter included a long list of Ms Pac-Man scores which were extremely high, bordering on the unbelievable.

After sending the player a note of encouragement, I filed the letter for future reference. When Steve Harris, Chris Ayra and Billy arrived a couple months later for Coronation Day, I pulled the letter out again. “This would be a great piece to work on together,” I announced.

The players read the letter, one after the other.

“The problem, here,” said Chris, “is that these scores aren’t even real. They’re bogus.”

Ms Pac-Man was the easiest game to unmask players who reported fraudulent scores. We knew that people could not get past 200,000 easily. And 300,000 was virtually impossible unless you knew how to “group.”

Billy laughed. “This player has no sense of how Ms Pac-Man works. He’s claiming three different games per day in the 250,000 to 380,000 range. That’s absurd. I can’t even do that.”

Chris Ayra jumped on the most telling point: “It takes one hour for a great player to reach 100,000 points. A lesser player would take a lot longer, of course.”

The letter said something like this: “Yesterday, I got 269,000 at the Quik-Mart, but a kid banged the machine until my score blanked out. So I went down to Easters Supermarket and got 378,240, but the kid followed me there, too, and did the same thing to that score. This is why nobody else is available to confirm my scores because they are being removed immediately by this kid, whose name I don’t even know.”

This had to be the most interesting excuse the scoreboard had ever received regarding problems with score verification. The next page listed an entire week’s worth of Ms Pac-Man playing, listing three high scores achieved every day.

I started writing down numbers. “OK,” I said. “If it takes one hour for every 100,000 points, and this kid’s scores add up to 900,000 accumulated points per day, he’s got to be playing nine hours per day. Right?”

“It would take longer,” interjected Billy, “because some boards are so difficult that we spend twenty minutes on them alone.”

“Nine hours of play per day,” I thought. “Don’t these kids think things out when they send in false scores?”

“I understand now,” I said in a dramatic voice, “This kid is a higher being and he is not affected by the forces of time and space.” In video game circles, he will forever be remembered as “The Man That Time Forgot.”

Ms Pac-Man was the litmus test to monitor scores. If any scores aroused my suspicions, I casually asked the player for his Ms Pac-Man score. This was a trick question, because no self-respecting video game addict during the golden age would admit to not playing Ms Pac-Man. Having a good Ms Pac-Man score was necessary to prove yourself in the early ’80s.

But, the best way to ferret out fraud was the peer-reviewed method. For instance, in North Carolina in 1984, player after player contacted me privately to tell me how different players (remaining unnamed) cheated on their scores. Of course, I had to hear the accused player’s side of the story, too, but it was good to be alerted to potential problems.

It was appropriate that the scoreboard got tough. After all my adventures in verifying scores, the player’s statement was the most valuable outcome. It made today’s submission form a more powerful tool in the scorekeeping process. It says:

According to scoreboard rules, my score can be challenged by another player who has just cause to believe that my score is not correct or that the settings were not TGTS.

The challenger must be a contender on this same game. If challenged, I agree to replay my game in my own town in front of witnesses approved by the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard. If I refuse to replay my game, I understand that Twin Galaxies has the right to remove my score from the record book. The replay must be completed within one year. Or, to be published, it must be replayed in time for the deadline of the next edition of Twin Galaxies’ Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records or the score may be deleted from the book. I understand that I am welcome to unlimited attempts at replaying before the book deadline. I sign this form with the understanding that my score can be challenged only one time and accept this condition.