ABC-TV's "That's Incredible" Broadcasts History's First Video Game World Championship, which was conducted January 8-9,1983

You can watch the entire show by clicking here. You may obtain a copy of Quicktime, necessary to view the file here. A brief history of the event is included below.

Twin Galaxies' first Coronation Day Tournament is recognized as history's first video game "World Championship"--held January 8-9, 1983 at the the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard in Ottumwa, Iowa, USA.

Co-sponsored by Twin Galaxies and ABC-TV's That's Incredible, the event featured nineteen of North America's top players competing on five current titles: Frogger, Millipede, Joust, Super Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong, Jr.

Billed as the "North American Video Game Olympics," this contest continued onward as Twin Galaxies' Coronation Day Tournament, an "invitation-only" Player-of-the-Year contest which features competition between hand-picked superstars. Every invitee was a record holder on at least one video game title.

  
 (Above article and photo reprinted from Ottumwa Courier, Jan. 9, 1983)

All the games were donated by the manufacturers and arrived brand new in crates.

The rules were simple. The highest score on a game was set equal to 100%. Everybody else would be scaled accordingly. For example, if the highest score on a game was 100,000, that score would be made equal to 100%. A man at 50,000 points would be 50% and a man with 28,500 points would be 28.5%. Absolutely straight forward.

Over the course of Saturday and Sunday, the players got three chances on each game and got credit for their highest score.

Then, after everybody had achieved their highest scores on all five games, the percentages were added together to get the final overall percentages, which were used to formulate the final standings.

Todd Walker was the winner at 23% ahead of Darren Olsen in second place.

The top three finalists won complimentary subscriptions to Joystik, RePlay and Playmeter Magazine and were invited to compete on the "That's Incredible" finals in Los Angeles.

The show was aired to an international TV audience on February 21, 1983.

Click on these four links to learn more;

Carol Kantor Review

RePlay Magazine

Ottumwa Courier

Final Winners 1 [Referees: Cary J. Hahn, ABC-TV Newsman and Walter Day]

Final Winners 2 [Walter Day and Ottumwa Mayor Jerry Parker flank Third Place Ben Gold, Second Place Darren Olson and First Place Todd Walker]

Ironically, Steve Juraszek, the player who had been written up in TIME magazine (for pioneering the first video game marathon) was in last place.

Frogger was the game that separated the winners from the losers. Frogger had a "kill screen" which would appear randomly. There was no way that you could get past it and no way you could guess when it would come for you. What this means is that certain screens would not allow you to jump your frog over the stream. It wouldn't line up the lily pads in a way that allowed safe passage. You could only sit there and lose your game.

It was Frogger that decided the final placement of the players. The space between second place and fifth place was so narrow, that anybody could have ended up right behind first-place Walker.

Eric Ginner, who ended up in fifth, may have been Frogger's prime victim. In spite of his sensational skills, he only got about 15,000 on Frogger, simply because the game gave him the "kill screen" at an early stage while his score was still low. This, of course, affected his average, lowering him out of the top three places.

The only real race was between Joe Malasarte and Ben Gold. Their final scores were so close that no one knew who would be in third place until the computer flashed the final standings on the screen. Ben Gold, in third place, just about fell down on the floor.