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TG oddities: Roy Shildt, and the second TG book of records
Howdy, everyone! I recently conducted a phone interview with Robert Mruczek, which will be posted to YouTube soon. While I had him on the line, I had to ask him about something I discovered trawling through the old TG printed record books a few months ago. Interestingly, this oddity caught Mruczek completely by surprise.
Roy Shildt, a.k.a. "Mr. Awesome", is best known for his Missile Command score from 1985. It was in the first edition of the TG book of records from 1998 (the "blue book", as I call it). This score has been the subject of much argument between Shildt, Mruczek, and Walter Day, which is a story for another time.
But Roy also had scores for four other games in the first TG book: 8,899,200 on Cheyenne, 87,400 on Karate Champ, 47,044 on Mad Crasher, and 703,410 on Return of the Jedi. Each of these were achieved at "Coronation Day", a TG-sponsored tournament at an arcade in Los Angeles in January 1985. Here are all of Roy's scores (at least all I was able to find) in that first TG book:Note that "Westwood" would appear to be Roy Shildt's home city in northern California. The book makes it clear that each of these scores that were achieved on that date were done at Coronation Day in Los Angeles:
Here's where things get interesting. Those four scores are still in the second edition of the TG book of records in 2007, but only one is still attributed to Roy Shildt. The other three - same score, same date, same location - are now attributed to a "Burton Milward". The same is true for a newer Missile Command score achieved in 2006.
Roy Shildt's name was restored for those four scores in the third edition of the TG book of records in 2009, and his contested 1985 Missile Command score was restored as well. However, in each of the cases where his name or score was restored, his name is misspelled, just as it is misspelled on today's TG leaderboard.
So who exactly is this "Burton Milward"? Given the circumstances, I was kind of expecting it to be a fake name, but he is in fact a real person. He is/was an attorney and historian, and (stop me if this sounds familiar) a practitioner of transcendental meditation at the Maharishi dome in Fairfield, Iowa.
https://www.kentucky.com/living/article169775367.html
https://portals.mum.edu/customized/uploads/TheReview/04-05/11-10-04.html
When I asked Mruczek about this, he was completely unaware. This 2007 book was released after he resigned from TG, and aside from his years of score adjudication, he had no direct hand it its production.
So what exactly is the meaning of all this? My guess - and this is just a guess, and I am open to other suggestions - is that Mr. Milward was offering legal assistance to Walter Day regarding Roy Shildt's various legal threats pertaining to his contested Missile Command score. Thus, the name replacement would have been a jab at Roy, perhaps one only he would have noticed when he went to look up his scores in the new book. The message to Roy would have been "Don't like it? You can talk to our lawyer."
I'm not gonna lie, though. While I found this interesting and a bit shocking, what I found even more peculiar was that there was no reference to this anywhere on the searchable Internet. I assumed a quick search would bring up at least some old CAG forum with people just as curious as I was. Not even common misspellings provided any results. Was I seriously the first person to bring this up after all this time?
