Billy Mitchell is an infamous video game player known for his record-breaking scores in classic Donkey Kong and his bullying attitude. His greatest achievements are obtaining the highest scores in Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. His scores and rivalries are so famous that there’s an actual documentary about it called King of Kongs. Billy Mitchell has been on Guinness Book of World Records several times. Well, it turns out Billy Mitchel was cheating to obtain his high scores and was stripped of his title and banned from Twin Galaxies.
Twin Galaxies is a gaming website and forum dedicated to professional gaming recognition and support. They have a relationship with the Guinness Book of World Records that helps record gaming achievements. Billy had recently broken the world record in Donkey Kong by achieving a score of a 1,062,800-point performance on July 31, 2010. This raised many suspicions from the community. Jeremy Young, a prominent member of the Donkey Kong Forum, accused Billy of achieving his high score on an emulated version of Donkey Kong rather than a legitimate arcade board. It was noticed after a frame by frame analysis of the footage that Billy sent in was displaying an incorrect sequence in the level transitions that never occurs on an arcade board.
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Usually, a member from Twin Galaxies must be physically present to view an attempt at breaking a world record but new management had changed. Twin Galaxies accepted the footage from Billy as proof of his achievement.
For his gaming crime, all of his high scores have been removed from records in Twin Galaxies and Donkey Kong Forum. This also includes his record-breaking score in Pac-Mana – a score of 3,333,360, the maximum before Pac-Man reaches its “kill screen” and becomes unplayable. His player page on Twin Galaxies is now blank.
With his score removed, the new world record holder is Steve Weibe who was Billy’s rival shown in the King of Kongs documentary in 2007. Steve is now the first world record breaker million-point scorer in Donkey Kong history and is recognized by Twin Galaxies. Twin Galaxies’ statement is below regarding their ruling.
With this ruling Twin Galaxies can no longer recognize Billy Mitchell as the 1st million point Donkey Kong record holder. According to our findings, Steve Wiebe would be the official 1st million point record holder.
Sources:
Twin Galaxy’s Statement against Billy Mitchell
The Gaming News Corner 
Interesting. I was only vaguely aware of the King of Kong documentary, but have never seen it.
Genuine question – what is the issue with whether the hi-score was achieved on an emulator or the original arcade? I’m assuming this has to do with maybe getting frame rates or something similar on an emulator giving you an advantage?
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Twin Galaxies only accepts scores from an actually arcade machine. Through an emulator, the game reacts differently through transition changes than the arcade machine does. This makes it possible to achieve a higher score than actually possible on a real arcade machine.
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Umm, you guys do realize that like at leaet 10 other people have high scores over one million right now? And that the current high score is 1.247 million set by Robbie Lakeman? Steve isn’t even in the top 5 anymore, you’d think a news outlet would do it’s research but oh well.
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You’re right. The world record for Steve is that he is considered the first person to break the one million score in the Guinesses Book of World Records.
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