Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/16/statement-from-billy-mitchell.html
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I can imagine that his personality, which was on full display in “The King of Kong”, contributed to Mitchell receiving some extra scrutiny.
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Billy Mitchell? I thought his name was Eddie Plant? So confused!
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Why does the article keep saying “donkey king”? Sloppy sloppy journalism.
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You joined eight minutes ago to complain about a single letter typo occurring precisely once in the article and once in the tags? Are you…disappointed in Boing Boing?
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Billy? Is that you?
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Perhaps your comment has been misunderstood and you were being ironic, which is a hallmark of high intelligence, instead of being a douche bag, which is a hallmark of precisely the type of person I come to Boing Boing to get away from.
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Back in the day, there were a zillion Donkey Kong clone boards. Sometimes they’d tweak the name of the game in the ROMs in hopes of bypassing the evolving copyright laws and enforcement at the time.
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This isn’t the Disappointed In Boing Boing club!?
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This particular sh!tstorm seems a little too perfect. There’s probably some kind of subtle promotional angle behind it all. No one had referred much to Billy Mitchell in quite some time before this came up, and the emulator proof seems like something that surely could have been noticed ages ago.
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Well, this is just my opinion, but personally I would rather be completely anonymous and unheralded in my time than be known for a high score on a video game. Donkey Kong is fun, but it’s not chess, and having the high score doesn’t make you Gary Kasparov. There’s something just sad about being so invested in a Donkey Kong score that you either need to fake it or make a video testimonial about how you were wronged.
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I cheated at being Disappointed In Boing Boing, so I didn’t get put on the list.
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Paying attention to the “heel” in pro wrestling is part of the entertainment, and harmless.
Paying attention to people who do shitty things for the attention in situations where that’s NOT the whole point is a bad idea.
If he had carved out a niche for himself as the “bad boy of old video games” without actually taking a giant shit on a hobby a lot of people legitimately cared about, then okay. But as things stand, let’s just stop paying attention.
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I remember reading the Kotaku article about Todd Rogers a couple months ago and being sort of baffled. Thinking I was missing something, I read through the relevant thread at Twin Galaxies. The people involved seemed to be earnest and intelligent and had put a lot of effort into supporting their claims, but the significance eluded me. I came away with the feeling that the observation about academic infighting applied: “The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small.”
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I’m kind of amazed and simultaneously pleased and disheartened that there are people who care so much about something so trivial and meaningless, and have such knowledge about it that they can tell different versions from how things get drawn on screen.
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Welcome to BoingBoing!
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No need to be disheartened. The impulse that drives people to care about the technical minutiae of how donkey kong screens is probably responsible for a huge amount of scientific discovery and human well being. We need thousands or millions of people to be super interested in things that don’t matter so that one of those things will randomly turn out to matter.
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Excatly! Plus, I personally don’t care about vintage video games, but rastering is freaking fascinating. A robotically steered particle beam in a glass vacuum tube, and it’s old technology!
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Yeah, although it’s not just the technical knowledge about Donkey Kong, but the fact that anyone cared about (and cared enough to go to effort to verify/discredit) his high score.
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Videogames get a lot of shit from people who are not invested in it and its culture. People have gotten into more savage arguments and fights over even more trivial things… like leaves on someone’s lawn, or hobbies like book clubs. These records matter to those involved because videogames is a big part of who they are and what they love. Some people here might think its silly and pointless but i’m sure i can say the exact same things most other people think is normal or worthwhile.
Similarly i’ve gotten a lot of grief for my hobbies in collecting nerdy ephemera. Books, figures & figurines, etc. but its generally socially acceptable for a grown adult to spend thousands of dollars on tickets to see a college sports team or what have you.
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