It doesn’t help his case that Billy Mitchell is also an odious, pompous, self-aggrandizing ass.
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E for effort?
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Are you sure it’s even a typo?
King Kong
Donkey Kong
Donkey Kong king
Donkey King
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I think we’re all tired of people who don’t even proofread their text before posting a “professional” article. I wish I could made dumb mistakes all day at my job and have people defend me.
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Buddy this isn’t CNN, it’s a blog. Even if it was CNN typos happen, dismissing the validity of an article over a typo isn’t too far from driving trollies. If you don’t have anything to add to the conversation other than talking about a typo then feel free to move on. Or don’t. I really don’t care, you seem very invested though. Your day must be fascinating.
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I fell down a rabbit hole about this and the other guy who had a ton of Atari scores. Some of them are laughably bad, reporting scores in increments you can’t actually get in the game. It is just surprising a lot of this wasn’t rooted out sooner.
I don’t think Billy Mitchell did what he said he did on a real machine. The evidence I have seen presented makes it pretty clear it was an emulation - and they DO track emulation scores, it is just noted as such.
Fun fact - I had Donkey Kong for the Intellivision and it kinda sucked. I found out this was on purpose! Coleco got the rights to port it to home systems, and they made the Atari and Intellivision ones awful, with meh graphics and only one or two level that looped, instead of the many levels the original had. But the Colecovision version was really nice and closer to a full port.
They did this on purpose so they could say, “Look how much better Donkey Kong plays on our system, because it is superior!” But it was just made bad on the other systems on purpose.
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I knew Eddie Plant from Pixels was based on someone (or several) real people but I laughed out loud when I saw that picture. Make him blond and bit shorter and he’s Eddie Plant.
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I make videogames and still feel like people are too invested in them (or invested too much in the trivialities, or for the wrong reasons). But to be fair, this high-score stuff seems a lot like sports to me, and I don’t understand the appeal there at all either. (I’m reminded of an Umberto Eco essay where he described how, watching a soccer match, the utter pointlessness of it made him realize he was an atheist.)
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High scores don’t appeal to me in the least, nor do speed runs, or even e-sports. Because i have no interest in it doesn’t mean me being dismissive is justified. I think plenty of things are dumb as hell but if it brings other people together then why should what i think matter? That’s my point. To people outside of the high score community this seems really low stakes but that’s easy to say when we’re talking about something you’re not invested in.
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Dude lucked up being played by Peter Dinklage; the man is a very talented actor.
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I’m not among those who care; but it seems as though there is generally a symmetry preserved between the two: any record that people care enough about that it can be treated as a record; achieved and recognized publicly, etc. must have people who care about it; and the people who care that much are also likely to care about the accuracy and honesty of claims to that record.
There are any number of records that are yours for the claiming, without challenge; it’s just that there won’t be much of a crowd gathered to observe the achievement; while any that does command a crowd will probably attract a skeptic or two.
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Must be sad when your only claim to fame is high score on an old video game, and even that gets taken away from you for cheating.
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It’s one of those counter-intuitive things. I’ve seen it in administrative spats at private colleges between departments, or within the areas of the same department.
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I first heard it from an uncle who’s an English professor, but I think there’s a broad truth there. I see it almost daily in engineering; people pick small, weird hills to die on.
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Mitchell is not without talent or skill - he’s managed to set some incredible records live and in front of an audience (and he has set legit DK records before). He also seems to have a massive ego and Trumpian capacity for hubris so it doesn’t at all surprise me that he’d resort to shenanigans to keep his name relevant.
His new promise to come up with new and never before seen “evidence” of his accomplishments sure has that “OJ looking for the real killers” vibe to it.
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Look for his upcoming book, “If I Did Connect a PC Running MAME To An Old Arcade Cabinet”
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