On a tangent I’ll just mention this terrific doc:
I’ve been thinking about how hard it would have been to fake screen shots at the time. Obviously there was no photo editing technology to enable it. But I think the record was made after the Commodore 64 was released. That had the capacity to be hooked up to a TV the same way that an Atari 2600 did without any special know-how or hardware, and I’m very confident it could have replicated screens from the 2600. Maybe there’s a technical reason it wouldn’t have been perfect, but it didn’t have to be perfect, just good enough for a polaroid. So I think if you really wanted to do great fakes, you just need to learn how to do graphics on the C-64. Don’t bother altering the original, just create it from scratch.
That might require more work than actually getting good at the game in the first place, and I’m not remotely suggesting Rogers did this (I’d be outright shocked if he did, occam’s razor says he just conned people), but it’s certainly something a person could have done with relatively inexpensive technology at the time.
This struck me. In the other thread I was talking about how I don’t actually totally buy into simulating a machine + cartridge on a spreadsheet because real life hardware is more complex than that. But that 65M score on a version of centipede where second place is 87k? Obviously that’s only possible with a game breaking bug - and what, he’s the only person who ever experienced that bug? Maybe not a lot of people vie for centipede high scores, but assuming the high score community is even remotely similar to the speedrunning community, it just feels impossible to me that such an exploit wouldn’t be known.
So I don’t think he’s trustworthy at all, and I’m not saying that throwing out his record is unjust, but I don’t like the precedent of relying on a spreadsheet to say something is impossible. Of course saying that I might come across as a sort of apologist for cheaters. Fortunately, video game high scores is a place I can take a stand on principle without too much worry about the real life harms of doing so.
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Welp, things just got real: FraudRogers.com.
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Yeah you could do that (and I had a C=64, I agree it should be able to make a 2600-looking screen, the only problem might be getting the colors right, but shooting on crappy film would mask that).
Alternately, if you develop your own film you can doctor it the old school way (burn and dodge…those photoshop tools are called that for a reason!), but while it isn’t that hard to do in black and white it is really a pain to do in color. Also you need a really steady and consistent hand to do straight lines (like the 2600 would have had).
Yes, I’ve apparently spent too long thinking about this since yesterday 
That would require a true master to alter a 57 into a 51 in the appropriate font. And then you’d have to hide that skill from the world rather than using it to make money or you’d be found out. Seems implausible. (Still thinking about this! 
)
You’ve got me on “seems implausible”, and now that I think about it burn n’ dodge are not the right tools for this (forgive me, I haven’t done any of this since the 1990s! Early 1990s!).
Make two shots, one with the 50-whatever, and one with whatever-1. Project the first negative onto the photo paper, place an opaque square (or rectangle, whatever) over the second digit in 50-whatever. Expose it for however minutes the paper needs. Replace the page square with an entire opaque sheet with just the square cut out. Project the second negative. Adjust the position as quickly as you can to get the 1 in whatever-1 over the only unexposed square in the photo paper. Expose it for however many minutes the paper needs.
To help line up the 1 you can do things at the very end of the exposure on the first sheet with rulers and whatnot.
In theory it is only a few times harder then doing the same sort of thing with cut and paste in phtotoshop (not cut n’ paste plus healing brush, or anything else though, so you really have to take advantage of the solid color backgrounds most 2600 games had!). In practice it is much much much harder because it takes something like a half hour per attempt. It also takes money on each attempt. You also need to own a darkroom. It is also much much harder to acquire these skills with a half hour per try during the learning stage (PhotoShop’s equivalent tool is effectively instant, drag, look, nudge, look…if the marching ants make it too hard to see you have only a slightly longer loop…drag, click, look, command/control-Z, nudge…).
I could have done it in B&W, but not color (I didn’t have a color darkroom, and you don’t get the red safety light in a color darkroom, so you need to know your chems and all the knobs on your focus equipment by feel alone…I wasn’t up for that in my teens, and to be honest, I doubt I am now either!).
It was entirely doable in the era though, and anyone who wanted to invest maybe $1000 and a very small room could do it, but it would take a few months of effort to learn how to be good enough to do it reliably.
Maybe not in the realm of a motivated teen, but definitely in the realm of a motivated young adult. Then again a teen could do it if their parents happened to be photography enthusiasts (or just figured it was a hobby they would fund for you).
However, I’ll bet you are right on the “found out” part. There would likely be more in his background hinting (or pointing straight at) this skill. So while this could be the way it works out in a movie or book without breaking immersion, it isn’t likely to have actually been the case here.
Just plain old social engineering? That’s what I think.
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It isn’t as surprising in the context of things like serious emulation enthusiasts, arcade game repair/reverse engineering exercises, and tool-assisted speedruns.
If you think all of those are equally weird this isn’t relevant, obviously; but choosing a game primitive enough to allow for it and then poking it at a very low level is an ongoing thing; with a modest but fairly serious following.
If you claim a record that not even the most meticulous tool-assisted experts can replicate it doesn’t look good for your record; and people tend to dislike cheaters on the leaderboard.
This is such a great detective story. Todd’s statement
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The photo would most easily be faked by glitching the game to allow arbitrary times (2 seconds and change is reportedly possibly this way), then dialing in a time on the margins of possibility and submitting it as a legitimate score.
It took 30 years or so for that margin to be collapsed. Not a bad run in its own right!
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