Donkey Kong scoreboard strips high score claim
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The 2007 documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" is my favorite movie of all-time, I must have watched it at least 40 times. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hBs2oFjSWk
For those who haven't seen the film, the contender Steve Wiebe sets a new record live at an arcade tournament in Funspot (NH) but reigning champ Billy Mitchell sends in a VHS tape with an even higher score.
The video gets fuzzy and looks suspicious but Mitchell's toadies in the group immediately accept the score, despite refusing to previously accept a VHS tape from the contender Steve Wiebe.
Since the movie came out both men were left in the dust by new players, but recently the score-keepers slow-mo'ed Billy's tapes and the Donkey Kong levels render the way MAME does them, not the actual arcade hardware. The current No. 2 ranked player (Wes Copeland) is basically corroborating this by running his performance through an app and determining the point ratios are off (e.g., too much from hammers).
Personally I don't think Billy's a bad guy, and the film actually shows him performing selfless acts for others, but if this allegation is true -- and it's hard to argue with the data -- I do think this seriously compromises his integrity and position in classic gaming history.
This guy has also made videos chronicling similar speedrun records for other games, and they're fascinating to watch.
But still, great watching.
Then I guess that's another bug for MAME to fix...
An actual arcade board renders the levels with a "sliding door" effect, while MAME builds entire chunks of a level at once and then displays them as a complete screen buffer (depending on the version).
It's just evidence Mitchell's score is not what he says it is.
If you agree with the premise that an emulator should strive to... emulate the real thing as closely as possible, then it is most certainly a bug.
Besides that, the real console hardware could vary more between revisions than the difference between a console and an accurate emulator, so you also have to ask whose real thing is being emulated? Even with Nintendo's attention to detail on lot check, some real Game Boys won't play Prehistorik Man. There are some NES accuracy tests out there that require making your emulator behave like one specific console owned by blargg.
This is exactly what BSNES set out to do. I think it's called Higan now > https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-...
The creators of MAME are mainly interested in rigorously simulating certain kinds of hardware which happen to play games, just as a classic car restorer may rarely or never actually drive his meticulous reconstructions.
For many other emulator devs, and almost all emulator users, the point of emulators is to play games. That may not be your area of interest, but it's rather silly to say that they're just wrong.
Billy Mitchell just happened to use older MAME versions without those improvements, even during his 1.062M run that was performed several years after MAME 0.127 shipped.
My shortlist of inspiring documentaries for people with startup/gaming mindsets:
- Indie Game
- Startup.com
- American Movie (Mark Borchardt has a thing or two to teach all of us about working hard to make dreams become reality)
- Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters
TwinGalaxies seems fairly shady in general. At least they recently revoked Todd Rogers's completely fake high scores.
It's changed hands a couple of times since the but since 2014 it's been owned by Jace Hall, a video game producer in San Fernando Valley, CA.
If you believe Reddit gremlins he's the Worst Person In The World, but I have some sympathy for him, it's tough to adjudicate all of these disputes that can get super technical.
Who has the time for it? Even now that Jace is charging for refereeing, it's not a lucrative endeavor. But he had to know what he was getting when he bought it.
Todd claimed to take a polaroid of a score of 5.51 seconds on Dragster that Activision later "verified" (i.e. acknowledged).
Recently several independent gamers running simulation software demonstrated the score was impossible, that 5.57 is the lowest limit achievable.
But despite the mounting technical evidence Jace initially refused to take action, saying he'd wait a few months before deciding. Then 5 days later, after Rogers' friend and former TG referee Robert Mruczek (featured in KoK) wrote a long blog post basically saying Rogers was a cheater, Jace stripped Rogers of his scores and banned him from competition.
The criticism is that he wasn't fast enough to act on technical evidence but then arbitrarily relies on testimony from one person.
But again, I sympathize with the guy. To overturn a 37-year-old record based on what an algorithm says and what Activision itself said in 1981 is tough. If he acted right away that would have p* off others. It's a thankless job, IMHO.
But he had to know that when bought it.
He for sure took advantage of the situation and knew nobody could verify his claims. It wasn't until recently people have finally shown most of his scores are totally unattainable to begin with, something nobody could really refute until now.
It also makes Twin Galaxies look incredibly shady and their refusal to really adjust the high scores just makes it seem like they have some weird stake in it was well.
I'd say it's part naivete (taking friends at their word), part incompetence (not fully vetting scores, especially early on), part complicity (gaming heroes make them seem like a stable of giants). Hard to know what % of each.
It's an incredibly narrow band of fame, of attention, by a weird subculture that 99% of humanity pays no attention to, but for some people I guess it's important.
You pretty much can't go to these events and not meet him. You walk into Twin Galaxies or Arcade Expo and he's standing there in a suit greeting people, selling autographs. That's his JOB. He's a brand. The only advertising for this brand is these stupid records. For Christ's sake, Adam Sandler riffs on him in "Pixels."
The hardest I have laughed in my entire life was at the line "This is Christopher Lambert". That moment is absolute bonkers.
Specifically, Billy had been conspicuously avoiding playing Steve in a head-to-head matchup in Donkey Kong, afraid he'd lose. When Billy does appear, he walks by, ignores Billy's greeting, then whispers to his wife, "There are some people I don't want to spend too much time with."
Here's the accusation from Billy and the rebuttal from one of the producers, Ed Cunningham:
https://film.avclub.com/the-king-of-kong-continued-donkey-ko...
"Ed Cunningham: Yeah, no, that didn't happen there. It didn't. At that moment, what we show is exactly what happened."
A.k.a. the subject of the article.
For instance they played head to head at an arcade a year before the documentary started filming.
Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade, from the exact same year, which also features Silly Bitchell but a lot of other interesting characters who play other games from the same era, is my favorite documentary of all time, though.
Highly recommend that one, especially if you like King of Kong, but also if you are interested in MAME / arcade history.
In the Reddit thread about Todd Rogers, someone pointed out how pissed they were when they would submit a score to TG for verification and then one of the guys there would say someone else just submitted an even higher score. As if every time a new high score was submitted by a newer player, the TG toadies would immediately put "their" guy's score up in an effort to keep newer players out.
Just all around shady stuff.
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1303
> Too bad it’s loaded with falsehoods. And by loaded, I mean packed, and by packed I mean like the last Japanese subway car before they have to shut down the line. I have seen both the screener and the final work of this film, and then I spent a lot of time listening to a lot of people, people who should know about the events portrayed in the flick.
[snip]
> What I’m saying here is that a good percentage of what makes the documentary “good” are made up conflicts, inaccurate reporting, smoothed-over narratives that are meant to make you root for one side or hate the other, when in fact reality doesn’t hold up to these allegations.
The post goes into detail on specific things the movie got entirely wrong.
> A core theme is that Billy Mitchell is an asshole, one who doesn’t even deign to spend time in the same location as Steve Wiebe and won’t even come in to eat lunch at the same table as him. In fact, Billy came in and paid for lunch.
One, the entire plotline about Doris setting a Q-Bert record was included to show some of the selfless things Billy does.
Two, Steve Sanders makes it clear in the restaurant scene that Billy "didn't want anything to do with Steve" and that he came "unexpectedly and uninvitedly." This is Billy's best friend saying this. The fact that Billy comped everyone's meal does not contradict these facts -- besides, it was his own restaurant.
Is Billy an a-hole? That's hard to say. But if the reporting in this ArsTechnica article is correct, Billy is at least a cheater and liar.
> Billy denies Steve the satisfaction of playing one-on-one on Donkey Kong. They’d played Donkey Kong one-on-one a year before the documentary was filmed at a previous championship.
The reason Steve wanted to play Billy publicly wasn't to play once and be done with it, it was to repeatedly show Twin Galaxy doubters that Steve was a consistently better player than Billy. If they wouldn't give Steve his score at least he wanted to show as many people as possible that he could play at or above Billy's level. I think Steve would have loved to play Billy 20 times because no one believed he was a million-point Donkey Player. Could the film have added, "We played once but I'd still like to play him again in front of everyone so the world can believe me?" Sure. But it's not some falsehood that compromises the film.
> It seems like Steve Wiebe finally gets a chance to top Billy and that same day, a videotape arrives and Billy tops Wiebe. Steve Wiebe already had the top spot in Donkey Kong, having achieved the record before the documentary started. The videotape that Billy sends in has a suspicious glitch. The videotape was a copy and the original was sent in with no glitch.
The point of this article is that Billy's videotape was indeed a fraud, so this "no glitch" defense doesn't hold up so well. Plus the bigger issue is that they denied the validity of Steve's tapes but blindly accepted Billy's tapes, an unfair double standard.
> Two representatives of Twin Galaxies arcade forced their way into Steve’s garage and looted the machine. Two members of the same social scene as Twin Galaxies and Steve were let into his garage by his grandmother, and asked Steve for permission to photograph the circuit board.
The movie makes it pretty clear what happened was disputed and tried to present both sides of the story. But at no point does the movie claim they "forced" their way in or somehow broke into Steve's garage.
> A number of insiders constantly appraised Billy on what was going on at the competition and took suggestions from him. Multiple times, the conversations being shown from both sides are not the same conversation.
What's the proof? Billy has made claims of selective editing but the producers deny them: https://film.avclub.com/the-king-of-kong-continued-donkey-ko...
Instead, this author says he is bitter that the King of Kong coopted his own efforts, now he can't make a documentary on a similar subject because people are afraid of being made out to be the bad guy. I quote, "And by doing this, he f* me, too. Doors that were open to me and my production are slammed shut."
If you have other arguments why KoK is a "seriously flawed work" then let's hear them, but the above points are not compelling, IMHO.
(I have no affiliation with the filmmakers, just a fan)
Possible but unlikely b/c the person making this claim is the current No. 2 Donkey Kong player in the world Wes Copeland, not Joe Schmo off the street.
Even if Mitchell's disputed scores were accepted they would still be far off Copeland's scores. So when the No. 2 player speaks it carries more weight than just some random dude in his basement.
It's like when speedrunners attempt to complete games in the fastest time. If they make a mistake at any point in the game that will cost them a lot of time, they will most likely abandon the game and keep trying until they are able to complete the game without making any costly mistakes.
But what Wes showed was that all the top gamers (with higher scores than Billy) average 13-15% of their total points from barrel smashes while Billy averaged almost 18%.
Details: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVDyEHrX4AEnxP0.jpg:large
Another possibility is that Billy figured out a hitherto unknown RNG manipulation trick. This is how a lot of TAS runs work. Again, I doubt this is the case but with the source it'd be easy to rule out.
Wouldn't this rather be a sign of people making different strategic tradeoffs? Mitchell spent more time breaking barrels but at the cost of getting fewer bonus points for finishing the level in time.
In such a game if each player can choose how many times they play then they can gain an advantage simply by playing more. And their top games will look more and more statistically unlikely. That can be especially surprising if they only report those top games, which is the case here.
What would be interesting to compute is how many more games does a player need to be playing in order to reasonably get the results in the article. If it's 2x, it's not proof of cheating. But if it's 1,000x then maybe it is, because who has that much free time?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
It's unlikely, but possible, to roll a 6-sided die 100 times in a row and get 100 6's.
In basically every PRNG algorithm, there is _no_ reachable state which will result in 100 6's in a row.
http://lcn2.github.io/mersenne-english-name/m19937/prime-c.h...
Expect to get length 1 in a number 10 digits long, 2 in a number 100 digits long (10²), 3 in a number 1000 digits long (10^1000)... So expect to find a run of 100 6s in a random number 10^googol digits long I think.
> 10 digits long[...]100 digits long[...]1000 digits long[...]10^googol digits long I think.
Not 10^googol digits. Googol digits long. Except you don't even need that much, because die rolling is base 6.
It's exactly as unlikely, but possible, to do the same and get the exact sequence: 6 2 2 4 5 4 4 1 4 4 4 3 5 4 2 4 6 2 4 4 1 1 2 4 4 4 6 6 4 6 6 1 1 2 4 4 1 5 1 2 3 6 3 3 3 1 6 4 1 4 1 5 4 2 2 5 6 2 1 6 3 5 3 3 2 6 6 6 3 6 5 5 1 5 4 6 2 6 4 3 2 2 5 1 5 3 3 5 4 5 6 4 1 5 5 6 6 6 6 3
(generated via https://www.random.org/integers/?num=100&min=1&max=6&col=5&b...)
Again, the numbers need to be run. There's no way to tell without them, the truth could be either way.
If "you" is some abstract entity with infinite time, perhaps. Even if you do ten three-hour runs a day, you can't actually get a very high deviation from average in any given century. Getting a certain deviation requires exponential time in proportion to the number of RNG calls.
And you can see from the numbers that it's not just Mitchell's values that deviate from the expected mean, it's the others as well (he's just more extreme), which also shows we can't expect them all to converge to the mean, there's some more complex statistical process going on.
His deviations being more extreme might be explained by him playing more games, or it might be cheating. So far we can't tell.
Yes, the RNG is not perfect, as the article says,
> the points derived from those enemy smashes are assigned semi-randomly
(which apparently solves an old mystery there).
In any case, the numbers for total smashes is 380 for Mitchell and 242-371 for the other players. Percent of score from smashes is 17.7 versus 10.6-14.8. In both cases the large variance among the other players shows that while he's an outlier, we can't expect the numbers to be close to a specific average, this isn't a simple statistical process where we average out thousands of independent variables.
He was caught cheating back then too, if I remember correctly, by sending a video that messed with the score. I am surprised they accept sent-in submissions from anybody in an age where videos are so easily edited, let alone from a notorious cheater.
People like Mitchell will go as far as they can to win regardless of whether or not they deserve it, and I'm interested in hearing what the thoughts are in the industry around dealing with cheaters. I've seen some gamers beat records while on Twitch, which I don't really know anything about first hand but it seems somewhat more legit than a sent-in video, as there are people watching both the player and the game he's playing in real time.
Are there any Twitch features that can tell if a game is really being played live?
Otherwise, are there any obvious moves that should/could be taken to ensure legitimacy in gaming world records?
I recognize that name Chibi and I think I've seen him getting picked on in some other videos. He clearly just wants attention, and part of me feels bad for him. Hopefully he's realized by now that cheating is no way to make friends.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w/vid...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSf2mgkRm7Q&list=PLoUHkRwnRH...
Technically never proven a cheater but the evidence is extremely convincing.
Todd Rogers is a genuinely excellent video game player. He's also a blatant cheater.
Sometimes this causes them to think that a game owes them a certain score/time (maybe they they pass all the hard 1 in 20 RNG events and then a stupid 99 in 100 RNG fails them) and occasionally decide to cheat just to get that score/time.