Twin Galaxies restores Billy Mitchell's scores following legal settlement | Hacker News Reader

Twin Galaxies restores Billy Mitchell's scores following legal settlement

arstechnica.com

42 pointsnomilk37 comments

Title is misleading. Twin Galaxies hasn't reinstated Billy's scores as legitimate high scores on their current record table.

Instead, they have created an archived record table as the scores were before ownership changed hands to Jace Hall. They've essentially created a mini wayback machine. The archived table is not the default when you visit their website, you have to manually change to it.

I don't agree with dropping the counterclaim against Billy, considering how much he cost TG in legal fees for a frivolous lawsuit, but hopefully he still gets some pain from his Karl Jobst lawsuit.

There's a very long expose on the entire Billy Mitchell cheating scandal that's been unfolding over the last several years by Veritas. Worth a watch if you're interested in how his cheating and usage of MAME was first uncovered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PySD_FiEl5c

I watched substantial chunks of that a while back, and I was totally, utterly convinced. Whatever a court rules, I firmly believe Billy Mitchell is a cheater who used a rigged machine to get his record.

There's no way in hell he wasn't using MAME. Now, it could be that the MAME version is an absolute perfect emulation that doesn't affect the final outcome. However, it'd be a whole lot easier to work some cheats into an emulator than the original hardware cabinet. If he can reproduce that score on a genuine cabinet, rock on. If he can't or won't, then I'd consider that damning.

Billy keeps getting got lmao

MAME is a legitimate platform at TG, but it's not as simple as "play on MAME and submit just a video". At the time of Billy's scores, I believe that MAME play on TG required one of a few specific builds of WolfMAME, a fork that removes some options that would be useful for cheating. It also always requires attribution as MAME, as well as submission of an input log. Billy did neither of these things, so it doesn't matter if MAME is 100% accurate for DK outside of VRAM scanout. He submitted MAME runs as non-MAME runs, and thus did not submit an input log.

Yikes, very long indeed. Twice the run length of King of Kong haha. 4 hours?!

A lot of the video evidence is youtube re-encodings of digital transfers of VHS video of video game CRTs (...or MAME). The video is exhaustive about what errors can be introduced in each layer of the process and how they combine.

As Guinness World Records is little more than an advertising agency, their reinstatement of his records doesn't hold much weight for me.

Edit: before downvoting, give this a read: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/6/8157639/guinness-world-record-b... or https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/20/552203402/epis...

Does the NPR episode go into more allegations than them accepting payment for fasttracking new records? I read the vox article, and it seems to stop after mentioning the income they get from marketing and inventing new more niche records. AFAIK, the actual records they track are still well-defined and updated when new facts come to light.

Not sure on that episode specifically. If you have two hours (or want to skip around to the good parts), this youtube video goes in depth on the records of Tommy Tallarico and his videogame-related records: https://youtu.be/0twDETh6QaI?si=dgBVx1osuCsDpaaZ It seems that, originally, Guinness just took his word for it and printed it as fact, but to your point eventually they renamed his record so it was more accurate.

(warning:language)

Did you read TFA? These aren't Guinness World Records.

In their defense, the article says this:

> Despite these kinds of arguments, in 2020, the Guinness Book of World Records reinstated Mitchell's record scores, saying it was "defer[ing] to the original contemporaneous adjudication" rather than relying on Twin Galaxies' updated findings

That's what I was referring to, yes. I could see how it could be taken to be mistaken about the main records being talked about.

My mistake, and my apology then.. I shouldn't have assumed.

YouTube fellow Karl Jobst has a number of videos chronicling this saga. He also happens to be involved in legal action with Mitchell which he claims is more likely to go to trial.

Funny because Karl Jobst posted a video titled "Billy Mitchell Lost His Lawsuit" but it sounds like he actually won?

As part of the settlement, Billy's scores will be restored on Twin Galaxies's "Original TG Historical Database." You access this by going to https://twingalaxies.com, and selecting Records, then "The Original TG Historical Database" on the nav bar. This is separate from their official leaderboard which you find in "View Leaderboards" in the same nav menu. A disclaimer is posted on this archive stating it is not their official leaderboard. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless, so I agree, I don't believe Karl's video title is appropriate.

Bit of both practically.

Pretty much a settlement that lets them both pretend they "won." Billy can keep saying he has a title and Twin Galaxies can keep pretending like they have a good reputation.

It's absolutely insane to me that this grown man has fought tooth and nail to protect his status as a high-scorer (or the overall best high score ever) for a video game from the 80s that nobody cares about.

The drama around it is the only interesting thing about it.

> that nobody cares about.

Obviously enough people care about it that: a) they track a high score, b) have rules about how to get that high score, and c) actually check if the high-scorer violated said rules.

> It's absolutely insane to me that this grown man has fought tooth and nail to protect his status as a high-scorer

People are weird. I'll bet there's a bunch of things in your household that are involved in some kind of "best of" competitions with competitors that are fiercely protective of their status.

I am not surprised, I used to work with someone that held a retro arcade high score (national, rather than world-wide, I believe), and they almost based their entire personality on it.

Billy Mitchell should get into the boxing ring with Jake Paul.

Somehow, at this point that would sort of make sense, at least to me.

People definitely care about it. Just because you don't does not give you the right to be condescending.

https://perfectpacman.com/

This site has many long, detailed analyses of Mitchell's scores and conduct for his records in Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Pac-Man. While the DK records are more popular, Mitchell previously owned the perfectpacman.com domain and has made several claims about his Pac-Man scores and whether Namco gave him an additional award. The site includes extensive commentary on his lawsuits with links to filings. It also includes descriptions of financial transactions between Mitchell, Twin Galaxies, and related parties over the years. (Sorry to be vague, I'm not interested in getting sued for attempting to accurately summarize events. It's a shame that Ars Technica, which presumably has a legal budget, doesn't do a better job reporting.)

I remember watching the king of Kong documentary. Was pretty good. Will say that after reading the article I am slightly perplexed. Billy sued because Twin galaxies was presented with a photo of him using a different joy stick? Basically saying he didn't play on a stock system, so he sued for libel, didn't win or lose and just settled?

He was caught using emulators and modified hardware (joysticks). Basically all sorts of things that aren’t “legal” when setting a record. He sued because they removed him from the records.

Twin galaxy’s lawyer just got caught contacting witnesses directly which is a huge violation of the court, and a day later we have a confidential settlement. This is probably more about TG not having the will and/or funds to do it all over again after their lawyer screwed up than anything.

Based on the evidence there’s basically no way he didn’t cheat, he just has the resources to fight in court longer than the people’s he’s suing can, or are willing to.

> Twin galaxy’s lawyer just got caught contacting witnesses directly which is a huge violation of the court

I wasn't aware of this. Here's a source, which also links to the relevant complaint submitted to the court:

> Twin Galaxies' own lawyer, David Tashroudian, faced misconduct claims of his own after he improperly contacted two witnesses in the case — prompting Superior Court Judge Wendy Chang, who's overseeing the case, to consider referring him to the State Bar for discipline.

> ...snip...

> The court was scheduled to hear arguments on both motions for sanctions on Thursday morning. Instead, a settlement was announced.

https://www.courthousenews.com/notorious-arcade-gamer-billy-...

In its statement, Twin Galaxies cites recent testimony from Dr. Michael Zyda, who was presented as an expert at the trial. Zayda's testimony concluded that Mitchell's submitted gameplay "could in fact depict play on original unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware if the hardware involved was malfunctioning, likely due to degradation of components.”

His opinion was debunked pretty thoroughly.

https://youtu.be/Q7mE1LkkOGg?si=holUhuJKWAEFNMQA

The video you linked doesn't debunk the expert witness testimony, in the video he says he will need to release a follow up video that does the debunking.

To be clear, I believe Billy's video shows MAME gameplay. I don't believe the hypothesis given by the expert witness. But it's not a "debunking" to just say that this is an unlikely explanation. You have to find arcade cabinets that are malfunctioning due to degrading components and show that even in the worst case they don't look like MAME gameplay. As far as I know, no one has done this, they have only compared Billy's video to arcade cabinets in good condition.

Feels like at this point the burden of proof should be on Mitchell to establish that an arcade machine is capable of producing MAME-like output under any circumstances at all.

I guess it's technically possible a malfunctioning machine could output literally any string of bits.

The chances they would just so happen to look exactly how a particular emulator wrongly displays them, and do so over and over, is virtually zero.

For people reading along, the crux of the matter is that MAME and the original cabinet draw the screen in a different direction. Here's a SO explanation of the implications behind that: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/8179/why-...

TL;DR MAME would have to emulate a CRT's electron beam drawing in the original cabinet's direction if it wanted to be spatiotemporally identical. The notion that a cabinet could glitch out and accidentally perfectly emulate MAME beggars belief.

Like you said, I suppose it could happen, in the sense that it wouldn't violate the known laws of physics.

But it didn't.

Seems like Mitchell could easily offer the offending cabinet for anybody to examine. But really it seems like there was never any question whether he was going to do that.

TG put up a historical record of the scores before it changed ownership, Billy’s scores are in that one, not currently updated high score tables.

The real “victory” for him is getting the dispute thread deleted from the forum (and obv not having to pay for lawyers during a trial that imo he was going lose)

>Zayda's testimony concluded that Mitchell's submitted gameplay "could in fact depict play on original unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware if the hardware involved was malfunctioning, likely due to degradation of components."

So either he cheated, or he was using malfunctioning hardware? Like that was his defense? Prick.

Billy has spent his entire life litigating anyone who calls out his blatant cheating, and spending an incredible amount of court resources to bully anyone who challenges him, it's disgusting.

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