Billy Mitchell, hot sauce salesman and professional 1920’s cartoon villain lookalike, has had all of his video game scores wiped from the Twin Galaxies database and is currently banned from entering new scores. This is the result of a dispute over Mitchell’s use of arcade emulator MAME to set his scores in Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. Mitchell has frequently submitted scores via videotape, something allowed by Twin Galaxies so long as it met certain standards. Those tapes were often suspicious, if not downright obviously edited, and yet were often entered into Twin Galaxies database of video game records. This can actually be seen playing out in the documentary King of Kong where Steve Wiebe sets a new Donkey Kong record in person, and Mitchell just sends in a video tape with jumps and cuts.
Recently the Mitchell suspicions came to a head when it was noticed a tape of his submitted in 2010 loaded oddly. In the arcade version of Donkey Kong the stages load in a set, predictable pattern, but in MAME the stage loads in differently. Mitchell’s submissions looked exactly like the MAME version of the game, not the original, something Twin Galaxies expressly forbids, so far as to not even host a MAME leaderboard.
After wiping those suspicious scores, Twin Galaxies, after being hammered for months over credibility, has finally done what was right and banned Mitchell completely. If you’re going to take games seriously, you cannot make shortcuts for friends. Clearly Mitchell went about setting the records through handshakes and friendships rather than actual achievement. Sure, it is just pixels on a screen, but integrity and honor still matters in competition. Now Billy can go home, get a haircut, and focus on what he does best, slinging hot sauce.
