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As a casual follower of speed running / high score community and HN frequenter, I'd say everyone who doesn't follow would be surprised how much detail goes into mastering some of these old games. These guys decipher everything, and find tricks that depend on "subpixel" perfect timing to shave off mere milliseconds. And they have thousands and thousands of attempts. The community at large thinks Billy Mitchell is a piece of shit, so tells me enough. Here's some channels if you want to learn more.
https://www.youtube.com/user/RWhiteGoose
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3ltptWa0xfrDweghW94Acg
Something to know about RWhiteGoose:
And his response:
https://mobile.twitter.com/RWhiteGoose/status/10677075646897...
How these are weighed against one another in evaluating his character is left as an exercise to the reader.
an usually good apology at least!
I don't know how a person in a matter of weeks can go from at the very least accepting (if not advocating) of the idea of genocide as an "answer" to that "question" could do a complete 180. When people are that deranged they are very willing to publicly recant views that they realize are not publicly acceptable while still believing it in private.
Yeah especially when the comments include talk about 'hiding your power level' which is explicitly about lying about your views to blend in and stealthily introduce fash/antisemetic/alt-right talking points to people without immediately turning them away or getting banned.
I think it's pretty unlikely. More likely that he's simply trying to salvage his brand.
the first thing he said in that imgur link was that he thinks its okay to "hide your power level" . he is clearly okay with and willing to hide his real beliefs
"Speedrunning is the most degenerate act man as ever come up with"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b56N17d4WnM
(language warning)
The speedrunner Summoning Salt has documentary-style videos on his channel regarding the history of various speed runs for anyone interested in that sort of thing:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w
To point one video out there:
Blindfolded _Mike Tyson's Punchout_ is an amazing niche documentary. To repeat, a _blind_ speedrun of a very old boxing game. The level of skill and dedication that those runners have is just astonishing. In some strange way, it really makes you reevaluate the limits we humans have, and how they aren't anywhere close to where you think they actually are. It's a heck of an achievement. All that from a game with Mike Tyson on the headliner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZT6JEOC3D8
I recommend this _insane_ 2-player, 1-controller blindfolded run of Punch-Out!! at AGDQ 2020, a live speedrunning event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4HnZ4-_HzI
I don't know anything about Mitchell beyond what I saw in "The King of Kong," but he and his lackey come off as scheming, haughty jerks in that film.
I've seen videos about this case on and off. Some of the things that seem particularly problematic for Billy's case are the conflict of interest in the fact that moderators were able to post records, the shady record trail for the DK run (only "seen" by one said moderator, who later was found to cheat, and the proof tape subsequently "disappearing"), and a claim that a run was done in real hardware despite video proof showing glitches that only happen in MAME (an emulator). He made claims that said video was adulterated after the fact without his knowledge, but hasn't provided any evidence for that claim (nor is it particularly believable that anyone would go through the trouble to do so).
There's also some surrounding circumstantial videos where Billy originally claims to change an arcade machine circuit board to a different game board in a very theatrical video, but then is called out for merely putting the same board back in (one can verify by looking at the circuit boards and cross-referencing with verified images of each alleged board), casting doubts into his motivations and general credibility.
There are also cracks in his main line of argument (decks and decks of "signed testimonials" from people who allegedly witnessed him doing the runs). Some of those witnesses have later come out claiming to having misrepresented, and would likely testify to that effect if ever called to stand.
Personally, I agree with the sentiment of the vast majority of the community that Billy is likely a cheat and that he sees this whole thing as "defamation" merely because it is a threat to his income model of milking sponsorships etc through his fame. I don't particularly see this as a good use of the courts' time, especially given how "productive to society" the monetary impact is here, but alas, he does have a right to pursue whatever crazy suit he wants if a judge hasn't thrown out his case.
My take when watching the show was that it was intentional documentary drama.
I wonder if that sort of figures into the whole equation.
Did he get typecast or was he really that type of person?
I watched "The Talented Mr Ripley" and I couldn't see Matt Damon as a hero type character in any role afterwards.
Wearing your patriotism on your sleeve ... or around your neck ... tells me all I need to know.
No, seriously, I have never been wrong yet about a person's character by observing things like that. I know a view as unscientific as that will not go over well with the HN crowd, but perhaps some of us do find merit in body language, and other external "tells".
To be sure, not saying he is not an impressive, and maybe even the best Donkey Kong player — just making an observation about his general trustworthiness in my view.
I'm not sure if he's so much wearing/celebrating his patriotism as he is cloaking himself with it. He's extremely litigious from all accounts I've seen and it seems to be part and parcel of a carefully crafted and intimidating persona. Billy himself has no credibility to a lot of people, so why not throw a symbol front and center that holds weight for people. Just my opinion, don't sue me Billy.
BIRG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basking_in_reflected_glory
Thank you. This was a fascinating read.
The tie is what gives you that impression? Not the mullet?
Yep, Joe Dirt had a mullet, and I think that’s all I need to say.
Life’s a garden, dig it.
Anyone who creates a persona around their association with something else casts suspicion on anything they do outside of that something else.
Many athletic all-time greats have been haughty jerks. I wouldn’t say that’s any evidence for or against the high score being authentic.
Yet I read Lance Armstrong's book before it all came out...
I'd recommend checking out Mario Grand Poo World related record runs and the history of those mods. It's crazy how much effort goes into it.
Run from the namesake:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwYt3QxJv34
Grand Poo Bear is a great streamer!
Barbarous King, the creator of Grand Poo World 1 + 2 released this video montage of other streamers playing his Grand Poo World 2 for the first time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anhKrWAT0Oc
Wow, that is way more in depth than I was expecting. Thank you for the link!
If you want to see the other side of creation, Barb is working on Grand poo world 3 now, some of it is in public on twitch.
http://www.twitch.tv/barbarousking/v/785940513?sr=a&t=1135s
Barb is one of my favorite streamers, it's nice to see him getting a shout out here.
And yes, watching him create Grand Poo World 3 has been a ton of fun, I love those streams.
This video about the 3 minute Mario 3 speed run was the most impressive technical thing I’ve watched this year -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24456247
I only know about him from the king of Kong (like many people probably) and I'm always wary of how those things can create a bias in editing, but man does he come across as a world class jerk in that.
Karl Jobst has some great in-depth explorations of the techniques and effort put into some amazing speedruns. He also has some good videos that go into how various communities have moderated themselves regarding techniques that verge on "cheating".
Edit: grammar + spelling.
Agreed, his YouTube channel is excellent. Also, I enjoy being called an “absolute legend” each time I watch one.
How awesome is it that we're all absolute legends? Right?
> The community at large thinks Billy Mitchell is a piece of shit
That is partially the crux of the matter: on the one hand, popularity and like ability is not evidence for or against him, and second, community contempt is the consequence of invalidating his scores and making him seem like a cheater. Maybe he’s a cheater, but evidence is the important thing
For those who grew up playing quake as a kid... A bit of history, speedrun and nostalgia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43d8fICz6gM
It's important to emphasize that this isn't just about a Donkey Kong score. Twin Galaxies took the extreme position that because they were suspicious of a handful of Donkey Kong games played over the decades by Billy Mitchell -- they're invalidating every score in every videogame he ever played in his life. (In 1985 Mitchell held the world's high scores for Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong, Jr., Centipede, and Burger Time.)
It seems like the record Billy is most proud of is his perfect game of Pac-Man. (To this day on Twitter he calls himself "Pac-Man Billy.") Here's a good article that explains how difficult that was.
https://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/622-the-perfect...
After 254 levels of normal Pac-man, the screen fills with jibberish and screen noise -- some of the pixels you have to eat are actually invisible. Billy was the first person on planet earth to crack that level.
That's one of the other records Twin Galaxies has invalidated.
Billy's argument is in part: there's zero evidence he cheated at Pac-man, so why is that score being invalidated too.
Isn't this common in sports? If you're caught intentionally cheating even once your entire career's achievements are invalidated.
No. It's not. In fact I can't think of any major sports that operate in that way.
Titles/records are stripped from events where they are proven to be doping/cheating but that's usually it. Athletes are then usually banned for a period afterwards.
Lance Armstrong comes to mind.
Lance Armstrong
Armstrong fits the “Titles/records are stripped from events where they are proven to be doping/cheating” pattern not the “acheivements negated for whole career regardless” pattern.
It's just that the conclusion of the investigations into the allegations that started early in the major success portion of his career was that he was cheating the whole time of his biggest successes.
Multiple people have been suspended for doping in tennis, but their past achievements were not impacted.
Looks like the Pac-Man score was reinstated.
https://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/29330854/retro-gamin...
By Guinness World Records only, despite the fact that GWR are not and never were the refereeing organisation for those records, so they don't have any authority. GWR just republishes Twin Galaxies' records.
By Guinness.
But not by Twin Galaxies...
Ah, thanks for this correction
Is it an extreme position? Video game high scores and speedrunning are sports that rely on honour to a certain extent, because it's difficult to detect sophisticated cheating even with video evidence, and many of Twin Galaxies' old records do not even have that, being verified by referees (at least one of whom has his own dodgy history) without surviving proof.
If someone is found to have cheated, their other records also lose credibility because of that honour component. Also, suspending records is maybe the only form of leverage honest players have.
TG removing his scores isn't at issue. I don't think there's a court that could order them to reinstate his scores, since it would be the government ordering them to engage in some speech. His claim is that TG called him a cheater.
For purposes of this ruling the judge found that TG's statements were not opinion but were held out as fact. I think TG did themselves no favors in being cagey. They could've easily formulated their statement as an opinion based on disclosed facts. In essence, "I think John is a drunk" may be defamatory because it implies undisclosed facts while "I think John is a drunk because he buys a liter of vodka each week" is an opinion.
In both cases doesn’t the “I think” convey that it is an opinion?
This comes down to language, specifically what differs an opinion from a belief. Which is quite complex and I cannot fully wrap my head around it. But here's my take nonetheless.
In this case, placing the "I think" would make it a belief. This could also make a statement an opinion, but from what I understand, beliefs have a non-zero chance of being proven or disproven, whereas opinions cannot be proven.
"I think gentleman11 is nice username" is a bit different than "I think gentleman11 is a man". Something being "nice" is a bit harder to prove, and possibly impossible without additional context. Thus, it is an opinion. Someone being an man, cheater, alcoholic, etc have the ability to be proven, so it's not as much an opinion as a belief.
I'm not a linguist, but I'd be interested in what language specialists have to say on this.
Couching your language only gets you so far. By disclosing the facts that underpinning an opinion a speaker may enjoy protections over merely implying them.
IMO, that’s a completely reasonable stance. Cheaters often retroactively lose trophies even if they might not have cheated in that instance. It’s simply better for the community to have such standards.
I don’t have a high opinion of the Olympics but _In the case of team events, the rule was revised in March 2003 so that the IOC can strip medals from a team based on infractions by a single team member._
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stripped_Olympic_medal...
That’s arguably a much harsher stance.
I'm not sure I understand your point of view. Suppose we're on a four-person relay race team, one of our other teammates is cheating, we win the gold medal in the relay race, and the cheating is uncovered.
It would seem outrageous to me for you or I to keep our Olympic Gold Medals.
They would ban a full team even if the member was simply on the roster and did not actually participate.
Designated alternates only get medals if they have some nominal participation, so they will generally get it when possible.
Well if he's cheated in one game, I think it's perfectly reasonable to issue a full ban, and I'm sure TG's TOS gives them full discretion to do so.
> I'm sure TG's TOS gives them full discretion to do so.
I think Twin Galaxies and those records predate this sort of privately issued internet law.
I don't really agree. Ban him from further games, because he's a known cheater? Sure/maybe. But unless his record in Pac-Man itself seems suspect I don't think it should be taken away.
The damage for removing a valid score from a known cheater is that they may be robbed of a legitimate score.
The damage of not removing an invalid score is that that score may be impossible or require superhuman skills (i.e. TAS) to attain, thus forever removing that category from competition.
This lopsidedness - and don't get me wrong, a healthy dose of schadenfreude too - makes me strongly believe proven cheaters should be stripped of all records.
Actually, I would tend to lean the opposite direction. Our ability to detect cheating tends to go up over time [1], so we can provide more stringent defenses against cheating for future events, in particular by requiring more/better evidence of scores. However, our ability to reanalyze older records for evidence of cheating is often more lacking, and so we have to enter in a default judgement.
If you're dishonest enough to cheat once, why should we expect your other records (both past and future) to be more honest? Once you have been caught cheating, that knowledge colors all of the other records, and you have a stronger burden of proof to demonstrate that those records are indeed valid. If that means that we are stripping you of legitimate records, well, maybe you shouldn't have broken the rules if you didn't want to suffer the punishment.
[1] In absolute terms. Of course, cheaters also get more ways to cheat over time, so the relative capability of cheaters versus anticheat detection will fluctuate over time.
This happens all the time in real sports. If you get caught cheating you often forfeit your legacy because everything you've done professionally is suspect, especially if you show a longer-running history of cheating or are caught multiple times.
I'm not sure how you can differentiate the punative nature of banning someone from all future tries because they had cheated indeterminately in the past, but not invalidating all their historical record outside of individiaul cases...
I'm trying to say this in a way that doesn't come across as snarky. Last year the Houston Astro's admitted they'd been cheating.
They did not forfeit their legacy, and in fact the very next year came within one game of competing in the World Series.
New England Patriots?
Many of Twin Galaxies' old records have no surviving evidence allowing them to be verified.
If they want to keep those runs, seems like this could be solved with an Archive/Legacy tab or even better a checkbox for "Show unverifiable runs" that's unchecked by default.
That way a game isn't killed forever because an unverifiable run got a perfect score.
> unless his record in Pac-Man itself seems suspect
Are there good records to determine that it _isn't_ suspect?
It might sound a bit harsh but OTOH anyone who decides to cheat in this context has plenty of time to reevaluate, since (I guess) it takes some preparation and energy.
I think Billy will do well at trial, given how honest, humble, and totally not delusional he appears.
Billy seems fairly litigious. He even sued some guy in New Zealand for comments in a YouTube video about these matters:
How does this guy selling hot sauce have enough money to file lawsuits in foreign countries?
He sells hot sauce that's carried by major stores, owns restaurants and who knows what he has made from gaming. He streams on Twitch and puts up some ridiculous Donkey Kong scores even if they aren't close to the current world record. He is still pretty popular in some circles. His restaurant isn't too far from my house and he makes regular appearances there so I assume he lives around here too. Cost of living isn't too high. He's probably doing alright.
Did he win? Or was this just empty bravado.
Ha! Might want to explicitly indicate sarcasm; even here on HN people might think you're serious!
I think it was a /s. My sarcasm detector is broken..
Whenever somebody compliments someone you don't know as _appearing totally not delusional_, it's going to be an /s.
I've encountered counterexamples, but they were more ha-ha-only-serious than first-order sincere.
Oooo, a sarcasm detector, that's real useful!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ73Q4DwrGM
> even here on HN people might think you're serious!
Ha! Might want to explicitly indicate sarcasm; even here on HN people might think you're serious!
I dont know the person. Is this sarcasm?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUXKruy3Zjs
Yes
I think Billy will fare poorly at trial, given how dishonest, arrogant, and delusional he appears.
Sarcasm is a cathartic way to vent, especially when spoken with intionation between friends, but it causes confusion in short-form published text. I suggest editing comments after writing them and before submitting.
r/woosh
For a good overview about how DMCA/lawsuit happy Billy Mitchell is, check out this video from the absolute legend Karl Jobst:
This is not a good overview. It's a one sided response to a lawsuit. It's incredibly annoying, like watching a domestic dispute unfold in public. I tried to keep watching but couldn't.
Here's some commentary on the technical arguments against the play on the videos being from original hardware:
https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/8a6ymm/billy_mitc...
This hardware is guaranteed to run the same for it's entire lifetime regardless of age or repair?
Hi, I wrote the linked post.
The most important thing to keep in mind is the rendering artifacts demonstrate that the video in generated using double buffering. In single buffering, the CPU writes to VRAM which is ultimately read and displayed on the CRT. The circuitry writing to VRAM is racing the circuitry that reads it.
With double buffering you have two video buffers in memory. The CPU writes to one while the other one is being read. While aging hardware can experience glitches, rewriting a game to use double buffering simply isn't something that will occur by happenstance.
I see.
I have never understood how we can point to video that has gone through an unknown converter into a television screen recorded by an unknown camera and say definitively what the expected result will be. I feel like the timing on multiple devices is guaranteed to give us some strange artifacts.
I don't think there's an expectation for an exact recorded output, but in this case, it's known how the arcade system draws the levels in ram, how the video output chip works from the ram, and if things show up on screen inconsistent with that, but consistent with how an emulator outputs video, that's pretty fishy for contest that's supposed to run on real hardware.
It's also an indication that the emulator isn't totally accurate at all times, even if it might be during gameplay.
Mitchell also described his recording set up as using a 2-bit brand converter. This device is not double buffered, making double buffering artifacts implausible. On top of this, DK hardware generates a badly timed sync pulse. The 2-bit converter does not correct for this and typically generates a black and white image when connected to a DK board.
Even if the converter was doing some buffering or interpolation (which ugh, who wants?), it couldn't reorder things to show out of order. At most, it would make things more simultaneous, or fade in.
For one thing, the pixels in the original are huge by today’s standards. With or without noise, you could roughly analyze a good percent of them fairly accurately
I hope this will lead into part two of "King of Kong" documentary. One of the best documentaries I have seen in a long-long time.
Actually, King of Kong is my go-to example on why one should not trust documentaries[1]. There was _so much_ deception by the filmmakers it is unreal. Some from memory:
They painted Steve as this upstart who came out of nowhere who was going to dethrone Billy's score. In reality, Steve was well known in the community, and had been on the stage with Billy Mitchell some years prior. He had set the record in the past, and when he was setting out for a new record in the documentary, he was trying to beat _his own record_, not Billy's. Yes - at the time, the record was actually held by Steve. When Billy got his (new) record invalidated, it wasn't so that he could be on the top again - the record simply reverted to Steve's prior record.
When Steve ate at Billy's restaurant, they made it seem like Billy avoided him. In fact, Billy did come out and meet Steve. They'd interacted in a friendly way multiple times over the years.
When Steve took part in a competition, and everyone seemed upset that Billy didn't show up, they made Billy look like a real jerk. His defense (not in the documentary) was that the invitation to compete came out of the blue with very short notice, and he needs time to practice/train, so he declined.
You can see Twin Galaxy's statements on the King of Kong here:
https://www.twingalaxies.com/forumdisplay.php/406-The-King-o...
[1] You need to be a bit of a subject matter expert to gauge the accuracy of a documentary. And if you already know the subject that well, the documentary isn't going to teach you much.
That’s a bit horrifying to be honest. King of Kong was my favourite documentary ever until 5 minutes ago. I feel so dirty now
That's usually the response I get from people when I point this out. It really is a fantastic documentary as far as production and storytelling goes. I felt the same when I watched it.
And then everything crashed when I looked up the details. It went from "awesome" to "Man, how evil _were_ those filmmakers?"
My apologies.
I wouldn't be surprised if most documentaries are similarly inaccurate. The filmmakers want to tell a story, and good stories are never completely neutral retellings.
Some stories are too good to be true I guess. To bad. I'm always wondering how do the directors always find the right guy in the right time just before something is going to happen. I suppose it's just a trick with mixing up the timeline and presenting things in different order.
Depending on if you are more interested in the speedrunning or the characters, Summoning Salt has put together a compelling set of videos about the history of various speedrunning records on YouTube.
The games & records are the premise; the people and personalities were the movie IMO
+1 for Summoning Salt. I especially liked his Mario Kart Wii video, where he explains the mechanics of the lap counting system in detail.
Consider "Ecstasy of Order" about Tetris, and a group of people who play it and have a tournament. It belongs in a top slot also.
Ecstasy of Order is really great. After watching King of Kong I expected it to have a similar villain and was happy with how it turned out.
That doc took some criticism for distorting a few elements. They played fast and loose with the timeline, omitted a few details and insinuated some things happened that didn't. The main thrust of the story was still accurate, but they played up a few things for drama that weren't that dramatic in real life.
The documentary Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade is a nice companion piece to King of Kong. It has interviews with a lot of the same people.
Ha, I made a track for a chip tune jukebox on the DVD menu, then they didn't even send me a copy so I never saw it. Perhaps I should see it...
Suing is really a jerk move.
I mean it’s a video game high score. It’s impressive played on an emulator or not.. but in the grand scheme of things..
I always thought of Billy Mitchel as kinda a fun personality in small doses. In the extras on the “fistful of quarters” he brings an old woman a q Bert machine to practice on which was nice.
Though he seems to have a bit of an humility problem he seemed affable.
This Lawsuit changes ones perception of that image a bit. I wonder what his reception at in person video game events will be once they resume.
What’s the purpose of requiring authentic arcade PCBs over emulators?
This isn't at issue. TG has tracks for emulation and arcade. Submitting a game to the wrong track is against the rules. TG alleges that the plaintiff passed off emulated gameplay as live arcade play.
Arcade and emulated play have different verification standards. Generally you need to reset the cabinet, which shows the machine's uninitialized memory on screen, post game you need to show the board. For emulated play you typically need to provide a full recording of the game, which can be re-run in the emulator.
One difference between arcade and emulation comes down to inputs. The arcade joystick has a 4-way restrictor. When Jumpman is climbing a ladder the player can't provide left/right inputs. At a high level this impacts their ability to steer and group barrels. This is totally irrelevant apart from the highest levels of play.
With a emulator it's easier to use save states and splice different parts of the run together, or to otherwise cheat. Given that Billy Mitchell has stated that he never used a emulator but the footage contradicts that, a lot of people believe he may be lying about using an emulator to hide the fact that he was cheating using an emulator.
This is a deep and complicated question, but the top-line answer is it's the best way to prevent cheating (note I didn't say perfect). A big part of these classic games is how the random events are generated. It would be fairly easy to modify the game in an emulator to more often generate ideal random events, giving you an edge over people playing on the real hardware. So the community agreed that for the purposes of the leaderboards in question here, the game must be played on real hardware.
To add, the biggest deal with altering the random events for a game like donkey kong isn't that the player would know what is coming up next. Depending on the random spawns in the game, there are more points to be scored. So you could play a perfect game and score 100k less than the record. So they're chasing the perfect game during a perfect random spawn.
It is also possible to modify a real arcade machine hardware.
And it's also possible to put some visual or aural indicators for player when to press which buttons, so the player would be just following computer's instructions. An ability to sync your actions to background music not provided by the game itself is also a possible avenue for cheating.
So the idea that somebody can set a recognisible world record while streaming from home is ridiculous. A proper procedure must involve all hardware and software provided by competition organizers and checked by independent judges.
Of course. I said it isn't perfect. It's a balancing act between preventing cheating and practicality. The requirements you laid out would result in no leaderboard at all.
As an interesting example: In speedrunning, certain movement patterns of bosses can be cleared faster than others.
If such a pattern only shows up in 1/4 of the runs and you need a good combination of three or more such patterns over the course of the game, the ability to control this will make reaching a world record much much easier. You still need a lot of skill, though.
There are some excellent documentaries on speedrunning on YT: For example Ninja Gaiden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u1tVD7UEqw
It's not only about obvious cheating like slowing down the game.
It might be easier to do certain things with different hardware setups.
An illustrating example: If you play quake 3 at 125 fps you can jump farther than you could if the game was running at 60fps.
While there are still some people who treat the arcade pcbs as inherently superior to mame, the general consensus nowadays (at least for DK) is that mame plays arcade perfect.
In fact TG has a separate leader board to track the mame high scores. Which is one of the most frustrating things about this whole affair... if Billy really wanted to use mame he could have just submitted his score under the mame category instead of lying and submitting it under the arcade hardware category!
There are two main reasons:
1) It's much easier to cheat (in many ways, adjust random generators to always be in your favour for example).
2) There can be differences (the differences are how he has been caught) -- it's common that games in emulators are faster as they don't bother implementing waits of various kinds correctly, as most games still work fine (often better, as they'll skip less frames), and it would just make your emulator slower.
Timing differences mainly. Plus emulators can be played at a slower speed and then the video sped up later.
The real reason is that Twin Galaxies were quite old fashioned (maybe still are?). Didn't allow emulators, glitches, various other things. It's partly why most speedrun leaderboards are kept on speedrun.com now, as the games communities get to dictate the rules, rather than the owners of Twin Galaxies.
Low level differences between emulators and the physical hardware could make a big difference to the high score/speedrun in theory, especially when developers take advantage of esoteric or undocumented features.
> I mean it’s a video game high score.
It's a defamation case. Liar is outed as a liar. You can imagine how this can negatively effect your entire life. Look at athletes caught for doping. Imagine you are called a doper, your records stripped, when you were actually innocent.
It's not about high scores per se.
Suing is only a jerk move if he's wrong, which can only be decided in the eye of each beholder.
Billy Mitchell built his life and career around this effort. Whether he is right or wrong in his claims, it matters. We wouldn't say that a professional athlete's dispute about cheating is unimportant because it's just a game. By the "grand scheme of things" almost nothing any of us care about matters.
I forgot what machine it was but I read a comment here about how a particular machine literally used an RC circuit for timing a delay. It's small things like that that really cannot be emulated perfectly.
EDIT: found it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569280
What's interesting about this to me is that there's some disagreement over what the absolute highest possible score is.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/05/is-this-the-worlds-fi...
I don't think there's disagreement - my score from 2016 is the one this article is about. The max is whatever the game's RNG will give you, and is probably somewhere close to 1.3m.
As top-tier play has gotten better, the ceiling has increased. We used to think this score was about as good as it was going to get, but only a few years prior, we thought the max was closer to 1.15m. Wild how things change.
Most notably, this is not a case intended to prove if Mitchel cheated. Such proof would be sufficient, but not necessary for Twin Galaxies to prevail. Proof that of cheating can remain an open question: so long as Twin Galaxies isn't shown to have taken it's actions with malice then they win.
If someone claims you are something you are not you have a right to sue them. I don’t think this should necessarily reflect poorly on him.
Everyone deserves the right to clear their name even if they are only accused of cheating at a really old video game.
Truth matters and unfortunately a long drawn out expensive process is the only way we have in most cases.
> Truth matters
How I wish truth did matter. In what time period are you referring? Clearly, in 2020, truth at best is tolerated. When you have people with photo/video evidence of someone saying something, but then argue with you that it didn't happen or that's not what was actually said, the truth is no longer relevant. So the question then becomes "Whose truth matters?" In an era of post-truth with concepts of 'alternative facts', truth is best describe as "what you believe is truth".
That's a disingenuous narrative. Truth can ultimately be verified independent of belief. That's what makes it true.
If your idea if truth is such that it can be dictated by political will, then you don't understand what makes truth special. It is special almost wholly due to its resilience to narrative, and it is incredibly bold or stupid to try to discount it through those means.
I don't hold the above as personal beliefs. I'm much more aligned with "The great thing about the truth is that it can be true whether you believe in it or not." That's spin on Neil Degrasse Tyson quote on science, but it holds true to me as well for truth.
It doesn't even need to be political. We have people that believe in a flat earth to this day. If you go through life expecting people to accept true as true, then you will be sadly un-armed for real-life experiences. There are people that are absolutely unwilling to accept that what they currently believe is not accurate, and will not listen to any reasoning what so ever.
There's always been people who believe in nonsense. Most people, throughout most of history have. The meaning of "post-truth" today is that people in power are no longer being asked to justify what they do on the basis of fact. (It doesn't mean that facts don't exist or that they don't matter, I just found it off-putting that you'd try to suggest that.)
Allow me to paraphrase a concept from Tolkien: evil doesn't win because it's a superior force, it wins because it convinces you that it's already won. "Look over there, evil wins. Look here, evil already won. Evil always wins, that's the way it has always been. You can't fight it so give up."
You can't win by spreading evil's messages, even sarcastically. You win by being a superior force and never giving up. People's credibility should actually suffer when they do or say things that are incredible, and people who appeal to us with facts and compassion should be rewarded.
But when you use words like "should", you've kind of already accepted the fate that it is not.
There are fights worth having, and then there are fights that are worth walking away from. If someone starts spouting off garbage, I just walk away and cut ties with them. I'm well past arguing over stupidity. You can tell when someone is unreasonable pretty quickly. However, when someone responds in a way that says they are willing to at least consider an opposing view, I will have a conversation. I enjoy those conversations even if no view points are changed at the end. That's the way it should work. See, I just said should as well.
>However, when someone responds in a way that says they are willing to at least consider an opposing view, I will have a conversation.
But what if they don't want a conversation? What if they want a "silent majority" that they will then claim to represent? What if they interpret a lack of resistance as evidence of support?
You may not be changing people's minds outright, but you do have some impact on the strength of their convictions, and their sense of how broadly held they are.
That's exactly why I enjoy having conversations with people with differing view points. If they are compelling and it's something I was unsure of anyways, I'm willing to accept that my current view may be flawed. OR if at the end of the conversation the other persons arguments were uncompelling or even disproven during the conversation, then I feel better about my current view of the topic.
If someone doesn't want that conversation, then it doesn't happen. I don't strap someone to a chair with toothpicks under their eyelids. I reserve that when getting people to watch my short films!
Edit: Conversations about differing/opposing view points isn't always about changing minds. It just helps to get to know someone. If someone tells me they are vegetarian, I don't launch into why I'm not. However, I will make the mental note to not ask them to join me for dinner at the local steak house. If I want to have dinner with them, it helps me plan an appropriate place that they would be okay with as well.
They didn't claim he was a liar, they implied it.
Reading the drama unfold in realtime a few years ago on the forums was enthralling. It was like reading a 500 page serial and by the end there was cold-hard facts vs "I'm going to expose fake news on my friend's right-wing internet radio show." King of Kong made him look shady, but the evidence of cheating since then is all based MAME emulator quirks* of very specific versions that allow replays from arbitrary points, lack of sound in recordings, glitches in video recording at convenient times, high score runs witnessed without anyone in the same room.
This quirks are things like (and I'm simplifying here) "Arcade hardware draws girders from left to right, but MAME v1.11 draws them from right to left. Billy Mitchell's video also shows them drawn from right to left, plus this random enemy always appears in the easiest possible position."
One of the original threads:
http://donkeykongforum.com/index.php?topic=2055.0
The 5 or so main threads are novel-length, in total.
And a cringy appearance on an unknown talkshow which was supposed to exonerate him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLxh9Yi5Dc
Hopefully they have enough proof on a technical level why billies scores aren't possible.
Is there any reason to believe that cheating is something that started recently?
Is there any reason to believe that the ROM loaded on every single original Donkey Kong cabinet is exactly the same?
Is there any reason to believe that the components on every single original Donkey Kong cabinet perform the same?
If you look at the sports world you have, more or less, the acceptance that cheating happens, the components change, training regimens change, etc. Professional baseball has comprehensive statistics dating back to the 1860s and the result is that people have divided the sport into eras, and when you compare players in different eras you don't look at the stats alone, you compare how they performed relative to their peers, etc.
A "high score" list that ignores the reality of change is worthless.
_Is there any reason to believe that cheating is something that started recently?_
No, and no one involved has suggested this.
_Is there any reason to believe that the ROM loaded on every single original Donkey Kong cabinet is exactly the same?_
Yes, unless otherwise documented by MAME.
_Is there any reason to believe that the components on every single original Donkey Kong cabinet perform the same?_
Yes, based on literally thousands of hours of video footage.
> Yes, based on literally thousands of hours of video footage.
Well that's fantastic! Probabilities can be established for all sorts of in-game occurrences and the probability of this dude's game being legit or not.
Not only that, but the gamer ability can then be separated from the randomness of the game on any particular play! Are all the high scores the result of aberrations in the game, or because the player is just that great???
Speedrunners are very well aware of all the probability based events of the games they play, as well as the odds of those events and any circumstances that can change them [0]. It's called 'luck manipulation'. Usually that's only really useful to tool assisted runs, but on occasion luck manip can be performed by human players.
Regardless, while those in-the-know can recognize that a good run would have been a record if not for an unlucky event, at the end of the day all that matters is your time (or score). Accounting for the randomness is part of the strategy aspect of the sport.
[0] People who speedrun a particular game will also know of any differences in those probabilities _across all known versions of the game_. These people have studied these games so deeply they usually know more about how they work than the people who made them.
Probabilities have been calculated from Billy's footage that shows his alleged arcade games rendering as MAME. His random hammer smashes give points way higher than the mean, suggesting he stitched save states in an emulator.
If I recall correctly from King of Kong, for at least some people they do inspect the machines to see if they are original. There are tons of rom hacks and modded machines.
I recall in the documentary that they came to inspect Steve Weibe's machine (I think there was controversy because they just came in to his garage and started looking without asking first and they didn't seem to give Billy the same scrutiny.)
_Mitchell argues that ... “[their] case rests on an untenable conspiracy: that scores of people around the country ... have agreed to lie”_
Curious use of language, in context.
Billy Mitchell has been streaming DK on Twitch. I saw him host Walter Day on his stream a couple of months ago. Can't be too much bad blood between them.
Walter sold Twin Galaxies a few years ago.
In 2020 with so many issues in the world — high scores in video games is not worth caring about.
This whole ordeal is like the ultimate case of someone reliving "that one highschool [insert sport] match" where they "won the game against [insert rival highschool]" and won't stop for the rest of their lives.
Uncle Leo from "Napoleon Dynamite".