Billy Mitchell, the man so good at Donkey Kong he was featured in a documentary about the game, has been accused of cheating to achieve his record high score. This claim suggests that Mitchell could have used an emulator instead of an actual Donkey Kong arcade cabinet, allowing him to manipulate the game in his favor. As a result of these accusations, noted score-tracking site Donkey Kong Forum has ꧋removed his highest score from their rankings.
Mitchell, with his audacious attitude and unique fashion sense, made himself a figure of note and criticism in a time when esports and Twitch didn’t exist. He was even depicted as the main antagonist in the 2007 documentary The King Of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. 🀅But dislike him or not, his ওhigh scores spoke for themselves. At least until an enthusiast took a closer look at his record-setting games.
As both the moderator and keeper of the scoreboard at Donkey Kong Forum, Jeremy Young (known as Xelnia on the site), took it upon himself to study videos of Mitchell's most famous games more closely. I, he makes a lengthy case that Mitchell used an emulator known as Mulitple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) to achieve his best scores. Young's evidence mostly comes from the fact that, in Mitchell's videos of those scores, the Donkey Kong game loads in chunks as opposed to sliding in from the side of the screen. That kind of level generation is indicative of an emulator, not of an a🅷rcade cabinet.
Why does this matter? Well, an emulator has one particular feature that allows for some easy cheating: gameplay recording. With access to such a tool, Mitchell could have easily stored video of several games and then edited together the best parts of each. Former Donkey Kong word record holder Wes Copeland backed this up . Co♐peland used statistical analysis to show that Mitchell's videos were likely patched toge✃ther from various play throughs, as the specific situations they depict are very unlikely.
Jeremy Young took immediate action in response to his findings, removing Mitchell's questionable scores from Donkey Kong Forum's rankings. With that, he went from rank 20 with a score of 1.062 million to 47th with 933,000. That 933,000 is a verified score because it was achieved at an event with a live audience. However, Mitchell's legacy hasn't been completely erased. Twin Galaxies, an authority on high scores trusted by the Guinness Book O෴f World Records, is still keeping Mitchell's 1.0💃62 million score in place pending an investigation. For now, at least, the King Of Kong hasn't been completely stripped of his crown.