If you follow high scores in video gaming, you may have heard of the name Billy Mitchell before. He was a main star on the ‘King of Kong’ documentary movie that came out over a decade ago. Well he is still a good Donkey Kong player, his over 1 million point scores have been revoked. This is because evidence shows that he may not have been playing the game on an original arcade machine.
Twin Galaxies forum users collected a lot of evidence that shows Billy Mitchell was playing Donkey Kong using a MAME emulator instead. His over 1 million scores have now been removed from the high score list.
Twin Galaxies also posted this message: “In light of the evidence presented here, I am removing Billy Mitchell’s current score of 1,062,800 from the Donkey Kong Forum High Score List.
This score will be replaced with his live score of 933,900, performed at the Midwest Gaming Classic on May 7, 2004. This score was performed in public and was witnessed by at least one TG member as well as Dwayne Richard”
Whether Mitchell cheated or not does not matter because legit scores have to be done on an original arcade machine and to have witnesses seeing your attempt. The current Donkey Kong record holder belongs to Robbie Lakeman with an astounding score of 1.230 million points. Lakeman even showed his record breaking attempt on Twitch (see below) while playing the game on his official arcade machine.
It will be interesting to see if Billy Mitchell wants to do another legitimate attempt at breaking the over 1 million points mark in Donkey Kong in the near future. I’m sure he will not be happy that his 933,000 score is the only one being officially verified now.
