Originally posted by: arch_8ngel
While it is sad for Mitchell that some of his legitimate scores were wiped (his perfect pacman game, for instance, was some kind of milestone as I recall) due to a total ban, this is a great teachable moment for kids about cheaters not being allowed to prosper.
When somebody cheats it taints everything they do that is within the same sphere of activity.
It will definitely be a new viewing experience to go back and re-watch King of Kong with this news in mind.
I just want to add there was controversy over him having the first perfect pac-man score as that may have been falsely setup by Twin Galaxies for publicity reasons. It has since been proven he wasn't the first, and that Twin Galaxies already knew that when they claimed Billy to be the first.
"In September, 1982, Kathy Novak, Senior Market Research Analyst for Bally Midway received contact from Twin Galaxies that William (Bill) Bastable, of Closter, NJ, scored a Perfect Pac Man. On October 6, 1982, she issued a formal letter congratulating Mr. Bastable on his accomplishment. But, for reasons I don't wish to divulge here, Mr. Bastable's accomplishments were buried in favor of other, believed more socially marketable players."
Also I want to add in a lot of people were pointing at the "girder finger" from the screen wipe compared to pop up loading style differences as the smoking gun for Billy playing on MAME, but in my opinion there is a much bigger, much more concrete smoking gun that I really haven't see anyone mention. I've watched the entire Billy 1 million score tape in question. What I found is that the flashing 1up icon in the top left is a huge smoking gun. It goes up for about 8 frames, and down for 8 frames in normal play. However between stage transitions it sometimes stays down for over 20 frames, or comes back up right away. This is due to saving stating and then reloading between stages and replaying them. This also could be due to splicing some of the footage as they forgot to track the 1up icon flashing rate. This is the same thing that people got caught splicing runs for in Super Meat Boy with the flashing loading icon of Bandage Girl. Using it you can likely pinpoint each exact spot Billy save stated and then heavily reloaded or spliced. Also this correlates with the dispute claim that Billy got extremely higher points per stage from barrels and random elements than any other donkey kong player. This would completely explain that.
Another thing I noticed is the high score on both Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong runs of 1,050,200 and 1,047,200 is default set to "007650" which I believe is due to it be playing it on MAME. Lots of people on Youtube casually playing Donkey Kong on MAME have the starting high score set to "007650".
