Donkey Kong scoreboard strips Billy Mitchell’s high score claims

Enlarge / Mitchell rides an oversized Donkey Kong machine in the recent Citrus Bowl parade. (credit: Billy Mitchell / Twitter)

Billy Mitchell has been a polarizing figure in the tight-knit world of classic video game high scores since well before he appeared as Steve Wiebe’s antagonist in the 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. But the Mitchell doubters got some strong new support on Friday as the Donkey Kong Forum—a popular clearinghouse for tracking performance in the game—removed Mitchell’s best claimed scores from its high-score list.

In a detailed post on the Donkey Kong Forum justifying the decision, moderator and scoreboard maintainer Jeremy “Xelnia” Young cites video evidence to suggest that three 1,000,000+ point scores presented by Mitchell were actually set using emulation rather than actual arcade hardware, as Mitchell claimed.

Footage captured from MAME version 0.115 shows the stage being built in whole chunks.

Direct-feed footage captured by Chris Gleed shows how an actual Donkey Kong cabinet renders a new stage (click for animation).

Footage from Billy Mitchell’s 1.05 million point claim seems to resemble the MAME footage (click for animation).

While a real Donkey Kong cabinet generates and displays game scenes in a “sliding door” effect, sliding from left to right, old versions of MAME instead build entire chunks of a level at once and then display them as a complete screen buffer (with slight differences as MAME has been updated over the years). The difference is noticeable in slow-motion, frame-by-frame analysis of the transitions between Donkey Kong levels. In the analysis, a new stage is first built in pieces after the “How High Can You Get?” interludes.