A Donkey’s Fall From Grace: The Billy Mitchell Controversy

In 2013, I traveled to Denver, Colorado to attend the Kong Off 3, an officially sanctioned national Donkey Kong tournament. That weekend I got to see some of the world’s greatest Donkey Kong players play live in person, people like Hank Chien, Steve Wiebe, and Robbie Lakeman. Of everyone there, the person I was most excited to see play was Billy Mitchell.

Rob O'Hara at the Kong Off 3

At least in video game circles, Billy Mitchell became a household name after the release of the 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. The film follows two gamers, Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe, on their race to break one million points the classic arcade video game, Donkey Kong. In the film, Wiebe is both the underdog and the outsider. He practices for hours by himself on an arcade cabinet that sits in his garage. Mitchell, on the other hand, is a judge for Twin Galaxies, the self-declared official keeper of video game high scores.

Throughout King of Kong, Mitchell is presented as a conniving backstabber, while Wiebe is that guy who is destined to fail. When Wiebe finally breaks the world record and submits the required VHS recording of his game play, it is revealed Mitchell beat him to the punch. The amount of editing and the veracity of the order of events in the film as been argued to death, but the bottom line is, it was ultimately Mitchell’s name that went into the record books as the first person to break 1,000,000 on Donkey Kong.

Back to the Kong Off. In 2013, my personal Donkey Kong high score was around 100,000, about tenth of the score these guys were achieving. I wanted to look over their shoulder, and see how the pros racked up these gigantic scores. One of the people I watched play was Billy Mitchell. And while I’m sure the guy’s good, he wasn’t great that day. Out of 22 competitors in the tournament, Billy Mitchell came in 22nd place. Dead last. Mitchell failed to crack the 600,000 mark on a day when the top nine contenders each broke a million.

Anybody can have a bad day, but I couldn’t help but feel that something wasn’t right.

Over the past couple of months, digital sleuths began investigating into Billy Mitchell’s record breaking scores. In one YouTube video, eagle eye viewers spotted some inconsistencies in the game’s motherboard as it is being removed. Even more damning, however, has been the video recording Mitchell himself presented as proof of his record-breaking score. I won’t bore you with the details; suffice it to say that when the video footage is slowed down slower than the naked eye can see, the way individual graphic components on the monitor are drawn reveal that the obtained footage came from a game being played on a computer, and not a real Donkey Kong machine.

In the world of arcade competition, this is a pretty big deal. The only way global competitors can keep the playing field fair is by all playing on the same hardware using the same settings and controls. Emulating an arcade game on a PC might be close enough to the real thing for home gamers and hobbyists, but not for world record holders. In fact, it’s explicitly against the rules of Twin Galaxies not to disclose, the organization Billy Mitchell was a member of.

Based on this discovery, Billy Mitchell’s world record as the first person to break a million points on Donkey Kong has been revoked, as have all his other high scores. He has also been banned for life for submitting new scores.

Harsh? Perhaps. Some people think only his records that have been proven to have been played through emulation should be removed. Others feel like once you’ve been caught cheating, all of your records are suspect.

The year after attending the Kong Off in Denver, my family and I took a vacation to Florida. On that trip, we went out of our way to stop by Rickey’s Restaurant and Lounge, in Hollywood, Florida. Rickey’s is “Billy Mitchell’s restaurant,” according to King of Kong. I wanted to ask him what happened at the Kong Off 3. Was it just a bad weekend?

Rob O'Hara at Billy Mitchell's Restaurant

Mitchell wasn’t there. In fact, the waitress we talked to said she couldn’t remember the last time he’d been there. In the small arcade that sat off to the side of the restaurant there were two arcade machines: a Jurassic Park pinball machine, and a Ms. Pac-Man arcade cabinet. I don’t know why I thought I might find Billy Mitchell, a Donkey Kong machine, or the answer to my question at that restaurant. In the end, I found none of those things.

For his part, Billy Mitchell says this is a witch hunt. He says he has an explanation for the whole thing, one he is carefully preparing even though he chose not to respond to any of the charges brought against him or comment on any of the findings. I, for one, will be interested to hear what he has to say.

4 thoughts on “A Donkey’s Fall From Grace: The Billy Mitchell Controversy”

  3. Billy’s videotaped DK scores were produced in M.A.M.E. There’s absolutely no question about it. It matters not how many character witnesses and other documentation he produces, the physical evidence is as clear as day. Even his own representative had to concede that he found it impossible to emulate the irregularities shown on the tapes, on a real arcade machine. Billy is claiming that his tapes are of DK arcade machine scores; they are not. End of story.

    If a guy lies about even one score, that should bring into question all of his non-refereed scores. There should be zero tolerance to cheaters, no matter how big the name. For a change, Twin Galaxies did the right thing by removing all his score and issuing the ban. I’m sure if sycophant-in-chief, Walter Day had still been in charge at TG, Billy would have gotten away with it.

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