12 ms·

Donkey Kong scoreboard strips high score claim

267 points by sanj 9y ago

shaunxcode 9y ago
I knew it! Not really. I suppose it could be said that maybe him placing that (now apparently) artificial line in the sand made others go legitimately further!
gowld 9y ago
He made good money for several years before the cheating was exposed. A good investment.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  You're being downvoted because HN hates winners.
- Y_Y 9y ago
  In fairness he had lots of runs of DK and Pac-Man that were very good and indisputable cheating-wise.
  - slphil 9y ago
    It's important to remember that most cheaters are actually good at the game they're cheating at. They're just not as good as they want to be, so they cheat. It's too obvious if they're clearly just not good at all -- a new chess player playing like a Grandmaster because he is using some secret radio tech in his shoes is obvious cheating, but a Master or Expert who needs advice from his scheming coach for exactly one game to win a tournament? That's the more common scenario. Todd Rogers is a genuinely excellent video game player. He's also a blatant cheater.
    - phire 9y ago
      It's quite common for professional video game players to get so consistently good at the games they are playing that getting the top score becomes more about luck than skill. Sometimes this causes them to think that a game owes them a certain score/time (maybe they they pass all the hard 1 in 20 RNG events and then a stupid 99 in 100 RNG fails them) and occasionally decide to cheat just to get that score/time.
ordinaryperson 9y ago
HA! The 2007 documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" is my favorite movie of all-time, I must have watched it at least 40 times. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hBs2oFjSWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hBs2oFjSWk For those who haven't seen the film, the contender Steve Wiebe sets a new record live at an arcade tournament in Funspot (NH) but reigning champ Billy Mitchell sends in a VHS tape with an even higher score. The video gets fuzzy and looks suspicious but Mitchell's toadies in the group immediately accept the score, despite refusing to previously accept a VHS tape from the contender Steve Wiebe. Since the movie came out both men were left in the dust by new players, but recently the score-keepers slow-mo'ed Billy's tapes and the Donkey Kong levels render the way MAME does them, not the actual arcade hardware. The current No. 2 ranked player (Wes Copeland) is basically corroborating this by running his performance through an app and determining the point ratios are off (e.g., too much from hammers). Personally I don't think Billy's a bad guy, and the film actually shows him performing selfless acts for others, but if this allegation is true -- and it's hard to argue with the data -- I do think this seriously compromises his integrity and position in classic gaming history.
- sh33mp 9y ago
  Here's a no-nonsense video chronicling the progress of the Donkey Kong world record: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAQ2vEHq2N4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAQ2vEHq2N4 This guy has also made videos chronicling similar speedrun records for other games, and they're fascinating to watch.
  - dlbucci 9y ago
    I just discovered this guy, Summoning Salt, this week and I cannot stop watching his videos! Super fascinating stuff :)
    - bobbean 9y ago
      I made an account purely to express how strange it is that I just found this guy no more than a week ago, and now I'm seeing people talk about him somewhere that I never would have expected. It's weird.
MrJagil 9y ago
The Dragster Saga is quite an interesting read: https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/7tsd89/todd_rogers_scores_to_be_removed_he_is_also_banned/ https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/7tsd89/todd_roger...
azakai 9y ago
The claim that it's statistically unlikely to get those random numbers isn't entirely clear. When asked how unlikely it is, the response is "extremely unlikely", but it's important to quantify that. It's possible he's playing 20x more games than them, for example, and then we'd expect his best scores to contain more unlikely results. But it's hard to say if they would be as unlikely as what we see.
- ordinaryperson 9y ago
  > It's possible he's playing 20x more games than them Possible but unlikely b/c the person making this claim is the current No. 2 Donkey Kong player in the world Wes Copeland, not Joe Schmo off the street. Even if Mitchell's disputed scores were accepted they would still be far off Copeland's scores. So when the No. 2 player speaks it carries more weight than just some random dude in his basement.
  - alexlrobertson 9y ago
    Wouldn’t a pro player be playing less games? They’re playing longer, higher scoring games not lots of average scoring games.
    - ldjb 9y ago
      Sort of. However, at that level, if you're in the middle of a game and aren't on track to getting a high score, you're probably going to abandon the game and try again from the beginning. Therefore there'll be a fairly high number of games, a sizeable proportion of which are abandoned. It's like when speedrunners attempt to complete games in the fastest time. If they make a mistake at any point in the game that will cost them a lot of time, they will most likely abandon the game and keep trying until they are able to complete the game without making any costly mistakes.
    - azakai 9y ago
      It depends how much time they put into it. No one checks how many games they play, so one player could play only on weekends while another might also play a few hours every evening.
peterchane 9y ago
I can't tell you how relieved I am that this is finally resolved.
- fortythirteen 9y ago
  It's not resolved until Walter Day removes Billy's score and admits that he propped him up with some shady officiating.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sfa_aok 9y ago
I was recently playing through Super Metroid on the SNES mini, and I ended up watching a "World Record Progression" video on YouTube. Turns out there's a series of these videos[0] done for a number of games - they're pretty well done, and it's fascinating to hear the level of effort people put in to shaving time off a World Record. [0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w/vid...
- lillesvin 9y ago
  Oh, Super Metroid is such an amazing speedrun. Over the last week's time, Zoast has been setting new WRs at least 3 times and there's still at least 10 seconds to be saved with the current route + optimal RNG.
LearnerHerzog 9y ago
I saw The King of Kong documentary when it first came out and remember Billy Mitchell was so hateable. There is nothing humble about a man who answers his phone: "World-Record headquarters, how can I help you?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wef2qDT5j3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wef2qDT5j3I He was caught cheating back then too, if I remember correctly, by sending a video that messed with the score. I am surprised they accept sent-in submissions from anybody in an age where videos are so easily edited, let alone from a notorious cheater. People like Mitchell will go as far as they can to win regardless of whether or not they deserve it, and I'm interested in hearing what the thoughts are in the industry around dealing with cheaters. I've seen some gamers beat records while on Twitch, which I don't really know anything about first hand but it seems somewhat more legit than a sent-in video, as there are people watching both the player and the game he's playing in real time. Are there any Twitch features that can tell if a game is really being played live? Otherwise, are there any obvious moves that should/could be taken to ensure legitimacy in gaming world records?
- thatguy0900 9y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o1BBiPeDXM0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o1BBiPeDXM0 here's a player getting caught cheating during a twitch run. He only gets caught because a very experienced runner was also watching at the time, at the end of the day faking is very easy, not sure what can be done about it other than using special locked down computers or something.
  - LearnerHerzog 9y ago
    Wow, very interesting. I recognize that name Chibi and I think I've seen him getting picked on in some other videos. He clearly just wants attention, and part of me feels bad for him. Hopefully he's realized by now that cheating is no way to make friends.
13of40 9y ago
If he was using an emulator, why would he splice instead of just altering the output of the random number generator to be more favorable?
- topmonk 9y ago
  Because the latter requires more technical knowledge that he probably didn't have. He'd have to reverse engineer the machine code.
sireat 9y ago
This reminds of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borislav_Ivanov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borislav_Ivanov Technically never proven a cheater but the evidence is extremely convincing.
classicsnoot 9y ago
This is a different doc for a different game, but it is an interesting story about the rise of MLG. It is called Smash and it follows some of the early luminaries of competitive Super Smash Brothers Melee. Highly enjoyable and fairly long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSf2mgkRm7Q&list=PLoUHkRwnRH-IXbZfwlgiEN8eXmoj6DtKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSf2mgkRm7Q&list=PLoUHkRwnRH...

267 points by sanj 9y ago

I knew it! Not really. I suppose it could be said that maybe him placing that (now apparently) artificial line in the sand made others go legitimately further!

gowld 9y ago

He made good money for several years before the cheating was exposed. A good investment.

fwdpropaganda 9y ago
You're being downvoted because HN hates winners.
Y_Y 9y ago
In fairness he had lots of runs of DK and Pac-Man that were very good and indisputable cheating-wise.
- slphil 9y ago
  It's important to remember that most cheaters are actually good at the game they're cheating at. They're just not as good as they want to be, so they cheat. It's too obvious if they're clearly just not good at all -- a new chess player playing like a Grandmaster because he is using some secret radio tech in his shoes is obvious cheating, but a Master or Expert who needs advice from his scheming coach for exactly one game to win a tournament? That's the more common scenario. Todd Rogers is a genuinely excellent video game player. He's also a blatant cheater.
  - phire 9y ago
    It's quite common for professional video game players to get so consistently good at the games they are playing that getting the top score becomes more about luck than skill. Sometimes this causes them to think that a game owes them a certain score/time (maybe they they pass all the hard 1 in 20 RNG events and then a stupid 99 in 100 RNG fails them) and occasionally decide to cheat just to get that score/time.

ordinaryperson 9y ago

HA! The 2007 documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" is my favorite movie of all-time, I must have watched it at least 40 times. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hBs2oFjSWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hBs2oFjSWk For those who haven't seen the film, the contender Steve Wiebe sets a new record live at an arcade tournament in Funspot (NH) but reigning champ Billy Mitchell sends in a VHS tape with an even higher score. The video gets fuzzy and looks suspicious but Mitchell's toadies in the group immediately accept the score, despite refusing to previously accept a VHS tape from the contender Steve Wiebe. Since the movie came out both men were left in the dust by new players, but recently the score-keepers slow-mo'ed Billy's tapes and the Donkey Kong levels render the way MAME does them, not the actual arcade hardware. The current No. 2 ranked player (Wes Copeland) is basically corroborating this by running his performance through an app and determining the point ratios are off (e.g., too much from hammers). Personally I don't think Billy's a bad guy, and the film actually shows him performing selfless acts for others, but if this allegation is true -- and it's hard to argue with the data -- I do think this seriously compromises his integrity and position in classic gaming history.

sh33mp 9y ago
Here's a no-nonsense video chronicling the progress of the Donkey Kong world record: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAQ2vEHq2N4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAQ2vEHq2N4 This guy has also made videos chronicling similar speedrun records for other games, and they're fascinating to watch.
- dlbucci 9y ago
  I just discovered this guy, Summoning Salt, this week and I cannot stop watching his videos! Super fascinating stuff :)
  - bobbean 9y ago
    I made an account purely to express how strange it is that I just found this guy no more than a week ago, and now I'm seeing people talk about him somewhere that I never would have expected. It's weird.

MrJagil 9y ago

The Dragster Saga is quite an interesting read: https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/7tsd89/todd_rogers_scores_to_be_removed_he_is_also_banned/ https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/7tsd89/todd_roger...

azakai 9y ago

The claim that it's statistically unlikely to get those random numbers isn't entirely clear. When asked how unlikely it is, the response is "extremely unlikely", but it's important to quantify that. It's possible he's playing 20x more games than them, for example, and then we'd expect his best scores to contain more unlikely results. But it's hard to say if they would be as unlikely as what we see.

ordinaryperson 9y ago
> It's possible he's playing 20x more games than them Possible but unlikely b/c the person making this claim is the current No. 2 Donkey Kong player in the world Wes Copeland, not Joe Schmo off the street. Even if Mitchell's disputed scores were accepted they would still be far off Copeland's scores. So when the No. 2 player speaks it carries more weight than just some random dude in his basement.
- alexlrobertson 9y ago
  Wouldn’t a pro player be playing less games? They’re playing longer, higher scoring games not lots of average scoring games.
  - ldjb 9y ago
    Sort of. However, at that level, if you're in the middle of a game and aren't on track to getting a high score, you're probably going to abandon the game and try again from the beginning. Therefore there'll be a fairly high number of games, a sizeable proportion of which are abandoned. It's like when speedrunners attempt to complete games in the fastest time. If they make a mistake at any point in the game that will cost them a lot of time, they will most likely abandon the game and keep trying until they are able to complete the game without making any costly mistakes.
  - azakai 9y ago
    It depends how much time they put into it. No one checks how many games they play, so one player could play only on weekends while another might also play a few hours every evening.

peterchane 9y ago

I can't tell you how relieved I am that this is finally resolved.

fortythirteen 9y ago
It's not resolved until Walter Day removes Billy's score and admits that he propped him up with some shady officiating.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

sfa_aok 9y ago

I was recently playing through Super Metroid on the SNES mini, and I ended up watching a "World Record Progression" video on YouTube. Turns out there's a series of these videos[0] done for a number of games - they're pretty well done, and it's fascinating to hear the level of effort people put in to shaving time off a World Record. [0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w/vid...

lillesvin 9y ago
Oh, Super Metroid is such an amazing speedrun. Over the last week's time, Zoast has been setting new WRs at least 3 times and there's still at least 10 seconds to be saved with the current route + optimal RNG.

LearnerHerzog 9y ago

I saw The King of Kong documentary when it first came out and remember Billy Mitchell was so hateable. There is nothing humble about a man who answers his phone: "World-Record headquarters, how can I help you?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wef2qDT5j3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wef2qDT5j3I He was caught cheating back then too, if I remember correctly, by sending a video that messed with the score. I am surprised they accept sent-in submissions from anybody in an age where videos are so easily edited, let alone from a notorious cheater. People like Mitchell will go as far as they can to win regardless of whether or not they deserve it, and I'm interested in hearing what the thoughts are in the industry around dealing with cheaters. I've seen some gamers beat records while on Twitch, which I don't really know anything about first hand but it seems somewhat more legit than a sent-in video, as there are people watching both the player and the game he's playing in real time. Are there any Twitch features that can tell if a game is really being played live? Otherwise, are there any obvious moves that should/could be taken to ensure legitimacy in gaming world records?

thatguy0900 9y ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o1BBiPeDXM0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o1BBiPeDXM0 here's a player getting caught cheating during a twitch run. He only gets caught because a very experienced runner was also watching at the time, at the end of the day faking is very easy, not sure what can be done about it other than using special locked down computers or something.
- LearnerHerzog 9y ago
  Wow, very interesting. I recognize that name Chibi and I think I've seen him getting picked on in some other videos. He clearly just wants attention, and part of me feels bad for him. Hopefully he's realized by now that cheating is no way to make friends.

13of40 9y ago

If he was using an emulator, why would he splice instead of just altering the output of the random number generator to be more favorable?

topmonk 9y ago
Because the latter requires more technical knowledge that he probably didn't have. He'd have to reverse engineer the machine code.

sireat 9y ago

This reminds of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borislav_Ivanov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borislav_Ivanov Technically never proven a cheater but the evidence is extremely convincing.

classicsnoot 9y ago

This is a different doc for a different game, but it is an interesting story about the rise of MLG. It is called Smash and it follows some of the early luminaries of competitive Super Smash Brothers Melee. Highly enjoyable and fairly long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSf2mgkRm7Q&list=PLoUHkRwnRH-IXbZfwlgiEN8eXmoj6DtKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSf2mgkRm7Q&list=PLoUHkRwnRH...