Video king stripped of records fights back

South Florida’s Billy Mitchell, once declared the Video Game Player of the Century, is now facing the ultimate test of his skills: salvaging his reputation.

Twin Galaxies, competitive gaming’s governing body, found Mitchell guilty of cheating. On April 12, it banned Mitchell for life and removed all his high scores from its record books, including his undisputed Donkey Kong and Pac-Man records from the 1980s and 1990s.

Mitchell has begun to assemble a group of experts to dispute the findings. He plans to show that Donkey Kong loading screens from his games are from the real arcade game, not a software emulator, as his detractors have claimed. An emulator allows a computer program to imitate another program.

He also wants to find witnesses for his most recent — and most disputed — high score, a 1,062,800-point benchmark set at the now-shuttered Boomers in Dania Beach.

“They said it was this ver-

sion or that version [of a software emulator]. When they finally said it’s a specific version, somebody came out and said that version didn’t come out until two years after I played the game,” Mitchell said in his first interview since losing his records.

Mitchell, a longtime Hollywood resident who now lives in Weston, achieved the high score at Boomers on July 31, 2010. He recalls more than 100 people shuffling in and out as he ran up the scoreboard for several hours that day.

In 1982, at the age of 17, Mitchell became the first person to reach the fabled kill screen of Donkey Kong, when the arcade game reaches its memory limit at level 117 and Mario seemingly commits suicide, dying for no reason. His total: 874,300 points.

He followed that up by reclaiming the Donkey Kong high score four more times, three against Steve Wiebe, his rival in the 2007 documentary “The King of Kong,” a film that cemented Mitchell’s image as the black hat of competitive gaming. Barrel, jump, hammer, smash. 933,900 points. 1,047,200 points. 1,050,200 points. 1,062,800 points.

It’s those last two high scores that have landed him in hot water. Twin Galaxies, the Guinness World Recordsanctioned keeper of video game high scores, ruled Mitchell’s scores were achieved on software that emulates Donkey Kong, not on the arcade game itself. That’s a problem because the software would allow someone to save and stop a game, which in turn would allow them to go back and replay if they die or get a score on a level they don’t like.

It’s a far fall for a man declared the “Video Game Player of the Century” in 1999 by the Japanese Amusement Machine and Marketing Association. He had just pulled off the first perfect Pac-Man score in history — 256 levels, consuming every fruit, every dot, every power pellet and every blue ghost with every power pellet consumed, all without dying once. 3,333,360 points.

“Probably my strongest accolade is that I did the first perfect Pac-Man,” Mitchell said. “It was quite the gala event. It was at the largest arcade in the world. Namco (Pac-Man’s creator) took me and flew me to Japan, where I had to repeat the performance.”

Now, as far as the scorekeeping body is concerned, that never happened. Not to mention his record-setting scores in Donkey Kong Jr, Ms. Pac-Man and Burger Time.

“The idea that they would go back and undo what was done more than 30 years ago in front of cameras and Life magazine and the best gamers of the day — it’s laughable,” he said.

TAIMY ALVAREZ/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Billy Mitchell was stripped of his record high scores in the classic arcade game Donkey Kong by Twin Galaxies, a regulatory body that keeps track of all-time scores on classic arcade games.