Billy Mitchell (video game player)

Billy L. Mitchell, (born July 17, 1965) is a video game player who is best known for recording high scores in classic video games from the Golden Age of Arcade Games. David Ramsey, writing in the Oxford American, called Mitchell "probably the greatest arcade-video-game player of all time".^[1] His achievements include the first perfect score in Pac-Man. He owns the Rickey's World Famous Restaurant chain, based in Hollywood, Florida. He uses the same brand to sell a line of hot sauces, Rickey's World Famous Sauces.^[2]

Biography

Mitchell grew up in South Florida and began playing games at age 16. Already a dominant pinball player, he was at first uninterested in video games appearing in the early '80s until he noticed that "everyone was standing around the Donkey Kong machine and wanted attention".^[1]

Mitchell attended Chaminade Catholic High School in 1983 and soon began work as a manager in the kitchen of his parents' restaurant, "Rickey's World Famous Restaurant". Mitchell assumed ownership of the Rickey's chain in the mid-1980s, continuing to own and manage it as of 2009. In the mid '90s, Mitchell had a short stint as a video game tester at Crystal Dynamics, in Menlo Park, California.

Mitchell is known for his mullet haircut^[3] and wearing neckties showing American patriotism during game competitions. The ties stem from his 1999 race to become the first person to achieve a perfect game of Pac-Man. One of his competitors, Rick Fothergill, wore a Canadian flag cape and called himself "Captain Canada". Mitchell began wearing his patriotic ties in response.^[2]

Mitchell is also the brother of Karen Harrington, a South Florida Republican politician who has run two unsuccessful Congressional campaigns (2010 and 2012) to replace Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the United States House of Representatives.^[4]

Billy has three children. The oldest is his stepdaughter who is a 2010 graduate of Florida State University. The middle daughter is a recipient of an academic scholarship from the University of Alabama and a 2015 graduate of American Heritage School in Plantation, Florida. His youngest child is a boy who is ranked as one of the top football prospect for the high school class of 2017.^[5]

Video game career

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

The 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters tells the story of newcomer Steve Wiebe's attempt to surpass Billy Mitchell's high score at the game Donkey Kong, which Mitchell had set in 1982.

Mitchell never showed up to play the game in the film, though he states the importance of playing in public, saying, "To me, most important is to travel to a sanctioned location, like Funspot that makes it official; if tomorrow Tiger Woods golfs a 59, big deal. If he does it at Augusta, that's where it counts." However, throughout the film Wiebe traveled to various locations such as Funspot and even Mitchell's home town to play him publicly, and each time Mitchell refused. More controversy arose when at Funspot, Wiebe set the Donkey Kong live score record and was given official recognition, something he did not receive for sending in a tape in which he scored the first million point game on record. A few hours later, a tape submitted by Mitchell in which he scored over a million points was accepted, and Wiebe lost his record. The film records speculation that Mitchell's tape may have been fraudulent. In Mitchell's hometown later on, Wiebe waited for four days to play Mitchell, who showed up one day and refused to play against Wiebe. In the film, Wiebe, while playing the game says hello to Mitchell, who does not respond, and says to his wife, as he walks away, "There's certain people I don't want to spend too much time with." Mitchell offers no explanation for his behavior towards Wiebe but later explained that at the time of filming, he had not played video games for "more than a year", and that the filmmakers had not given him enough advance warning to train for a public record-breaking attempt.^[6] Seth Gordon, the film's director, in referring to Mitchell's character says that Mitchell "is a true puppet-master", "a master of information-control" and that there was a lot of "stuff we couldn't include because of inter-state telephone rules."^[7]

At the film's conclusion, Wiebe beats Mitchell's score to gain a new Donkey Kong record on tape to claim both the live and taped records.

After King of Kong

On July 26, 2007, on the 25th anniversary of Mitchell's first record-setting performance, Mitchell again played in public and retook the Donkey Kong record with a score of 1,050,200,^[8] though that score was surpassed on February 26, 2010 by Hank Chien, who was temporarily the record holder at Donkey Kong.^[9] However, Mitchell reclaimed his title once again on July 24, 2010.^[10] On September 20, 2010, Steve Wiebe once again took the title with a score of 1,064,500.^[11] As of February 27, 2011, Hank Chien re-took the record with a score of 1,090,400 ^[12] which then he improved four times over the next two years, setting his final record at 1,138,600 in November 2012. On September 4, 2014, Robbie Lakeman broke Chien's result and set the new world record scoring 1,141,800.^[13][14]

Notable scores

• First person to achieve a perfect Pac-Man score of 3,333,360, achieved July 3, 1999 at Funspot Family Fun Center in New Hampshire.^[15] As of September 2010, this is the only championship Mitchell holds, sharing it with 5 other players.^[16]
• Achieved a score on Donkey Kong Jr. of 957,300 in 2004. Score beaten by Steve Wiebe on February 14, 2010 with a score of 1,190,400^[17][18]
• Achieved a score on Donkey Kong of 1,050,200 in 2007. Score beaten by Steve Wiebe on September 20, 2010 with a score of 1,064,500^[9]
• Achieved a score on BurgerTime of 7,881,050 in 1984. Score beaten by Bryan L. Wagner on September 5, 2005 with a score of 8,601,300^[17][19]
• Achieved a score on Centipede of over 10 million points.^[17]
• Recaptured the world records for both Donkey Kong (1,062,800 points) and Donkey Kong Jr. (1,270,900) on the weekend of July 24, 2010.^[20] These records were lost to Steve Wiebe on September 20, 2010 (1,064,500 points) and Mark L. Kiehl on September 9, 2010 (1,307,500 points) for Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. respectively.^[21]

Honors

On January 14, 1984, he was selected as one of the 1983 "Video Game Players of the Year" by Twin Galaxies and the U.S. National Video Game Team.^[22]

On September 17, 1999, he was proclaimed the "Video Game Player of the Century" while at the 1999 Tokyo Game Show. In a ceremony on the Namco stage, company founder Masaya Nakamura presented Mitchell with an award commemorating the first "perfect" game on Pac-Man.^[1]

On November 24, 1999, he offered $100,000 to the first person who could get through Pac-Man's "split-screen level".^[23] The prize was never claimed before the January 1, 2000 deadline.

On June 21, 2006, MTV selected Mitchell one of "The 10 Most Influential Video Gamers of All Time." He was also nominated as leader of the Nerd Herd.^[24]

Mitchell placed eighth in the Microsoft Xbox 360 Pac-Man World Championships on June 4, 2007.^[25]

In 2008, Mitchell became the first video game player to be honored with a Topps Allen & Ginter trading card.^[26]

See also

• Electronic sports

References

Further reading

• Joshuah Bearman (July 2008). "The perfect game : five years with the master of Pac-Man". Harper's 317 (1898): 65–73. 

External links

• Twin Galaxies profile
• Billy Mitchell on the "X-Show," February 2, 2000
• Date of World Record Break