Billy Mitchell (gamer)
William James Mitchell Jr. (born July 16, 1965) is an American video game player. He achieved fame throughout the 1980s and 1990s through claiming numerous records on classic video games, including a perfect score on Pac-Man. Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records recognized Mitchell as the holder of several records on classic games, and he has appeared in several documentaries on competitive gaming and retrogaming. However, in 2017, the legitimacy of a number of his records was called into question, leading to Twin Galaxies stripping Mitchell of his records. Mitchell rose to national prominence in the 1980s when Life included him in a photo spread of game champions during the height of the golden age of arcade video games. In 1999, Mitchell was the first person to claim a perfect score of 3,333,360 points on the arcade game Pac-Man. A 2007 documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, follows his attempts to maintain the highest score on Donkey Kong after being challenged by newcomer Steve Wiebe. In 2018, Mitchell's high scores were contested after members of the Twin Galaxies forums found discrepancies in the videos Mitchell had provided for The King of Kong, suggesting he had used emulation software to falsify his score. Following a months-long investigation, Twin Galaxies concluded that some of Mitchell's high scores were not performed on original hardware as required by their rules, and invalidated all of his scores due to their zero-tolerance policy for dishonesty. Guinness likewise stripped Mitchell of his records. Following legal threats against Twin Galaxies and Guinness, Guinness reinstated Mitchell's records. Twin Galaxies, however, did not reverse its disqualifications, leading Mitchell to file defamation lawsuits against Twin Galaxies and others in 2020. Mitchell's family owns the Rickey's restaurants in Hollywood, Florida, and Pembroke Pines, Florida, and he sells Rickey's World Famous Hot Sauce. Biography Early life and first records Mitchell was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and grew up in South Florida. In grade school, Mitchell became an avid pinball player. He was initially uninterested in video games, but as they became more popular, according to Mitchell, "[e]veryone was standing around the Donkey Kong machine and I wanted that attention". He began playing video games around age 16. His interest was also spurred by a friendly rivalry with a classmate, the two trying to outscore each other on both Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. Mitchell became curious whether Donkey Kong had a recorded world-record high score, and reached out to Walter Day at Twin Galaxies, at the time a single arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, that had started tracking such records. Day told him of a record of 1.4 million claimed by Steve Sanders. In November 1982, Life brought several notable arcade players, including Mitchell and Sanders, to Ottumwa for a photoshoot. Mitchell challenged Sanders to Donkey Kong and demonstrated that the game had an impassable "kill screen" when he reached level 22, while subsequently beating Sanders and setting a high score of 874,300. Later, Sanders admitted that he had lied about his