The ultimate badge: Part 2

by ersatz_cats

Welcome back! A little while ago, we talked about Donkey Kong Forum badges – almost all of them, anyway. We discussed kill-screen icons, individual level emblems, Twitch tokens, Pauline placards, and Snek signifiers. We reflected on Kong Offs, and million point games, and even some hammerless derring-do. And lots of nerdy fun was had by some.

But some of you may recall this story began with a purpose. Something about “one of the greatest Classic Arcade Gaming feats, period”. Something about “wasn’t quite a high score run, and not a speedrun either, but rather a unique challenge all its own”. Today is the day we get to that half of the story. I knew this gaming achievement was insane from even a cursory evaluation, but digging into the facts behind it has only reinforced that belief. While this was a direct challenge posted to the Donkey Kong Forum, you could say it was only partially serious. No one would have blamed even the most hopeful among the Kong community for thinking it may never be achieved.

Before we begin, after a while of reviewing the narratives and crunching the numbers, I thought “Dang, this should really be a Summoning Salt video!” On that note, Salt did just post their updated soundtrack. I invite you to cue it up alongside reading this piece, to enhance the flavor of this journey through gaming greatness:

THE TRIFECTA

Last time out, we took a deep dive on all the single-game recognitions Donkey Kong Forum had to offer – whole game world records, individual board records, kill-screens, million point scores, et cetera. But aside from various tournament-related badgery, we didn’t delve into any multi-game recognition. As such, we glossed over the importance of one very noteworthy badge:

This electronic triumvirate is listed as “1M Point Triefcta”. As you might have deduced, it recognizes players who have scored one million points on original Donkey Kong, and on Donkey Kong Junior, and on Donkey Kong 3. On September 13, 2013 – the same day Dave McCrary posted the lineup of the first sixteen DKF badges – Ben Falls remarked that he’d heard site founder JC Harrist “was working on a 1M trifecta badge at one point”. Five days later, as part of the site’s second wave of badges, this Trifecta was implemented as badge number 27.

As of my writing, this badge belongs to six individuals: Ben Falls (syscrusher), Estel Goffinet (Dk_madness), Wes Copeland, Craig Tubby, and two others to be named later. Syscrusher was the first to reach the mark in 2014, a few months after the badge was originally implemented.

Given the unlikelihood of any one player owning all three arcade DK world records (even back in 2014, when all three records were much lower than today), this first foray into cross-game ceremony was a way to honor players who had gone to the effort at becoming proficient at each one. But of course, multi-game awards come with their own baggage. For one thing, the defining category may not be agreed upon. One person recognized Ben Falls as having achieved a “quadfecta” for also having gotten one million points in arcade Mario Bros. However, despite its fans, that game never made it into the pantheon of full DKF recognition.

But even limiting to the DK games, everyone is going to have their favorites, and their… less favorites. Some top players, like Hank Chien, will have no interest whatsoever in expanding out to the other games. And while some accept the multi-game challenge as motivation to branch out from their comfort zone, you can see others framing it as more of an obligation – “I’ve got two-thirds of the ‘fecta, guess I’d better play that other dumb game and get the whole set”. And while players may save different games for last for different reasons, most of the overt Trifecta grousing seems directed at poor Stanley the Bugman from DK3:

There’s some statistical analysis to bear this out, as well. I was able to identify 11 players who, as of this writing, are missing only one of the three million point Trifecta requirements. Out of six players lacking a milly on original DK, three of them have PBs around 100,000 away, indicating the barrier is not interest as much as the usual combination of skill, time, and RNG. Only one player – Steve Wagner, a.k.a. TheSunshineFund – has locked up a million on both Junior and DK3 without any score submission whatsoever on DK. The two players lacking only the Junior milly (Dan Desjardins and J.P. Buergers) both have relatively low PBs in the 200k-400k range. But it’s the DK3 requirement that betrays a complete lack of interest, at least from three otherwise-Trifecta-eligible players. Phil Tudose doesn’t have any score submission at all on the required difficulty setting of DK3, and the other two – Steve Wiebe and John McCurdy – don’t have any submissions of any kind on any DK3 track.

The push for cross-game recognition is still sweet though, even if the initial implementation wasn’t perfect. For one thing, a decision had to be made regarding difficulty settings. While a million points on DK and DK Junior are straightforward milestones, efforts to label DK3’s wide variety of difficulty options have resulted in something of a quagmire, as alluded to in “Part 1”. For today’s purposes, we’ll only be discussing two of those options: setting #1, known at DKF as “Easy”, and setting #3, known as “Hard”. (DKF refers to setting #s 2 and 4 as “Medium” and “Hardest”, though these labels are not universal.) We’ll also be setting aside TGTS restrictions, which limit scores to five lives, and looking only at marathon scores.

As Jeremy Young confirmed, originally the Trifecta badge’s DK3 requirement was for a million points on “Easy” difficulty, before later being bumped up to “Hard”. This change happened some time in 2014, with one player remarking in the forums that they had to re-earn their DK3 Triefcta piece. (FWIW, this player did not qualify for DK or Junior, and never had the actual Trifecta badge – just the DK3 requirement. Based on this archive of the DK3 “Easy” top 10, nobody in 2014 lost the Trifecta badge based on this change.)

But there was another, more important problem with this initial implementation. Here’s a list of all 22 million-point DK players, as of late 2014:

And here’s the list, as of my writing this in June 2024:

That list of 22 is now a list of 52, while the current top 22 now consists of exclusively 1.1 million players. DK Junior has had a similar evolution, with only 13 players qualifying for Trifecta in 2014 compared to 26 players today. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with just handing out more badges for everyone. But how do you recognize those players who are dominating these games – each of these games – at levels we’ve never seen before?

BARRA’S QUEST

This brings us to the story of our favorite New Zealander, Andrew Barrow, a.k.a. Barra. Here’s Andy at the Galaga World Championship in 2018, hiding a brewski behind a $10,000 check, as one does:

I didn’t mention Barra much in “Part 1”, as I was saving his story for here. But a few quick searches shows he always had fun with the badge system, calling “Badge Hype” after people’s big accomplishments:

Curiously, it does seem that once upon a time, Barra’s own ambitions did not include the Trifecta, for the sake of one non-bug-related game:

That would be the game where you play as Donkey Kong Junior, against Mario as the bad guy, who has your pops in a cage. In researching this piece, I found instances of Barra besmirching DK Junior in 2014 and again in 2017. I asked him why he felt the way he did, and it turns out, he has since warmed up to the DK sequel:

Haha so 2014 was before I really played Junior and got decent at the game. My opinion changed somewhat after I started going for bigger scores. It’s a HORRIBLE game to learn with a very steep learning curve but once you overcome that initial frustration it becomes more fun.

The steep learning curve in Junior is pretty much why it gets a lot of hate. It becomes more enjoyable to play once you get used to the delayed movement, and start trying to extract points out of it. It is not nearly as tedious & annoying as Donkey Kong because of the lack of randomness (to a certain point).

With that said, to 2010s Andrew’s credit, he didn’t let his momentary disdain for simian liberation get in the way of gaming greatness. In April 2017, he boosted his DK3 “Hard” setting PB from 400k to 800k overnight. A couple days later, he pushed it higher, joining the one million club.

But then, something notable happened. Jeremy Young advised Barra that maaaaybe, when he does play DK Junior, he should push the game a little more than the advised Trifecta minimum:

“[You] never know what the supafecta badge will require.”

So what was this “supafecta”? Barra sure wanted to know!

Donkey Kong legend Wes Copeland stepped in to clarify that, while nothing was set in stone yet, some folks had pondered the idea of a multi-game badge beyond the mere million point Trifecta currently offered:

This would explicitly break the award from its million point moorings, and would allow administrators to tune the various dials as preferred. (I may have mixed up some metaphors there, I don’t even know.) This makes sense, as million point scores were no longer the foreboding thresholds they were when the original Trifecta was commissioned. Indeed, a year earlier, you can see Wes planting the idea of a “superfecta” milestone, and what it would entail:

Given the above paper trail, I reached out to Wes (currently an administrator and site engineer at the popular site RetroAchievements.org) to ask what his role may have been in the creation of… the thing we’re about to discuss:

Admittedly, I’d completely forgotten about this until rereading those posts. After I achieved a world record score of 1,190,000 on Donkey Kong, I became very interested in exploring other arcade games. At that point in time, I was only really known for playing Donkey Kong and Defender. I wanted to test myself to see how quickly I could pick up other games if I focused with the same intensity on them as I did with Donkey Kong. Badges and achievements have always been alluring to me, and the trifecta badge was highly exclusive — I wanted it.

It so happens I was able to put up top scores on DKJr and DK3 within weeks. After that, I started to convince myself that with enough dedication and grit, I could put up any score I wanted on any game, given enough time spent throwing myself at the game. I then refocused my efforts to being the first person to score 1,200,000 on Donkey Kong with original arcade hardware.

Once the idea of a “Superfecta” was publicly planted, folks were happy to chime in on what such a challenge should look like. As is tradition, there was some disagreement as to what milestone and difficulty the DK3 piece of the equation would entail. Wes’ idea was to have three different benchmarks that were roughly equivalent in terms of leaderboard placement. However, the competitive depths of DK3 had not been as fully explored as with the other two games. DK3 master George Riley suggested hitting the Repetitive Blue Screen (DK3’s version of the kill-screen) on “Hard” would be an appropriately difficult challenge, though he acknowledged he may look like a jerk for offering something that, at the time, only he had ever achieved. George then amended the offer, agreeing that 2.5 million would be more inclusive to start, but that it could be amended if folks later found it too easy to achieve.

Riley was more on target than he knew at the time. In November, Jeremy Young unveiled “The DK Masters”, along with the related information thread:

https://donkeykongforum.net/index.php?topic=1993.0

https://donkeykongforum.net/index.php?topic=1994.0

Instead of a single “Superfecta” badge, whose requirements could be subject to change as players continued to push the upper limits of these games, the idea was developed into an entire ranking system for the elite echelon of Kong arcaders. Also, while the original Trifecta was limited to the three mainline releases, the “Superfecta” project incorporated Crazy Kong as the fourth Nintendo-authorized Kong release. (The lower-scoring CK never would have been a good fit for a million point “Quadfecta”, given that to this day the all-time record is 852,100 as scored by John McCurdy.)

Following up with Wes recently, he gave a glowing review for Jeremy’s finished product:

I’m not sure if my idea of the “Superfecta” badge ultimately evolved into the concept for the DK Masters, but I would be flattered if that were the case. The DK Masters is an underappreciated epic challenge not known to many even within the classic gaming sphere. At some point, these are the kinds of long-form meta quests we’d like to create on RetroAchievements.

And at long last, that brings us to the first of those silly shields we skipped last time:

This green crest is for “Rank D”. As Jeremy confirmed, the color green was chosen to invoke the idea of a participation ribbon. To get this bad boy, you had to (in Jer’s words) “[demonstrate] a basic level of competency on all four games”. In strict terms, this meant achieving the following:

• A kill-screen on each of Donkey Kong, DK Junior, and Crazy Kong;
• 1,000,000 points on DK3 on “Easy” mode.

Despite one player’s suggestion of offering easier ranks to encourage participation, Rank D remains the program’s entry point – the bare minimum required to put your name up among the multi-game masters of the Donkey Kong series.

The first thing you may notice is that the Rank D requirements are actually easier than those for the million-point Trifecta (albeit with one more game thrown in). The DK3 requirement, for instance, is literally the same score but on easier difficulty. Granted, as discussed last time, at least one player on original DK did hit their first million before their first kill-screen, but usually those are achieved the other way around. Same for DK Junior, with most million-point games being kill-screen games, and with kill-screens being achieved at scores as low as 621,100. Naturally, this has resulted in more players achieving Rank D than the original million-point Trifecta:

Keep in mind though, the above list excludes players who went on to achieve higher Masters tiers. As you no doubt surmised, Rank D was only the beginning.

For “Rank C”, the participation green is now in the background, flanking a crest of bronze. To hit this rank, you must achieve each of the following:

• 1,000,000 points on Donkey Kong;
• 1,100,000 points on DK Junior;
• 1,000,000 points on DK3 “Hard” mode;
• 650,000 points on Crazy Kong.

This one is more equivalent to the original million point Trifecta, including bumping DK3 back up to “Hard” mode. I was a bit curious why the Junior requirement was punched up to 1.1 million, given that at the time a basic milly on Junior was as exclusive a club as 1.1 million on DK. Our overworked Jeremy said the “short answer” behind that decision was that the Masters milestones are more about proficiency than merely the choice of a specific score.

Rank C is also where we see some separation for the best-of-the-best:

We’ll circle back to that little code on the left side later. Moving from Rank D up to Rank C, we’ve whittled the list from thirteen down to two. And we’ve now accounted for each of the Trifecta-bearers we named earlier. (Estel Goffinet and Craig Tubby qualify for Rank C on Crazy Kong, but lack 1.1 million scores on Junior, keeping them at Rank D for now.)

However, as I mentioned, there were two other yet-unnamed trifectionistas, one of whom is Andrew Barrow. In 2018, Barra became only the second player to reach Rank C, behind the grandfathered Wes Copeland who qualified based on scores from 2016. And of course, DK Junior was the last piece of that puzzle, with his 1,167,000 score completing both Rank C and the traditional million-point trifecta. As Barra remarked, he focused on his goal of 1.1 million, leaving loftier goals for another day:

Indeed, Barra wasn’t done yet!

This is the badge for “Rank B”. We’ve upgraded our bronze to silver (you can probably guess what comes after that), and both the previous colors are in the background. For this bad boy, you have to achieve each of the following:

• 1,100,000 points on Donkey Kong (100k more than Rank C);
• 1,200,000 points on DK Junior (100k more than Rank C);
• 715,000 points on Crazy Kong (65k more than Rank C);
• And you must reach DK3’s Repetitive Blue Screen on “Easy” mode.

Note that the DK3 requirement has switched back from “Hard” mode on Rank C to “Easy” mode on Rank B, but with a more daunting threshold. While it may seem confusing, this was done to make each challenge more difficult than the last, and was done so mindfully of those who prefer to aim for the higher thresholds. As Jeremy explained when the Masters program was introduced, qualifying for a higher Rank automatically includes qualification for those same games’ requirements at the lower Ranks:

So when did Barra receive his Rank B badge?

I’m sorry to say, he never did. But he did improve his PBs over the following two years. First up, in October 2018, Barra killed DK3’s Repetitive Blue Screen on “Hard”, with a score of 3,246,000. (He was still only about halfway to George Riley’s 6,108,200 score from 2012, but honestly, who was ever gonna reach that?) And in April 2019, Barra tackled Junyah again, this time crushing a score of 1,319,700.

You may ask, aside of course from the usual gamer urge for personal growth, what was the point of these score improvements?

Yes, that would be a gold crest, flanked again by each of the previous colors.

Do you even want to know what insane thresholds were required for “Rank A”?

• 1,130,000 points on Donkey Kong;
• 1,300,000 points on DK Junior;
• 750,000 points on Crazy Kong;
• Reach DK3’s Repetitive Blue Screen on “Hard” mode.

To put this into perspective, as of my writing this, the DK requirement would put you in the top sixteen players in the entire world, the Junior requirement would put you in the top eleven, and the Crazy Kong and DK3 requirements would each put you in the top five.

And to acquire that gold crest of Rank A… you have to achieve all of these. This benchmark is actually, certifiably insane. In no other sport is this level of dominance expected for anyone other than those in the conversation for Greatest of All-Time.

But with the once-dreaded DK Junior already out of the way, and with Hard RBS in the bag, Barra now only had to improve his PBs at Donkey Kong and Crazy Kong. And (pandemic aside) April 2020 brought with it the perfect opportunity to up those scores:

The DK Masters Tournament was an online competition with the explicit goals of raising money for DKF and for encouraging players to boost their PBs into Rank range. In the end, this tournament only christened one new member of the Masters club: Mat McGill, who completed Rank D with a 593,800 score on Crazy Kong. (While the initial post as seen above can be read as though unique badges were awarded for the event, as we saw back in “Part 1”, no such badges existed. These “Limited edition badges” referenced were the Masters badges themselves.)

But Barra, already a member of that Masters club, did play. And play he did! The tournament involved each of Donkey Kong, DK Junior, Crazy Kong, and both Easy and Hard variations of DK3, for a total of five tracks. 35 total players competed, only 14 of whom submitted scores on all five games. The way the scoring worked was, the top score on any one game was worth 100 points, the 2nd place score got 99, the 3rd place score got 98, etc. This meant A) Everyone would be forced to play DK3 twice if they wanted to win, lol, and B) The maximum possible score any perfect godsent player could ever get is 500, for the top score on each game across the board.

So among those 35 players, what mark did the mortal, earthbound Andrew Barrow achieve?

Barra got the top score on Donkey Kong (995,200), the top score on Junior (1,058,000), got second place on both DK3 variations (behind only DK3’s unfairly legendary George Riley), and a podium-worthy third place on Crazy Kong with a score of 613,800. He ended only four spots away from a total sweep of the entire event.

And yet, even with all of that, only his 5,025,000 score on DK3 “Easy” was a new personal best. And that didn’t help him on his quest for Rank A. In fact, the only Rank A requirement anyone hit in the tournament was a single RBS game on “Hard”, by you-know-who. This should give you an idea of how daunting these Rank A thresholds truly are. The entire active community, at a moment when they had the most free time they will ever collectively have, were still unable to crack any of the three score-based requirements.

But again, Barra already had two of those four conditions in the bag. The possibility of Rank A still awaited him, if he could get past this guy:

Barra’s standing PB on original Donkey Kong was a 1,014,600 score from back in 2015 – good enough for the million point requirement on Rank C, and the exclusive million point club in general, but nothing beyond that. Following the Masters Tournament, Barra got to work. On July 12th, he submitted a new best score of 1,121,800:

Here you see the score pace, as shown at Kongtrac.kr. As is expected, Barra exited the first five levels on a great pace with potential for 1.2 million. Top players tend to reset poor starts to not waste time, and thus, big games played to completion will typically have outstanding starts which fall off over time. Along with progression points, Barra accumulated 19,600 death points, while riding a single life from 5-6 all the way to 19-1.

This score would be good enough to fulfill Rank B’s requirement of 1.1 million on DK. But Barry wasn’t done chasing gold yet. The following month, on August 24th, Andrew posted a much different looking PB on classic Kong:

The pace charts don’t display the first five levels, which are anomalous compared to the rest of the game. Barra’s pace exiting 5-6 was much lower than before, but he kept at it. And this time, instead of leveling off, his pace skyrocketed up. By 7-6, he was on pace for a score almost 20,000 points higher than his best pace of the previous PB. At that point, the run did cool off, with untimely deaths on 8-3 and 10-2. Barra also collected only 7,100 death points – significantly fewer than the July 12th game. But in the end, it was enough for a final score of 1,137,900 – good enough for the Rank A requirement of 1.3 million.

With all other challenges out of the way, Barra’s final hurdle was Crazy Kong. Barra had previously squeaked by Rank C’s 650k requirement with 653,700. A score of 715,000 – a significant jump – would bump him up to Rank B…

But on September 26th, he blew that goal away, achieving a score of 788,900. At the time, that score was good enough for third place all time on the Crazy Kong leaderboard, and was just 23,000 points shy of the world record.

And from that day forward, Barra bore the gold crest of DK Masters Rank A. I told you earlier he never received a Rank B badge, and the only reason he didn’t is because, like a damn boss, he skipped it entirely.

Jeremy congratulated Barra in his announcement on the DK Masters information thread:

When I started the DK Masters, almost 3 years ago, I wasn’t sure if anyone would tackle the harder Ranks. But Barra did it and has proven himself to be the all-around best player of the DK series.

Upon reaching Rank A, Andrew discussed the Donkey Kong Masters leaderboard, reflecting on each of the four game requirements:

DK Junior – Back when the DKM leaderboard was created, 1.3m on Donkey Kong Junior seemed like one of the hardest to achieve. Now that we know what is possible, and with the addition of at least one new significant strategy, this has probably become the easiest of the 4 requirements. This is mainly due to DK junior having much less randomness than the other 2 comparable games (DK/CK) (no the springboard isnt random). The requirement is still fine as you still need to implement most modern point pressing strategies.

Crazy Kong – I don’t have too much to say about this one. Achieving 750k does require all out point pressing but there’s not too much in this game that can go wrong once you’re comfortable with the rejumps and floor skip, and there’s always a lot of points on offer. Due to the randomness of the rivets I’d say this is harder than 1.3m on DK Junior, but not by much.

DK – Even though 1.13m has become a mere board-run for a few players, this requirement is still perfect. It requires additional risk, strategy and time compared to a 1.1m flat and we all know what can go wrong playing DK. Only a handful of players passed the Rank A threshold on their first 1.1m+ game. I would rank this as the 2nd hardest achievement for Rank A, way above the other two traditional DK games.

DK3 – Although Riley has shown that this can be blown out of the water almost every credit, that doesn’t make it any easier for the rest of us. Once you’re at that level its probably the one you can achieve the most consistently but actually getting to that level is the reason I consider this as the hardest Rank A requirement. DK3 definitely has not been played anywhere near as much as the other 3 games, but getting to the RBS on D3 is never going to become easy. If Jry ever ups the requirement for this I’m GONE

And yet, as absolutely legendary as Barra’s ascent to Rank A was… it was not the monumental gaming feat I’ve been teasing through one-and-two-thirds write-ups. Despite its insane requirements, the gold shield of Rank A is still not the “ultimate badge”. There was one more hill to climb – one so astonishing, so unlikely, that no one would have been blamed for thinking it would never be achieved.

JUSTIN’S JOURNEY

And at long last, that brings us to Justin Elliott, or “Rayfinkel” to his friends.

That’s Justin earlier this year at the Kong Klassic, where he won both the pro division and something called the “Inter’GIL’actic Belt” at the same event.

Justin’s meteoric rise in the DK ranks honestly defies description or explanation. His first score submission to Donkey Kong Forum was in August 2018, and in the short time since then, he’s claimed multiple world records (as we’re about to detail), and is currently top 3 on classic Donkey Kong, within striking distance of claiming that most coveted arcade world record of all. The way he has dominated these games compared to the competition, he may as well have flown in from Krypton.

I recently asked Justin about his beginnings with Donkey Kong. He reflected that, after years of PvP gaming on Halo and World of Warcraft, he sought a different challenge:

I basically told myself it was time to pursue a game where I only had myself to rely on. I wasn’t really into strategy RPGs like Starcraft and I never dove into the fighting-game genre, so for me, it came down to speedrunning or something else. Ultimately, I decided in July of 2018 to actually try playing Donkey Kong. I had been inspired, like most of this current “DK generation” by the King of Kong movie. A year earlier, in 2017, I had already installed MAME and got the DK rom ready to go, but after about 20 minutes of playing, it just didn’t appeal to me at all. A year later, I committed to at least a couple hours of trying and ultimately got sucked right in.

Justin’s first ascent was on the original, starting with a score of 246,900. That became 330,500 days later, then a jump to 881,700 two months after that. He got his kill-screen badge with a 888,000 score on October 12th, and after a year of playing offline, he accumulated a couple more badges with a score of 1,142,200. More importantly for today’s purposes, with a score over 1.13 million, this meant Justin had checked off the DK requirements all the way up through Rank A.

But you know Justin didn’t stop there. In September 2021, Justin posted a 628,500 point kill-screen on Donkey Kong Junior. A year later, he began taking the Junior grind seriously, shocking the community with a 1,405,200 score in January 2023. Once again, a game’s Rank A qualifications were permanently crossed off the list. As Justin said at the time:

i’ve been really enjoying learning this game. it gets a bad rap for some reason but i genuinely love it. i had spent a little time last year learning it from the ground up and killscreened pretty quick. i played it periodically for a few days here and there since then. last month, i decided to go on a grinding spree and just learn everything i could. it’s a very satisfying game and i’m pretty happy with this score despite two 0 point deaths. would like to chase something big with this game at some point.

And “chase something big” he did! That 1,405,200 soon became 1,465,000, which became 1,503,400, followed by 1,533,100. And finally, on July 3rd, 2023, Justin Elliott claimed the all-time Donkey Kong Junior world record with a score of 1,584,400. (Definitely Rank A material.)

Since this is a series about badges, I did ask Justin about his badge collection. But he indicated he never paid that much attention to them – especially in his earlier days, when he only played DK:

Getting badges is amazing and a cool little reward but I don’t really base my “what to play” decisions on them. I never really got into any of the other DK games with the intention to get records or badges. I was just curious about them and wanted to see if they were any fun. Turns out they were definitely a lot of fun! And the scores, records and badges basically emerged as a byproduct of those endeavors. But I’d be lying to you if I said adding new badges wasn’t pretty thrilling haha.

With DK and DK Junior down, Justin had two games to go on the path to Kong immortality. However, here’s where we’re going to circle back to those little codes I skipped earlier:

Along with the Masters program came a tie-breaker system – a way to arrange a hierarchy of players even within each rank. For Rank D, this was made simple: First come, first serve. The current thirteen members of Rank D are all arranged in order of when they first met each requirement, with three of them (Brian Allen, Steve Wagner, and Chris Psaros) having done so before the Masters program was unveiled. Both current members of Rank C were also grandfathered into the program based on legacy scores, with Ben Falls “Syscrusher” actually being the earliest legacy player to qualify for Rank D, based on scores achieved all the way back in 2013 and earlier.

Rank C, however, is where these tie-breakers get more complicated. There, players are ranked based on how many days elapsed between two qualifying scores. As you see above, Wes Copeland qualified for Rank C based on scores achieved between February and June 2016 (making him the only grandfathered Rank C player). This gives Wes a rank of “C-115”, meaning “Rank C, all scores achieved within a span of 115 days”. Note that this number is not set in stone; the number is assigned and potentially reassigned based on the shortest such span in a player’s submission history, and thus they can redo qualifying scores in a faster time to improve their rank. Obviously, Ben Falls has yet to take advantage of that feature, with his 2013 DK score and his 2022 Crazy Kong score bracketing a whopping span of 3,331 days. But really, what’s nine years between friends?

Ranks B and A are similarly ordered… or they would be, if there were more than one player in either of them. Still, thought was clearly given to how far the competitive boundaries of the game had been pushed, and the fact that over time, the top of their new Masters leaderboard could become more crowded than expected. And this thought extended to what distant, aspirational challenge could lay even beyond the far away barrier of Rank A – a target so outlandish, so preposterous, that it may never be conquered, yet either way could always stand as the furthest horizon.

But what would this challenge even be? Do you just keep pushing the numbers up even higher? Aren’t they already unreasonably high enough? Shouldn’t Rank A itself be the highest feasible scores across your quadfecta of games? Or do you instead switch to a different metric? Should this ambitious goal reflect not only skill but also consistency – the ability to achieve these nigh-impossible scores and, more importantly, to do so on command.

And thus was born onto this Earth, the final objective… Rank S.

Gold? Silver? Bronze and green? They’re all behind you at this point. This ultimate badge of platinum blue would be bestowed only to those who could conquer the most insane Donkey Kong challenge ever humanly devised.

The goal?

You must achieve each of the Rank A requirements – again, those are:

• 1,130,000 points on Donkey Kong (top 16);
• 1,300,000 points on DK Junior (top 11);
• 750,000 points on Crazy Kong (top 5);
• Reach DK3’s Repetitive Blue Screen on “Hard” mode (top 5).

And your “Rank A” tie-breaker… must be less than one. To put that another way, each of these scores, which any mortal player would spend months or even years grinding away for – each of them would have to be achieved…

…within the span…

…of twenty-four hours.

Even the games’ greatest players winced at the brutality of the 24-hour requirement:

In October 2020, upon reaching Rank A, Barra offered his thoughts on the possibility of any player ever achieving Rank S:

When this first started I honestly didn’t think anyone would ever achieve Rank S. It still hasn’t happened and there’s only one Rank A, but with the constant improvement over time and different players showing what’s actually obtainable on some of these titles in the last 3 years, its now in the realm of possibility. I really don’t know my plan for this or if I even have one. I’m not good enough at any of the games yet to be able to do these requirements on command. Maybe one day….

In the end, Barra never did make an attempt at Rank S, as he explained to me recently:

Honestly, its kind of a simple answer; it was never the goal. When Jeremy first introduced the new DK Masters ranking system, Rank S was one of those “never going to happen in a million years” type of achievements. Posted more as a meme, than something actually achievable (in my eyes). Rank A, however, was more than achievable. So I immediately set my sights on that and decided I wanted to be the first to Rank A.

Barra added that his approach would have changed if he had seen Rank S as a reasonably attainable goal. Barra also reflected on how the passage of time has brought some of these “impossible” benchmarks down to Earth:

Back in 2018 when it was created, the Rank A/S thresholds were seen as close to WR caliber scores (with maybe the exception of DK) and so it was easy to dismiss Rank S as a bit of fun to look at. Things change, new players come along and new strats are developed. Kinda like how back in the day people said 1m wouldn’t ever happen on DK, then they said 1.1m, then 1.2m, now we all say 1.3m!

Of course, before Rayfinkel could even look at any Rank, he had to start putting up scores on two other games. I asked Justin about his practice regimen when trying out a new game competitively:

Well, when I first start out, I play it just like anyone would. I go through the game and see how far I can get. If I find that it’s a fun game and that curiosity kicks in, that’s when I start investing in seeing what my potential on that game is. It’s pretty simple – I figure out what all the hardest parts of the game are and what the most important parts of the game are and I either just work on them on Arcade or make save states for them on MAME. I have two basic types of practice – improvement practice and consistency practice. Improvement practice is where I’m trying to harness my curiosity and try new things. What happens if I do X? What about Y? Then, with consistency practice (which, by the way, is vastly more important), I’m just trying to develop patterns and muscle memory so that I can repeat something over and over – which is exactly how I will end up playing the game. I want to ultimately practice exactly how I’m going to play. No changes. And I just get after it till my hands bleed. It really isn’t that much different than what speedrunners do if you watch them. If you want to use a sports analogy – imagine you are a basketball player and there are all sorts of different things you could work on such as free throws. If you wanted to become a better free throw shooter, wouldn’t you just shoot 500 free throws a day instead of waiting until a real game to practice them?

Justin’s next victim was Crazy Kong. I wish there was more of a story to tell about this one, but there’s not. Justin’s first formal CK submission was a 558,500 point kill-screen in September 2021. His second submission? That was a new world record of 833,200, submitted ten days after his Rank-worthy Junior score in January 2023. As Justin explained:

When you get to a certain level in DK, CK feels extremely easy in comparison – even all the hardcore point pressing stuff. So that didn’t take very long. DK is a brutal grind – absolutely brutal. Junior was incredibly painstaking at a certain point. DK3 required me to perfect my practice and ability to figure things out in a video game. CK was like taking candy from a baby lol. I think every DK player reading this will probably agree with me haha.

FWIW, I would guess current DK record holder John McCurdy agrees with Justin. The following month, the ol’ ball-player re-emerged with a new CK score of 852,100 to claim the WR for himself, proving that he is still alive and watching those leaderboards.

But even with all his Kong credentials, Rayfinkel still wasn’t ranked up. He didn’t even have the original million point Trifecta yet! Poor Stanley had yet to snag Justin with that bug sprayer.

I never even thought about the Trifecta badge because I had no plans on playing DK3. I just figured I’d stick to the platformers. In 2023 I picked up both the Crazy Kong and the Donkey Kong Junior records and, after that, just figured I’d commit to DK till I went all the way. Of course, because I had achieved “Rank A” in DK, DK Jr. and CK, people began talking about DK3 and when I was going to fire that up. “NEVER!”, is basically the answer I always gave. But, as it goes… I eventually, at some point in mid-to-late 2023 just got kind of curious. Whenever I get super curious about one of these games, everything else just sort of falls into place.

On September 15th, 2023, Justin made his first splash into this last Kong frontier:

This finally netted Justin his green Rank D badge, but since it was on “Easy”, it didn’t qualify for the Trifecta. For that, Justin had to wait… three days.

I’ve previously interviewed Justin about original Donkey Kong and DK Junior. But for this piece, I asked him about his strategy revelations on the DK threequel:

DK3 is all about not missing your shots and making sure you’re shooting the right things at the right time. It’s incredibly simple in that regard, but very difficult to execute. It’s really, really hard to figure out which bugs take priority. You can’t just kill everything all at once. You have to pick a target and make sure you’re positioned well, don’t miss and then are immediately setting up for the next target. If you choose a bad order to shoot the bugs in, even if you don’t miss, you will be punished with a chaotic board and death will become imminent. So it takes a lot of effort to see these boards with that aforementioned clarity but if you put the work in, you’ll sort of start seeing it like the matrix and it will all start to make a lot of sense.

At this point, Rank A – the second most daunting challenge the Masters program had to offer – was a foot race away for the prodigy. Cheering him on the way were his friends Michael Kibbey (one-time Nibbler record holder), Greg “therexershow”, and of course, Barra:

Switching back to “Easy” mode for Rank B, Finky posted a score of 2,777,100 on October 9th, followed three days later by a score of 3,138,500 which, as he put it, “just barely made it over the RBS road.” This made Justin the first, and thus far only DKF member ever to hold the Rank B badge.

As an aside, following up on our nerdy exploration of DKF badge history from “Part 1”, the five Masters badges were numbered 50 through 54 prior to the site’s dot-net transition. However curiously, they were ordered D-C-B-S-A, for some unknown reason. Ranks B and S were never held by anyone prior to the transition, and yet Wayback Machine did archive those otherwise-unused images, due to their in-line inclusion in the DK Masters thread. Spoiler: Justin did not stop at Rank B, leaving that badge currently vacant as of this writing. The only other two DKF badges not currently held by anyone are for Crazy Kong arcade WR holder, and for DK Remix WR holder; both of those records belong to Robbie Lakeman, whose account has lapsed.

Getting back to our quest, it was almost two months until Justin’s next move; given his otherwise supersonic ascent, I must assume there was some imminent personal emergency behind the delay. I asked Justin about this final piece of the Rank A puzzle:

There is a huge skill jump in being able to go from RBS on Easy (which is Rank B) to RBS on Hard (Rank A). It was a ton of work honing my skills to be ready for that. Mainly it all came down to the regimented practices. There were many of them and many bouts with self-doubt, but every day I put in the work I would get rewarded the next day with new clarity and vision on how to play the game. I’ve always found it very interesting that if you work insanely hard at something, you might not reap the benefits of it right away. It’s like it takes time to stew in your brain and work its way into your DNA, but when it does it’s pretty incredible. But you have to put in those hours and those hours have to all have intent and purpose.

On December 10th, Justin posted a new DK3 personal best of 2,795,800 on Hard, which he unenthusiastically announced as “meh”. But any disappointment from coming short didn’t last long. Five days later, RBS was achieved, with a Rank A qualifying score of 3,335,600, streamed live on Twitch. Congratulations poured in for Justin becoming only the second player ever to achieve Rank A.

But as we’ve established, Justin had his sights set on more than what was already proven possible. There was one last mountain out there to climb. As much as these games have been played by so many people over the years, only one other player had ever achieved all four of these Rank A marks, ever, at any time. And now Justin was being asked to accomplish all four, on command, in the span of a single day.

If I may editorialize for a moment, my amateur impression was that the 24-hour time limit for this challenge would have to be such a colossal mindfuck. It’s one thing to have all the time in the world to restart your high score attempts, day after day. Or alternatively, if we were talking about a single game speedrun, obviously the runner would have to stay clutch to turn a solid start into a completed run, but you have no choice but to keep playing; the only alternative there would be to abandon that game and begin again from scratch. However, with a unique challenge like this, where you could have two games in the bag and a ticking clock bearing down on you, you’re in a weird in-between zone. If you’re on your third game, and you have a mediocre start, a part of you has to be questioning “Do I play this out and hope it gets there, or do I reset to conserve my limited remaining time?” Time itself becomes a resource in a way rarely seen outside of live tournaments. You have to be constantly aware of how you’re using that resource, all while also trying to focus on the games themselves.

But despite all that, when I asked Justin about this aspect of the challenge in our chat, he was cool as a cucumber:

Haha well… I don’t want to sound arrogant about it, but by the time I was ready for Rank S, I had gone way above and beyond the actual Rank A requirements for the first three games. So I was not intimidated at all by the Rank A ranks and knew I could probably do them in one sitting without any major issues. It was the DK3 one I wasn’t super confident about since I had just achieved Rank A and only by the skin of my teeth!

And it’s true. Justin needed 1.13 million on DK; his personal best was 1,235,500. He needed 750k on Crazy Kong; his personal best was 833,200. He needed 1.3 million on DK Junior; he was and still is literally the world record holder with a score of 1,584,400. And this speaks to part of what it seems Rank S was designed to assess – not just the ability to punch the numbers higher, but the ability to elevate one’s game so much that the highest reasonable marks can be achieved nearly at will. The purpose was not to measure a player’s ceiling, but to test their consistency, which in gaming can be a hard thing to adequately define and judge.

And so it was time to devise a Rank S strategy. To clarify, as noted in the Masters program rules:

The 24-hour clock starts running as soon as one achievement is reached. Keep in mind: the clock starts the moment the achievement is reached, even if that isn’t the end of the game. Players must then meet the remaining 3 requirements within 24 hours. This is a hard cutoff. All achievements must be met in that 24-hour window.

This timing has two implications: First, the total time span of your Rank S games could actually be greater than 24 hours, if your first game runs long before you hit the requisite mark. But more importantly, you have an added tension, in that you are effectively encouraged to abandon that first game once you hit the milestone, even if that game could otherwise represent a noteworthy score for you.

Despite Justin’s uncertainty with DK3, I was surprised to learn he chose to tackle that game second. When I asked Justin about his choice to play the original DK first, he cited both that game’s length, and its notoriously brutal RNG:

Just because DK is the longest, honestly. And most finnicky. I didn’t want to get the DK3 one first and then have DK say NOPE on rivets and pies LOL. I just wanted to get it out of the way. I say I lacked confidence in DK3 but truth be told, I had only just gotten Rank A in it so I was still in relatively good DK3 “shape”, if you will.

DK, as we all know, can be a huge PITA. But 1.13 is something I could do and have done generally within 3 or 4 credits at the most. So, the plan was to try to drop a 1.13 in DK, immediately get on DK3 and try for the Hard Mode RBS and if I could do those two relatively quickly, I was mega confident I could smoke CK and DK Junior in probably one credit each.

Over the next few days, Justin got to work. He chose to attempt his quest on MAME, which he hadn’t used to play some of these games in months. Meanwhile, DK lived up to its usual reputation. Justin had a couple bad games, which effectively cost him 24 hours before he could comfortably try for the whole suite again. However, late in the night hours of December 19, 2023 – after having woken up at 8am and put in a typical day’s work – Justin got the start he was looking for. Carrying the game past Midnight, with one life still in reserve, Justin hit the 1.13 million mark on the final complete barrel board at 2:10am, U.S. Eastern time:

Interestingly, Justin did not throw the rest of the game away, choosing to finish through the kill-screen for a modest-by-his-standards score of 1,151,500. He even took his traditional moment to enter his initials: “JME”. After about a twelve-minute break, Justin got back to work, firing up DK3 as planned.

Unfortunately, our hero suffered a technical setback. 25 minutes and four deaths into the DK3 run, Barra in Twitch chat asked why Justin was not accumulating extra lives. He had mistakenly left his game set on five-life (TGTS) settings from earlier practice. At nearly 3:00 in the morning, he had to restart the game. A frustrated Justin remarked on stream, “I just wasted a lot of time… precious time.”

An early death prompted another quick restart, squandering more of his remaining energy. But as folks like to say, the third time was the charm. At 5:22am, after two more hours and 33 deaths, Justin transitioned from the “blue” screen of board 159 to the “blue” screen of board 160, completing his RBS requirement.

After punching in those initials again, Justin remarked, “Man, it’s gonna be hard to sleep tonight. Or this morning, I should say.” But he knew, with both of the biggies out of the way, the hard part was over. Justin sent his Twitch viewers off on a raid, and, in his words:

I immediately went to bed with the plan being to wake up about 7-8 hours later and play CK and Junior fresh.

Shortly before 3pm, Justin fired the stream back up. Some uncooperative fireballs and a wild barrel forced a couple early deaths on Crazy Kong, but soon he was in his usual groove, completing the final board before the kill-screen at the exact target score.

As with DK earlier, Justin kept his game going, using the jump glitch to bypass Crazy Kong’s kill-screen for extra points, ending on the level 22 rivet board with a final score of 765,600. After another short break, Justin got on DK Junior…

…and nailed it on his first try.

Before a meager audience of 54 on Twitch, Justin Elliott completed one of the most insane gaming challenges ever devised. Now off the clock, and on his own time, he once again played his game out to the end, completing his third kill-screen of the day with a score of 1,324,800. For the fourth time, he signed off his input file with those “JME” initials.

After taking an hour to finally get something to eat and drink, Justin proudly posted his Twitch highlights and all four input files to Donkey Kong Forum. (DKF displays posts in your local time, which is why his post above displays as 6:25pm in my screenshot.) As a bonus, Justin shared his MAME command prompts, which still fit on a single screen:

Congratulations poured in, both immediately in Twitch chat, and in the following days on DKF. Justin’s biggest cheerleader on the road to Rank S was none other than his closest competitor, Barra himself:

The early days of arcade gaming had countless tall tales of gaming grandeur, including the occasional story of multiple world records broken in a single day. Sadly, our expanded understanding of these games has shown many of these stories of yesteryear to be apocryphal at best. A few elaborate cock-and-bull concoctions have even been objectively proven as utterly fraudulent. The fact that some folks go to great lengths to lie about world-class achievements across multiple games is a testament to how special something like Justin’s run at Rank S is. He smashed four of the best scores you’ll ever see on four classic, contested arcade games, all with full modern proof standards, and he did it all essentially on command. Justin Elliott left no doubt. Despite the cynicism some have selfishly worked to engender in competitive gaming, there are still legends who play these games, and who defeat them the right way.

And that, my friends, was how Donkey Kong Forum’s final badge was conquered. I want to offer a HUGE “Thank you” to everyone who helped by answering questions across both installments, from Jeremy to Wes, to ChrisP and stella_blue, to Barra, and of course Justin himself.

However… there is one more loose strand to this story remaining. When the Masters program was first announced, Jeremy Young made a certain pledge, possibly with the thought that no player would ever manage to achieve this impossible pinnacle:

As a special reward, anyone who reaches Rank S will receive a physical certificate commemorating their achievement!

Five months later, and Justin is still awaiting that certificate. I don’t want to bust Jeremy’s balls too much, as he is a hard and honest worker. He since inherited an active forum website from the late founder JC Harrist (rest in peace), and the moderation and maintenance must be no small task. So I’m going to end this piece abruptly, with (as of this writing) a placeholder beneath. Once Justin does receive his certificate, I will add the image below, and at that time, you will know the story is complete.

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