This post is part of a series, examining various myths and stories around Billy Mitchell’s claimed performance of Pac-Man in 1999 and his subsequent trip to the Tokyo Game Show. The first post in this series can be found here:
https://perfectpacman.com/2021/09/02/dot-one/
The supplemental material for “Dot Six” can be found here:
https://perfectpacman.com/dot-six-supplemental/
FIRST CONTACT
About a month after Billy’s appearance at the Classic Gaming Expo dinner and award ceremony in Las Vegas, Billy traveled to Japan, to participate in the annual Tokyo Game Show (or “TGS”), a Japanese tech convention similar to E3. In our next installment, we’ll get back to discussing the “Player of the Century” award Walter Day gave to Billy at CGE, how it plays into this Japan trip, and what that little plaque Billy likes to show off is all about. But today is about every other aspect of this Japan trip, which has largely been shrouded in mystery, allowing Billy to tell whatever story he wants without objection or correction.
The first question to address is, how exactly did Billy’s appearance in Tokyo come about? While we do not wish to put much stock in the word of people who have shown themselves to be (to put it politely) inauthentic, we can present what has been claimed over the years.
For starters, we can’t rule out that the first attempt at outreach was through the contemporary iteration of Bally-Midway. They were the American manufacturers of the original game, and thus likely the ones Walter would have interacted with directly with regard to high scores back in the ’80s. This theory is boosted by the Wired article from July 8, which doesn’t quote anyone from Namco, but which does quote a representative from Midway Games:
Of course, if Walter and Billy had reached out to them and got a “Thanks but no thanks” on any proposed cross-promotion, we would never hear of it. Which brings us to Namco, the publisher of Pac-Man in Japan and owner of the rights to the franchise. Billy described his “initial contact” with Namco during a publicity press conference for the movie Pixels in 2015, as heard at 30:50:
I knew the phone was gonna ring from Namco. I knew it. And soon enough, one day, it rang. And that was the initial contact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7L_1tCi53Q
(We’re going to be hearing a lot from that panel here in Dot Six, so keep that link handy.)
One could imagine that maybe, when Billy says he “knew” Namco would call, he meant it in a horoscopic sense, similar to “I know my team is going to win the World Series this year”. However, if Billy meant it literally, that he had been informed that a phone call was impending, this would be a strong indication that it was official scorekeeper Walter Day who brought together Namco and Billy Mitchell, perhaps offering a certain “Game of the Century” award as an incentive.
Billy tells a similar story in Exhibit B, starting at about 22:40:
And I had in my mind… “Boy, that phone’s gonna ring. Boy, that phone’s gonna ring.” And it was some time in July that that phone rang, and it was Namco. […] They talked, they knew about me, they knew my history. Again, I was one of the few people, or the only person who somehow over the years had grabbed the attention of some of the manufacturers. Players were very unwelcomed, almost always. And they were so warm and so welcome. They asked me a lot of things. They asked me to put together and produce a lot of things that I sent to them. And then they invited me to the Tokyo Game Show in Japan, in September.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbvba08fmOQ
I understand if you had to stifle your laugh at Billy suggesting that he, individually, was grabbing the attention of game manufacturers during the years he was a nobody quietly running a laser tag venue in Iowa and his parents’ hot sauce business in Florida. The only genuine claim he could make to that end is that his name was in The Guinness Book of World Records in the ’80s, but he didn’t get his picture in the book like “Mr. Awesome” did:
https://archive.org/details/guinnessbook00mcwh/page/384/mode/2up
This “they knew about me, they knew my history” angle doesn’t seem to be reflected in the version Billy tells in Exhibit A, shortly after 22:50:
They wanted a video of the game, which we had. They don’t know what they’re lookin’ at, anyway. They truly don’t. So… They wanted a video of the game, and they wanted a video of me, speaking, talking about me, my life, and history. Really, what they were doing was looking at me, to see if I was… the right personality.
Billy told a similar story of auditioning to Namco to the After 2 Beers podcast, at 55:30:
Sure enough, one day the phone rang and it was Namco. And we went through a series of things. They wanted film, they wanted the game, they wanted everything, everything, everything. And I knew they were… I was sort of at a stage rehearsal. I had to have the right personality for what they wanted. I had to talk about my life, so I sent ’em all this stuff. Then they said “We’d like you to come to Japan.”
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3PQuOk4cblJAD8UsyWRaum
That sounds more like a remote job interview. Which makes sense. Lord knows there are some deeply unsettled people in competitive gaming. Namco wanted to know “Is this a guy we want to associate with and include in our promotion?”
Obviously, we shouldn’t take anything Billy says too seriously, but we can at least chalk up the Exhibit B clip as a claim that contact with Namco was made in July, prior to the awards at CGE in Vegas. This does line up with the Korean language coverage in late July (discussed in “Dot Four”), which indicated Namco themselves were by that point pushing the “perfect game” story to the media.
Lest anyone think that Billy’s trip was an initiative of Namco in Japan, there’s a distinct American connection to these stories. Just prior to the above quote from After 2 Beers, Billy described waiting for a call from California:
Well, the story ran around the world, and I mean, I knew it. I knew it. Every day, I’d look at the phone. Phone would ring. I’d say “Who dat? That could be it. That’s California.”
In this interview with two random kids, Billy reiterated that his primary contact was with Namco USA, while peppering in his story about how hardly anybody had ever seen the split screen (at 13:40):
It was only a select few people had ever seen it. Nobody had ever done a perfect game. And it was so unbelievable to me, that when I did the perfect score, and then I sent all the evidence, and I sent it to Namco, Namco USA who sent it to Namco in Japan, none of them had ever seen it before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7eKVQxYORo
Billy has occasionally claimed that he spoke to a “Namco USA” employee by the name of Maurice. [S1] He is heard saying this to Walter Day in Exhibit A, at 22:50. This claim also appears in one of his signed statements from his September 2019 legal threat, as seen on page 74 of 156:
While Billy refers to “Namco USA”, the company actually had several divisions. [S2] One was Namco Cybertainment, the division handling arcade facility ventures. Recall that Twin Galaxies had already collaborated with Namco Cybertainment to host Family Fun Day, the weekend after Billy’s sneak attack, indicating the existence of an open line of communication between the two.
This brings us to a man named David Bishop, a longtime top executive at Namco Cybertainment (and later Namco USA). [S3] Walter and Billy are described as having been close friends with Bishop for many years. In Exhibit E, at 13:10, Billy references Bishop by name, discussing their presence together at the Pixels panel. And on that panel, at 1:10, David introduced Billy as follows:
Billy and I have been friends for a number of years now, and… he still gives me a really hard time every time I see him.
Never one to miss an opportunity to take a shot at his friend, Billy responded:
He’s got it comin’.
In Walter’s interview with ’80s Reboot Overdrive, he talks about his longstanding relationship with Bishop, starting at about 3:20:
Me, and Billy, and David Bishop and his daughter are sort of like family. We’ve gone and done so many things that we seem to… because he comes to our awards. He’s come to numerous of our award ceremonies, and his daughter has dressed up as Pac-Man, I think three times in Fairfield […] or in Ottumwa, next door. And so we have… kind of like a family relationship.
https://www.mixcloud.com/80srebootoverdrivepodcast/walter-day-interview-80s-reboot-overdrive/
Not surprisingly, David Bishop has received a pile of honors from Walter Day, as do many of Walter’s friends. In 2015, Bishop was given the Walter Day Lifetime Achievement Award (the very first recipient of that award) as part of his induction into the 2015 class of Walter’s International Video Game Hall of Fame, for which Bishop currently sits on the board of directors.
http://www.ivghof.info/classes-of-inductees/class-of-2015/
http://www.ivghof.info/about/board-of-directors/
And of course, such a noted position at Namco in the U.S. meant he was in a great position to collaborate with Namco in Japan. Here he can be seen posing with Masaya Nakamura, the founder of Namco, at E3 in 2005:
http://www.ivghof.info/classes/2015/david-bishop/
Another division of Namco that comes up is Namco Hometek, their home console division in the U.S. While the finer details of Namco’s corporate structure from 1999 are not entirely clear, these two divisions can be shown to have collaborated, as indicated by this Namco Hometek tournament page hosted on the Namco Cybertainment website:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000617033637/http://www.funcrafters.com/hof_nt_soulcal_990925.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20000607034114/http://funcrafters.com/
In the late ’90s, Namco Hometek was taking the unusual step of producing their own game using the parent company’s IP. [S4] (This is unusual, in that the game would be developed in the U.S. before being brought to Japan, rather than the other way around.) Their idea was to introduce Pac-Man to the world of 3-D platforming. As a director at Namco Hometek R&D explained:
Yes, actually the Japanese parent company was very easy to work with. I think that was due in part to the way the parent company viewed Pac-Man at that time and the development strategy of the US subsidiary. At that time Namco Ltd. developed games for the Japanese market and sold the ones that appealed to Americans in the US. At that particular time Namco viewed Pac-Man as a mostly dormant franchise in Japan. They didn’t think there would be a large market for a new Pac-Man game in Japan. To them Pac-Man was the company mascot and a cultural icon similar to Mickey Mouse, but not an active game franchise. So when we proposed making a Pac-Man game for the US, they thought it was a good idea because we were developing a product for a different territory with different tastes.
https://playstationmuseum.com/SLUS00439.html
The game, originally developed under the title “Pac-Man: Ghost Zone” in 1997, experienced restarts and delays, until in 1999 it received a new title – “Pac-Man World: 20th Anniversary”. [S5]
https://www.ign.com/articles/1999/04/15/yellow-heros-new-game
In the game, the player journeys the land to collect keys (Get it?) to free Pac-Man’s friends, while eating dots and fruits and ghosts all along the way. In other words, it’s not exactly your grandfather’s pattern maze game. At any rate, Pac-Man World for Sony Playstation was Namco’s big point of emphasis that fall, and thus also was the centerpiece of their presentation at Tokyo Game Show:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000818012241/http://www.zdnet.co.jp/gamespot/news/9909/10/news01.html
You can see this emphasis on Pac-Man building even back in April, before Rick Fothergill’s head-to-head victory over Mitchell at Funspot. In an announcement for an unrelated collaboration between Namco and Hasbro, both Namco Managing Director Yasuhiko Asada and Namco Hometek Director of Marketing Mike Fischer were agog over the implications of reviving the Pac-Man franchise:
https://www.atariarchives.org/cfn/12/03/0062.php
While we don’t hear from Misters Asada or Fischer again in this series, one name that does come up later is that of executive Shunji Iki, seen here (left) alongside Namco CEO Masaya Nakamura in the December 1990 issue of RePlay Magazine:
Shunji held various roles, including as a director of Namco Operations (alongside David Bishop) in the early ’90s before that division was reformed into Namco Cybertainment. Later, in a 1995 San Francisco Chronicle article detailing a sexual misconduct lawsuit against Mr. Nakamura, Shunji was identified at that time as a director of Namco Hometek. Shunji also later served as a corporate director for Namco U.K., retiring in 2007.
https://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/namco_operations.html
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Video-VIP-Named-in-Harass-Suit-3025159.php
https://opencorporates.com/companies/gb/02824795
But like with Bishop and the others, any role Mr. Iki may have personally had in initiating Billy’s visit to the Tokyo Game Show remains unclear. Regardless, the evidence suggests Billy’s TGS appearance was a Namco USA initiative, with someone seeing in this timely “perfect score” news an opportunity to promote their new American-developed Pac-Man game on the verge of release. In a way, Time Magazine and CNN doing blurbs about original Pac-Man is one step away from being free advertising for Pac-Man World. To highlight this, in October, the Kansas City Star published a feature on Pac-Man (later reprinted by the Orlando Sentinel and others), tying together the original game’s 20th anniversary, the new Playstation game, and of course, Billy’s claimed perfect score (in emphasizing that people still play the original arcade game):
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1999-10-29-9910280374-story.html
Of course, if you leave it up to Billy, he’ll tell the most outlandish version of the story he can. At 56:50 in this episode of Obsolete Gamer Show, Billy invoked Masaya Nakamura while giving his own theory of why he was brought to Japan [S6]:
To think I went to Japan on a first class ticket because the owner, the founder, the CEO of Namco wanted to meet me.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0sI1aot6T4QsV7W70b4eQ8?si=J5jUgWdFRgybHoSpyvTtYg
ALONG FOR THE RIDE
Billy traveled to Japan alone, although it’s not clear whether the invitation was for him alone, or whether accommodations for his family were offered and declined based on the prospect of traveling with such an immature child as his son. [S7] (“Little Billy” turned one year old shortly before TGS.)
Of course, the general vibe of Billy’s stories from his time in Japan is that he was treated like royalty, and was the center of attention in everything. First up, he claims he was flown “first class”. (It’s not like he would ever say “Yeah, they saved money and flew me coach”.) In a 2016 profile with CNN, Billy described his personal celebration as starting the moment he arrived at the airport:
Meanwhile, Walter Day did accompany Billy in Japan… eventually. A Usenet post from the beginning of the month indicates Day’s original plan was to arrive on Tuesday the 14th and leave on Sunday the 19th, which would appear to coincide with Billy’s departure dates:
https://groups.google.com/g/fj.rec.games.video.home.superfamicom/c/VC5oxbE5Wok/
Naturally the two flew out separately, as one lives in Florida and the other in Iowa. But, as the story goes, Walter was not part of the official invitation, traveling on his own dime, and arriving late. Billy tells his version of the story in Exhibit A, at 37:50:
I fly to Japan, and he’s flying on a separate flight… I fly in first class. He’s there, he goes “Why’d everything go good for you?” “Because I’m Billy Mitchell.” He flew, he got a flight canceled, he got bumped, he had to go to a different city. He got there two days after I got there.
Skipping ahead a little, in Perfect Fraudman, Billy describes an encounter with his hosts in the hotel lobby the morning of the Tokyo Game Show (at 18:50):
And she showed me an email from a guy Walter Day, wanted to know what my opinion of it was again. So I was telling her about it, I told her everything, and she had some photos. Her and her assistant, both of their names are… Mister Ishii. She’s Misses Ishii, he’s Mister Ishii, but they’re not related. And… the hotel in Japan was $600 a night. $600 a night! And… So he wasn’t gonna pay for his own room. My room had a double bed, so he stayed in mine. Well, I went down, and I met, and I was meeting the Japanese… friends, and they were telling me the venue, and structure for the day. And then Walter came walking, and we had just been talking about Walter, and… you see this guy walking, he’s carrying all kinds of bags, he’s got bags like this and like this. And he’s got one bag in each hand, and he’s got a bag pinched between. And he’s walking, he looks like… He looks like a… halfway wacky. And the guy, Mr. Ishii’s sitting there, and he points over his shoulder, he says… He sees a guy in a striped outfit, he says “That look like Walter Day.”
During a Twitch stream in August 2020, Billy told a much longer version of this story. (I would simply show you the clip, but Billy files copyright strikes against such reuploads of his streams. Again, Billy Mitchell hates evidence.) Notably, Billy describes Walter’s misfortune arising from not being a part of his hosts’ itinerary [S8]:
I introduce him to everybody. Okay, there’s like one minute to stay on their schedule. And they are orderly. They say hello to Walter. They say goodbye to Walter. Walter says he’s goin’ to the same place as them. He asks for… advice on the best way to get there. They told him to ask the girl at the desk. He’s goin’ the same place we are, but he’s not on the schedule, and because he’s not on the schedule… he doesn’t go with us. Because that would represent disorder.
Billy continues, describing himself going to the convention center directly by limousine, while Walter Day had to take public transit:
Walter goes, and he’s gotta take like Japanese trains and subways. It took him… I got there in two hours. It took him about eight hours to get there, okay. And… poor Walter. What can you say?
You may notice some incongruity to these stories. So Walter Day was not a guest, and Namco had no interest in him, but they did have an interest, and did recognize him right away? If Walter Day was not a guest, why did he think he could show up, drop in on such a structured itinerary, and just trail Billy around to these events?
It’s hard to tell how many of these stories putting down Walter Day are sincere, however. Recall in “Dot Three”, Billy spoke of Walter’s prediction that his printed record book in 1998 would make him (Walter) the most famous person in video gaming history, and would make Billy the second most famous. Billy’s quote continues with these remarks, heard in Exhibit E, at 14:40:
It didn’t work that way. You know. He’s number two, and he’s a distant number two. And he acknowledges that. So what I do is, every time I tell you how he’s not famous, or don’t worry about him, or something like that, it’s me, you know, sticking it to him because of his original prediction.
So if Walter was such a third wheel, why was he there at all? Well, you may be shocked to learn that the one and only Walter Day, official scorekeeper of the known universe, may not have been quite the gooseberry that Billy would make him out to be. He was, after all, the authoritative “Electronic Games Historian” who first declared Billy Mitchell “Player of the Century” and Pac-Man “Game of the Century” (along with co-authority John Hardie of course, who did not make the trip). As for the purpose behind Walter’s end of the trip, that will be a story for “Dot Seven”.
A TRIP TO THE ARCADE
Before we get to the actual Tokyo Game Show, let’s cover a couple of Billy’s side trips from earlier that week. One of Namco’s projects in Japan was a series of “Wonder Park” locations – basically, a chain of shopping mall arcades. [S9] Billy was invited to appear at a “Pac-Man Festa” on Wednesday, September 15, at the Wonder Park location inside the Tokyu Shopping Center in Kohoku (an area in Yokohama, about a 36 kilometer / 22 mile drive south from downtown Tokyo). The home page of Wonder Park Kohoku announced Billy’s upcoming appearance, inviting people to attend, play games, and maybe win prizes [GT]:
That page, as captured in 2000, does not have any surviving photos of the location, but later captures from 2003 gives us a look at the wonderful Wonder Park Kohoku [GT]:
A “Kids Stadium”? A “ball pool”? A “playing house corner”? Is this an “arcade” or did they set Billy Mitchell up at a daycare?
That storefront still exists today, even with the same telephone number (now operating under just the name “Namco”). It appears to be a rather spacious place:
https://bandainamco-am.co.jp/game_center/loc/kohoku/
https://www.kohokutokyu-sc.com/floor/detail/?cd=000213
So what happened when Billy got there? Let’s hear the story in his own words, in a recent interview with “Pac-Man Entertainment” (formerly known as “Level 257”), at 47:10:
To think, as a game player, that I was flown across the ocean… by Masaya Nakamura… that I was given the honor and the treatment that he gave me… that I was in his Pac-Man studio arcades. Umm…There was media there. It was the first time that I was ever somewhere where I had an entourage of people in front of me that I didn’t know. I mean there was security because the crowd was tremendous. And sometimes, at one point the crowd got a little rowdy or pushy and they grabbed me, and I thought I was under arrest. They grabbed me, like eight people, and they whisked me in the back room because the crowd had gotten so… rowdy, I guess. And then we waited a little while and it was safe and so we went back out there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0feW53grOI
Gosh, he sounds like a superstar! He’s lucky to have survived being accosted by all those adoring fans!
In an August 2020 Twitch stream (transcribed in today’s supplemental material), Billy gave a similar account, along with some awkward racial exaggeration:
First of all, there’s no Americans, no matter what you see on TV. Okay, there’s people everywhere. It was a mob show. It was like some kind of rock concert. They had advertised I was gonna be there. And… And I’m there, and I felt like I was the president, because I’m standin’ there, I’m talkin’, I’m wavin’, I’m bein’ interviewed, and all that. And there’s all these guys in front of me. Like… like secret service guys, like holdin’ the crowd back. The thing is… I don’t know what they’re gonna do. All these guys are like four-foot-ten, okay. They’re holding back a bunch of other guys four-foot-ten. I didn’t need them to protect me. But… anyway… it looked good.
In the December 1999 issue of Tips & Tricks magazine, as part of their “Japan Report” on page 112, we see three photos from Billy’s visit to Wonder Park [S10]:
https://www.retromags.com/files/file/4664-tips-tricks-issue-058-december-1999/
Well, okay, there’s some kids there. Don’t know how “rowdy” they look, though. The kid in the camo shirt looks like he might be playing his own game.
Those two kids there are so rambunctious and unruly, they’re not even watching Billy show off his split screen tape! But hey, at least Billy got to meet Pac-Man, and got a big bouquet of flowers.
There’s another very tiny photo of Billy playing at Wonder Park included in this “Happy birthday Pac-Man” feature printed in Namco’s official magazine in Japan, Nours [S11]:
https://www.bandainamcoent.co.jp/corporate/bnours/nours/vol26/
https://www.bandainamcoent.co.jp/corporate/bnours/nours/vol26/pdf/26_03-07.pdf
Not counting the Namco staff attending to Billy, that looks to be about six neighborhood kids. At least this time they’re definitely watching him play.
After Billy’s visit, as part of a Pac-Man 20th anniversary subsite on the Japanese Namco website, a page was added to commemorate Billy’s arcade visit [GT]:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030222094937/http://www.namco.co.jp/home/pac20/billy-visit/index.html
Further down this subsite are five photos from the event, only two of which were captured by Wayback Machine. [S12] One is the same photo of Billy pointing at his video replay, while the other is a picture of Billy talking to… someone?
https://web.archive.org/web/20020823020601/http://www.namco.co.jp/home/pac20/billy-visit/02.html
Judging by the casual attire, the guy Billy’s talking to is probably an arcade-goer, and not his translator. Also, for what it’s worth, those glass display cases behind them are showing off items relating to Soul Edge and Tekken 3, both Namco games. [S13]
You’ll notice the lack of Walter Day in these Wonder Park photos. This indicates there could be some truth to the account that Walter’s flight arrangements were mishandled (although the particulars of Billy’s version of events are still unverified). If Walter Day was present, there’s no way Billy would have let his biggest cheerleader get excluded from all these photos. And it was a public event, so it’s not like Namco guards would be standing at the door of the arcade saying “Sorry, old man. Foot Locker is that way.”
One last wrinkle to this rather unremarkable arcade visit comes from this Japanese page, announcing Billy’s upcoming appearances [GT] [S14]:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030108175232/http://www.namco.co.jp:80/home/pac20/index.html
I didn’t notice it at first, but after seeing this page a few times, one word caught my eye… Was Billy’s September 15 visit to the Namco arcade on a Japanese “holiday”?
If you just looked up Japanese holidays, you might miss it. That’s because, in the early 2000s, as part of a government initiative called the “Happy Monday System”, a few traditional holidays were moved from locked dates to Mondays, to enable more three-day weekends. One of those was “Respect for the Aged Day”, which in 1999 fell on September 15:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_for_the_Aged_Day
As my research colleague put it:
Mitchell in the “Museum” part of the facility on old folks day – how appropriate!!
THE INNER CIRCLE
Billy’s arcade visit was a soft palate-cleanser compared to what we have in store now. You might want to refill your popcorn before we dig into this one.
After Billy’s Wednesday visit to Wonder Park, there was still one more day before his appearance at the Tokyo Game Show, which brings us to what is probably Billy’s most ridiculous, over-the-top fish story of this whole affair: His meeting with Masaya Nakamura and his “inner circle”, which in our research we came to call “the boardroom story”.
Billy often describes this as the apex of his time in video gaming. In Exhibit A, at 23:30, he referred to it as “probably the absolute coolest highlight of my illustrious gaming career”. And in a 2018 interview with the Autofire Power Hour, Billy described it as follows (at 55:00):
I would say that that meeting in the room with Masaya Nakamura and his inner circle was the highest point I can think of, of things that have happened to me in my gaming career.
https://autofirepowerhour.com/2018/02/10/episode-23-interview-with-billy-mitchell/
In case there was any doubt as to what Billy considers to be his personal hierarchy of memorable moments, at the previously referenced Pixels panel in 2015, Billy explicitly placed both his claimed perfect score and his appearance at the Tokyo Game Show below this supposed closed door meeting with Masaya Nakamura and his “inner circle” (at 30:40) [S15]:
It’s not getting the perfect score. That was not the most memorable moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7L_1tCi53Q
It does seem a bit in-character for Billy Mitchell to value the gratification of meeting influential people over the thrill of achieving some hard-earned world record video game score, does it not? (Assuming he genuinely has had any such scores.) Does Billy do a big pop-off any time he meets some new, important person? One of my colleagues, who took an especial interest in this “boardroom” story, couldn’t help but read into Mr. Competition’s characterization of this alleged meeting with suit-and-tie executives as the high point of his career:
You can almost see into Mitchell’s thinking here, High scores will come and go, so why not fabricate an entire story so unique and farfetched that no one would be able to match it? That way, in true Mitchell fashion he’ll always be able to trump your achievement and stay on top.
If you’ve listened to any at-length Billy Mitchell interview, you have no doubt heard some variation of this tale, told in a mostly formulaic way, usually with a few details tweaked here and there (as is known to happen when recalling vivid memories of things that definitely for sure happened to you). While there are a small number of lengthier iterations of this story out there, [S16] the core narrative can be broken down into four elements. First, Masaya Nakamura and his “inner circle” of bigwigs and VIPs walk into the room (as heard in Billy’s 2020 Q&A with Pac-Man Entertainment, at 49:40) [S17]:
And Masaya Nakamura walked in, with… eight other guys. It was his inner circle of programmers, his inner circle of marketing people. And to think that I was seated there, and it’s the very first thing I said, I said “To think that I’m seated here, in front of you.” I said “There’s not a kid in the world that ever played video games that wouldn’t want to be right here, right now.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0feW53grOI
In Billy’s stories, Mr. Nakamura’s entourage always consists of two out of three specific groups, depending on how he wants to tell the story that day. With Autofire Power Hour (at 50:40), it was “his inner circle of programmers and marketers”. At the Pixels panel (at 32:00), Billy said “they were described as his inner circle of developers and marketers”. And in Exhibit E (at 9:00), it was “their inner circle of programmers, developers”. (While “programmers” and “developers” could be seen as an overlapping reference, “marketers” would be something entirely different, would it not?) More notably, the number of people accompanying Mr. Nakamura has fluctuated, from as few as four to as many as ten. [S18] Again, that’s just the sort of thing that happens to the single most memorable moment of your entire career.
The next element of Billy’s story is how he allegedly confounded this elite squad of gaming’s finest minds with some benign question about Pac-Man. We’ll start with The Five Count, at 15:10:
It was interesting as I talked to ’em, because I always had this list of questions that I would ask these… these guys, you know, these guys that created the world. And I would, I would ask ’em this list of questions, and I’d finally have the answers that every one of us video game players always seemed to ask, all these stupid questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlLQdRwis1Q
The story continues, as heard on Autofire Power Hour at 51:40:
I asked a couple questions. They just shrugged their shoulders. It was crazy. I asked questions about Pac-Man, about the end of the game. They had never seen it before. I showed it to ’em. And they said “Mr. Mitchell, you know far more about Pac-Man than we know. We never thought scores were like this possible.”
The basic formula at play here is, Billy asks this “inner circle” a question, they respond through an interpreter (who apparently speaks broken English) “We have no idea, we never thought scores like this possible.” Billy then asks another question, and the answer is “You know far more about Pac-Man than we know.” (In Exhibit E, at 9:10, these two responses, worded slightly differently, are given in the opposite order.) [S19]
So what exactly were these questions? Let’s start with Exhibit A, at 28:20:
And so I said to him, and he’s got his inner circle there, and I says “When you get to the last screen,” I says, “we believe that there’s not enough room on the board… in the memory for the entire board and that’s why it’s garbled, and because there’s not enough room there’s not enough dots. That’s why the board doesn’t advance. And so we figured the score…” I went through some long explanation.
Ah yes, it’s Billy erroneous understanding of the split screen that we discussed back in “Dot Two”.
To be clear, even if this was a real meeting, and even if those were real programmers with some familiarity of early ’80s arcade games, they likely still would have struggled to provide an answer to Billy’s theorycrafting, not because they would be stumped, but because Billy’s questions had no basis in reality, and therefore no real answer (at least not without coming across as disrespectful of their guest). And that’s before you bring the language barrier into the mix, or the fact that the provided translator may be proficient at their trade in general but not at dealing with video game jargon in particular. [S20] Is it any wonder that these suits put their heads together and said “What is this guy even talking about?”
To make matters worse, when describing this interaction, Billy often can’t articulate his own question to his audience. Here was the attempt Billy gave at the Pixels panel, at 32:50:
And I asked ’em, I said “Gee… At the end of the game, this happens and that happens and this happens and that happens…”
In Exhibit B, at 27:00, Billy fills the time with a little beatboxing:
So I asked them a question, I said “Well, at the end of the game in Pac-Man, we think, because it runs out of memory, badda-beep baddap,” ask ’em all these questions…
And on his appearance with the After 2 Beers podcast, Billy (perhaps appropriately, given the venue) slurs his way through his explanation, at 60:50:
I said to ’em, I go “Listen, on Pac-Man, on the split screen, at the end of the game, when this happens, and there’s only half of the memory, and this, and runs out, and [gibberish],” I go, “Is that right?”
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3PQuOk4cblJAD8UsyWRaum
(No, really, open up that link, skip to 60:50, and hear that bit for yourself. It’s gold.)
Billy will sometimes describe asking a related follow-up question, which he similarly fails to articulate (as heard in Exhibit A, at 28:50) [S21]:
The answer came back, they said “Mr. Mitchell. We have no idea. We never thought scores like this possible.” And I said “Oh.” And I guess I should’ve listened a little better, because I took the question and I turned it a little different with more technicalities, and I asked a similar question.
On the Pixels panel, at 33:10, Billy alludes to four different lines of follow-up questioning without actually defining a single one:
I shoulda heard him, and if I heard him I wouldn’t have asked the second question. And the second question was a similar question about what happens here or what happens there or why this or why that?
It seems that, in the dozens and dozens of iterations of this story Billy has told, he can’t even think of two questions he asked these supposed executives. He only ever identifies one, which he claims to have asked twice, which he can only sometimes conditionally articulate, and which he often doesn’t bother trying. (No word on what happened to Billy’s list of questions he supposedly had ready to go.) [S22]
As my research colleague remarked [S23]:
For an event that vividly trumps everything else according to Mitchell, including the perfect Pac, he’s exceedingly vague. He’s actually more precise about his early schtick about the perfect score – the kid unplugging the game, the mistake at 1.9 million, the struggle to coach himself through the rest of the boards. Compare that to the pinnacle of his career, his story is really just a draft outline of a story.
My colleague was also puzzled at Billy’s apparent inability to simply ask a question these business suits could answer:
I mean, if Mitchell was genuinely curious about the design of the game or thought through a social situation, I can think of all sorts of questions like “Did you think that Pac-Man would be a huge hit when it was released in Japan? Did Namco ever consider releasing its own home console?” Lots of “small talk” questions could be posed to get a little conversation going, but instead each time he asks something, poor Nakamura is apparently forced to repeat himself in Billyspeak: “Mr. Mitchell, we have no idea. We never thought scores like this possible.”
In Billy’s universe, it was the executives who, wowed by his brilliance, turned the tables and delivered a litany of questions for him. Here he is, from his 2020 chat with Pac-Man Entertainment, at 51:10:
At that point, they had a question for me. And I answered it. They had a question for me, and I answered it. A question, a question. And for the next hour, I fielded questions that came at me. And I never asked another question, and I quickly realized that they had… an equal or greater fascination for what we were all exchanging.
In that version, it seems Billy is able to infer these executives’ sense of wonder. However, in the version told on Kurt and Corey, they outright told Billy they were more fascinated with him than he was with them (at 7:30):
I suddenly realized, as I was sitting there and I was looking at all their faces, and as they began to ask me questions, they were… They told me they were more impressed, the fact that I was sitting across from them than they were of me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdd3uS-7NOE
And don’t you think that these executives’ interest in Billy was limited to his recent claimed perfect score, no sir! Billy will tell you otherwise, in Exhibit A, at 29:20:
So then I sat there, and the absolute perfect point in all that I’ve ever done, the questions started coming this way, and not just about Pac-Man.
In case there was any mistaking what you are supposed to take away from Billy’s story, he makes his point clear on the Pixels panel, at 33:30 [S24]:
Now, the next question came from the other side, and came to me. And we spent a long, long time, more than an hour, and I was fielding questions. And it finally… It dawned on me, the things I was sayin’, the things I was tellin’ ’em, they were more fascinated than you could ever imagine that they were sittin’ across from me. I mean, you talk about bein’ a superstar!
Sometimes this reverse-questioning was one hour, sometimes it was two hours. [S25] Hey, time is funny like that. Also, we never find out what any of these questions were. You’d think, one or two hours of questions would have resulted in some examples over the years. Were the questions embarrassing? Were they too inane? Where they stupid? Were these executives entrusting Billy with their most confidential corporate secrets?
But that’s okay, because all of this is just a setup for the fourth, most important element of the whole story, the bit Billy never fails to insert into any discussion of his supposed video game knowledge. [S26] Here’s his punch line, as delivered in Exhibit B, at 28:20:
I love it when I get the wise guys. You know, you’re the wise guy and you say “Oh, you think you know everything. You think you know more about the game than the guy who made it.” Well yeah, he told me I do.
There are a lot of problems with this “inner circle” story (aside from the obvious fact that no strawman heckler has ever actually served up such an easy batting practice pitch for Billy to hit into the upper deck). [S27] But before we continue, let’s be crystal clear about something: This story, whether any of it is true or not, serves no legitimate purpose. If you boil away the bluster, the idea of gamers knowing more than the game’s developer isn’t actually a shocking proposition, and would hardly be unique to Billy Mitchell. [S28] Walter Day himself talks about this phenomenon, such as at Free Play Florida in 2014 (at 34:50) [S29]:
The designers quite often get real good at the game, then the game goes out into the public, and within a couple days the public is ten times better than the game designers. And that always blew their mind because they… they did it, and so they thought they’d understand it best. But there’s just some ingenious quality in the top gamers that allow them to just cognize the gameplay and just turn it into something beyond which the designers themselves could ever envision or ever pull off themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US35ZSUPXv8
And you don’t need to take Walter Day’s word for it, either. This has been a common sentiment expressed from designers of all sorts of games [S30]. It’s also reflected in the fact that unintended kill screens exist in the first place, or the fact that scores roll over, or that level indicators on many games stop incrementing, or that players found ways to pilot these valuable quarter-munchers for several hours (or in some cases even days) at a time. Really, any score on Pac-Man in the general three million range would have been likely to elicit a response of “We never thought scores like this were possible” from the game’s developers.
We don’t need this whole semi-fictionalized boardroom story framework to establish that Billy Mitchell is better at playing Pac-Man than Masaya Nakamura, [S31] nor his 1999 cadre of “programmers” and/or “developers” and/or “marketers”, who would surely have been more focused on whatever new 3-D platformer or fighting game was lining their pockets. What the boardroom story does accomplish, however, is twofold: It convinces people that Billy is somehow on a unique level of game mastery relative to his peers when he was not, and (importantly for Billy) it burns into people’s memories that Billy Mitchell once met Masaya Nakamura.
The story as told is also a bit… convenient? Usually, if one party asks another party a question, and they don’t have an answer, this implies both parties are equally unknowledgeable. But instead of responding with the executive equivalent of “I don’t know, son, we just collect the quarters,” the way Billy tells it, the suits give him exactly the line he needs to deliver his self-serving finale. To paraphrase, “They told me I’m the expert! You’re not calling them liars, are you?”
As if that weren’t enough, Billy becomes the meme with his claim that any time Namco gets “a real hard, technical question” about Pac-Man, they refer the question to Billy (the guy who thinks the split screen happens because the game only has enough memory to draw half the board). [S32] At Free Play Florida in 2014, Billy claims to have been consulted on an unspecified number of game adaptations (at 34:00):
And, you know, they’ve made cell phones and stuff like that. And different companies have had questions for them that they… “They have no idea.” And I’ve had… they’ve referred them to call me. And they’d send me something to test it, to see if it’s authentic. So… that’s kind of flattering, obviously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US35ZSUPXv8
Before we get to the major discrepancies in Billy’s many retellings of this boardroom story, there are a couple other problems with this story as it’s told. First, it seems to be an amalgam of two distinct stories Billy used to tell separately. Let’s go back to the Back in Time webcast at TG’s “Coronation Day” in January 2000, at 47:20:
When I was on stage in Japan, afterwards I sat down with the President, I went over… President of Namco, and I went over a few things with him, and I told him the truth, being from the video game era and kids and video games, “There’s not a single kid in the world who doesn’t wish he was seated in my seat.” So I consider myself blessed, beyond anything I could have imagined.
https://archive.org/details/bit01112000
And… that’s it? No “inner circle”, no wacky stories about questions flinging back and forth. Keep in mind, this was not even four months after the Tokyo Game Show, so this big highlight of Billy’s career, the most memorable thing he says he’d ever been a part of, should have still been very fresh in his mind. But he didn’t seem to have much to say about it. It sounds like a brief, uneventful encounter.
On the other hand, there’s this story from 2003, courtesy of Retro Gaming Radio. At 1:10:30, host Shane R. Monroe asks Billy if he’s “one of these world record freaks” like Todd Rogers, with many records on many games. Since Billy’s published resume is lacking in that regard, Billy gives a different answer, of trying to break games, to see things nobody else has ever seen. This led to the following story, at 1:11:10:
On Donkey Kong, 117 screens into it, you reach a kill screen. Well, on Pac-Man, 256 screens into it, you reach a kill screen. Ms. Pac-Man, 134 screens into it, you reach a kill screen. Well, in all of these, each time I’ve come across a… programmers or people that created the game, I’ve tried to talk to ’em about it, and they’ve explained to me that… They run program, they don’t know how it falls together. Regardless of what question I asked them, they always told me “You know far more than we know. We never thought scores like this were possible.” And… so I always liked the fact, when somebody says “You think you know more than the guy who made the game?” Yeah, I do, cuz he told me I do.
https://archive.org/details/rgry6/06+Episode+2004-08+Part+01.mp3
So wait, Billy had private meetings with each of Nintendo, and Namco, and General Computer Corporation (who created Ms. Pac-Man before selling it to Namco)? And each time they told him the same thing? Interestingly, we never hear much of those others again, after Billy decided to marry this “I met the developers” story to his documented trip to Japan. I suppose it would seem more authentic that way, given that his trip to Japan and participation in Namco’s event at the Tokyo Game Show is more documented than these other claimed encounters.
Of Mr. Nakamura’s alleged entourage that day, only the translator is ever given a name. (We’ll get to him in a moment.) Thus, unless either this translator or the CEO of Namco in Japan were interested in getting into some corrective war of words with some English-speaking American about what did or did not happen when they briefly met in 1999, no one was ever going to correct Billy’s stories about this closed door meeting, which Billy (conveniently) appears to have introduced years later.
But this does raise the question: What exactly were the credentials of this assembly of specialists accompanying Mr. Nakamura that day? Were they actually “programmers” or “developers”, or were they just executive assistants and senior managers (as one might expect to accompany a CEO)? Even in Billy’s stories, you get a sense for this group’s low level of technical expertise, such as in Billy’s 2006 profile in Oxford American:
https://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/622-the-perfect-man
One of my research colleagues found the illustration of this interaction quite humorous [S33]:
It reminds me of an old Simpsons episode where Milhouse asks the aging actor from the TV show about the various minute details found in the actual Radioactive Man comic books!! His response to the question is less than enthusiastic to say the least! Why would he know?? Only a child would believe that he would. Does Mitchell hold a similar childlike belief that everyone at Namco knows every one of their games inside out?? Why not ask about the inner workings of Nakamura’s original mechanical horse rides while you’re there, Billy. I’m sure the Nintendo CEO or creator of DK knows absolutely nothing about the finer points of barrel grouping either in case you should ever meet them!!
Another research colleague was more amused at Billy’s characterization of computer science:
Yeah, programming specific behaviors for the ghosts had nothing to do with their programmed specific behaviors. Maybe the middle managers that Mitchell apparently spoke to were just being polite but any coders in the room aren’t going to leave that alone. According to Mitchell, programmers just “run programs” and they cross their fingers hoping for the best – Mitchell’s take on Computer Science 101 in a nutshell. Anytime you walk up to an ATM to withdraw money? There’s a roomful of programmers sweating bullets and praying, “Come on, come on, work again!” And let’s just say that Mitchell’s favorite astronaut alter-ego would never have survived his trip to the moon if programmers just “ran programs” without understanding the consequences of their code executing instructions.
So we aren’t given any concrete qualifications for anyone who was supposedly present for this alleged boardroom meeting with Billy Mitchell on that late summer day. But even if the meeting did happen, we can tell you who definitely wasn’t there:
Toru Iwatani (commonly referred to as “Professor Iwatani” since joining the faculty at Tokyo Polytechnic University in 2007 [S34]) led a small team in the design and development of Pac-Man between 1979 and 1980. The idea was to make a video game that appealed to women, with bright, colorful characters, differentiating it from the plethora of male-focused shooting games like Space Invaders which were dominating the market.
In the 2003 interview with Retro Gaming Radio, Billy savored the opportunity to talk about his big trip to Japan, starting at 10:10:
But my favorite trip, without a doubt, after doing the perfect score on Pac-Man and gaining all the notoriety I gained, I was flown to the Tokyo Game Show, and… in front of Mr. Nakamura, who was the father of Pac-Man, and… probably about 70,000 Japanese, I was awarded the title of video game player of the century. For sure, that was my favorite trip.
https://archive.org/details/rgry6/07+Episode+2004-08+Part+02.mp3
Afterward, the hosts asked Billy about various rumors they’d heard about Pac-Man’s actual creator, whose name they could not recall, including that he was paid almost nothing for Pac-Man, or that he never programmed another game after that. [S35] Billy’s answer was:
Actually, I don’t know. I don’t know who that is. I just know Mr. Nakamura as the father of Pac-Man. Actually, I call him the godfather of video games.
Billy would eventually meet Professor Iwatani at the 2007 Pac-Man World Championship in New York, and again at the previously linked Pixels press conference in 2015. In Exhibit E, at 11:20, Billy does make clear that those were the only two occasions he had met Mr. Iwatani. Additionally, at the Pixels panel, at 34:20, while speaking of his 1999 trip, Billy gestured toward Iwatani and said “He wasn’t available, so that was a tremendous disappointment.” (It would have been very awkward if Billy tried to shoehorn the Professor into his wacky boardroom story, only for Iwatani to say “Uhh, I don’t remember any of this?”) [S36]
So for all of Billy’s boasting of having stumped “the people who made the game”, the actual literal creator of Pac-Man was not present for any of it!
Billy’s answer to Retro Gaming Radio left my research colleague very puzzled:
Who actually is Mitchell claiming to have spoken to (if anybody) that day? Iwatani wasn’t there, so for all we know it was probably Nakamura and a load of Namco marketers. Hardly the group of boffins Mitchell is claiming he bamboozled with his technical prowess. It’s just more Mitchell folklore where he stretches the tiniest piece of information into some huge lie. And yet again the interviewer (already prepped by Mitchell not to rock the boat) misses the chance to question. “Oh so who did you actually talk to in Japan about the technicalities of Pac-Man, Billy? Professor Iwatani? No?!! One of his small team that helped him program the game? No?! Well who then? Nakamura and a couple of his fat cat lickspittles?”
Professor Iwatani was never an important figure in Billy’s elaborate story about himself and his supposed greatness, which is reflected in the fact that Billy consistently gets his name wrong. Often, he pronounces it “Iatwani” (“Eye-uh-twah-knee”). [S37] When asked to pronounce it on The Kurt and Corey Show, Billy responds, “I just say Mr. Tori.” And in Exhibit A, in 2016, Billy referred to the Professor as “Toru Wan… Mister Otwani.” I guess, if all the consonants are present, that’s close enough for Lily Bitchmill.
Let’s go back to that totally-not-made-up heckler line, this time as seen in Billy’s 2006 profile in Oxford American:
https://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-53-spring-2006/the-perfect-man
Billy has gotten a lot of mileage out of that line. Check out this passage from that same profile:
The author seems to be conflating the Classic Gaming Expo in August and the Tokyo Game Show in September, as if Billy traveled to Japan twice in two months. (Odd, isn’t it, how these miscommunications always seem to make Billy appear more grand and not less.) But more notably for the current topic, the author walked away with the understanding that it was Iwatani (Pac-Man’s actual creator), and not Nakamura, who Billy met in Japan. Again, where is all this misinformation coming from? Why must these stories always be told in such a way to give people the wrong impression?
Going back to the heckler line, let’s see if you notice anything different about how it was delivered by Billy at the Pixels panel, in the presence of Professor Iwatani himself (at 34:50):
I like it when I have a tough guy questionin’ me. “Oh, you think you’re so smart.” And I go… And they go “Oh, you think you know more about the game than the company does.” And I go “Yeah, I do, cuz they told me I do.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7L_1tCi53Q
Woah! What happened to the other guy!? The heckler who compared Billy to Toru specifically? Gosh, I hope he’s okay! Also, strange for Billy to miss such a golden opportunity to reminisce with the Professor about the time he congratulated Billy on his extensive Pac-Man knowledge. After all, Billy sure is fond of telling that story to everyone else he meets. (Lest you think this is some sort of modesty or respect for Professor Iwatani on Billy’s part, keep reading.)
Going back to the basic boardroom story, we’ve gone over some of the minor variations in Billy’s many retellings, but let’s take a look at some major discrepancies. First, Billy cites two different statements as being “the first thing” he said to Mr. Nakamura. In fact, in a single 2012 interview with The Five Count, Billy cited two different things as both being the “first thing [he] said to him” (heard at 1:44:30) [S38]:
The very first thing I said to him, I… I said to him, I said “This is the second time we’ve met.” I said “We met when I was seventeen in New Orleans, for a photograph.” And… I told him I’d get him a copy of that photograph. And I… I said “You might say, it was a seventeen-year journey for me to get back here in front of you again.” […] The first thing I said to him, I said “There isn’t a kid in the world who ever plays video games that wouldn’t want to be in this seat, you know, right here right now.”
http://thefivecount.com/audio-posts/an-evening-with-the-king-kongs-billy-mitchell-steve-wiebe/
As a quick aside, this remark about a photograph in New Orleans appears to be a reference to a 1983 industry trade show in New Orleans hosted by the Amusement & Music Operators Association, or AMOA. (Note that, while the show was not open to the public, reportedly Walter Day and his U.S. National Video Game Team were able to secure entry under the guise that they were press, which at least was true of Steve Harris.) [S39] In Exhibit A, at 26:50, Billy claims that Nakamura encountered the team as they were having a photo taken for RePlay Magazine, and that Nakamura joined in for a group photo. [S40] While we did find a photo of Walter with his team taken at that event, and while it appears Mr. Nakamura may have been present at the AMOA convention in New Orleans that year, we were unable to find such a photo in AMOA coverage in RePlay or elsewhere, nor any description of such an encounter from other members of Day’s team. [S41] It seems this photo fell into the same black hole all of Billy’s other corroborating evidence has disappeared to. (But hey, at least we got those board swap videos!)
We did, however, find a photo of Walter, Billy, and the rest of the National Video Game Team at the AMOA convention in Chicago the following year, along with Jerry Momoda of Nintendo:
https://www.twingalaxies.com/images/generalinfo/usnvgt_vending_times_dec1984_725.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20071009234349/https://www.twingalaxies.com/index.aspx?c=18&id=1363
http://jerrymomoda.com/about-2/
Maybe Billy just thought it would’ve been cooler if that was Masaya Nakamura instead?
Getting back to our main thread, an astute reader may have already picked up on the fact that Billy also can’t agree on what day this alleged meeting with Nakamura’s inner circle happened. [S42] He usually tells the story as if it happened on Thursday, the day between his visit to Wonder Park and his appearance at Tokyo Game Show. And Thursday would make sense, in that nothing else was attributed to that day of Billy’s visit. (Indeed, Billy may have genuinely been granted a guided tour of the Namco facility that day, although it’s highly unlikely Mr. Nakamura himself would be guiding such a tour.) However, sometimes Billy describes the meeting with Mr. Nakamura as happening after his TGS appearance, as we saw in “Dot Five” on the Mark and Me podcast in 2019 (heard at 26:30):
And I realized how important that was, when I was on stage in Japan, and afterwards I sat in the executive offices with Masaya Nakamura.
https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/markandme/episodes/2019-02-25T10_00_00-08_00
In fact, in that Back in Time webcast interview linked earlier, not four months after his Japan trip, Billy places both his meeting with Mr. Nakamura and the “There’s not a single kid in the world” line after his Tokyo Game Show appearance:
When I was on stage in Japan, afterwards I sat down with the President, I went over… President of Namco, and I went over a few things with him, and I told him the truth, being from the video game era and kids and video games, “There’s not a single kid in the world who doesn’t wish he was seated in my seat.”
There’s also an issue with Billy’s translator in this supposed closed door meeting. For years, this translator had no name, until one was provided for Billy at the Pixels panel in 2015, by David Bishop. In fact, at 31:30, you can see Billy look off in Mr. Bishop’s direction (past Iwatani and his translator), for confirmation he was getting the name right:
I was at the Namco headquarters… the day before that. And I was in a room, and I’m waiting for him to come in. And I was there simply with his… assistant… Mr. Iki?… Yeah.
We believe this to be a reference to the previously mentioned Shunji Iki of Namco Cybertainment [S43]:
It would make sense that, as a corporate director, Shunji would travel to Japan for the Tokyo Game Show (especially given Namco USA’s connection to the promotion of Pac-Man World). It also would make sense that Mr. Bishop would remember the name of his executive colleague for many years, as opposed to some random translator from 15 years prior:
https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_fl/P15789
In fact, a 1992 photo in RePlay of a group photo of Namco executives, with Shunji positioned next to a younger Mr. Bishop sporting a sweet Borat ‘stache:
One might rightly ask, if the Mr. Iki from Billy’s stories really is this corporate director, why does Billy always describe him as being Nakamura’s “assistant” or “translator”? But it turns out, Shunji Iki was described exactly that way in magazine appearances over the years. [S44] A photo caption in a 1992 issue of RePlay Magazine referred to Shunji as a “Special Assistant” and translator for Mr. Nakamura. The caption to the above photo with Mr. Bishop identified Shunji as “advisor to the chairman”. And in a 1990 interview with Mr. Nakamura, also in RePlay, the following nod to Mr. Iki was included:
Finally, deep thanks go to Mr. Shunji Iki, Namco’s advisor to the president, for his very able translation and other valued assistance.
At any rate, now Billy has a name for his translator, to help flesh out his story a little bit, to make it seem a little more authentic. You can hear Billy in Exhibit B in October 2020 (at 27:10), where he compliments Mr. Iki on his English:
I ask ’em this particular question, and it goes to the interpreter, very nice guy, Mr. Iki, speaks English better’n me…
And Mr. Iki’s name comes up again in Billy’s chat with Pac-Man Entertainment, two months later (at 50:50):
And so, I asked ’em another question, really the same question a little differently. And it went back and forth, back and forth, and Mr. Iki brought back the answer. They said “Mr. Mitchell, you know far more about Pac-Man than we know! We have no idea!”
There’s just one problem. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
Previously, Billy’s supposed translator in this meeting had been a woman!
Let’s go back to Billy’s interview with The Five Count from 2012, and listen starting at 15:30:
And so when I sat down, and it was question time, I asked them about… “Gee, at the end of the game, you know, when this happens and that happens and there’s the split screen and there’s this. Is that because of this and that?” And it gets interpreted, and they talk back and forth amongst all themselves for half a minute, and the answer comes back, and the girl says, “Mr. Mitchell, we have no idea. We never thought scores like this possible.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlLQdRwis1Q
And then a moment later in the same interview [S45]:
And I asked another question, and back and forth they spoke Japanese for about a half a minute, and then when… she said to me, she says “Mr. Mitchell, you know far more about Pac-Man than we know. We have no idea.”
As one of my research colleagues remarked:
We’re all familiar with the stereotype of a family member – let’s pick on a stereotypical mom – who tells the same story of how she met dad over and over, so much so that it elicits groans from the kids, who then finish the story in unison since they’ve heard it so many times. With Uncle Billy, it’s a completely different experience. It’s “sort of” the same story – it’s in Tokyo, there’s a meeting of some sort – but the retellings are never exactly the same, which you’d think would be a good thing (share new details to keep it fresh!) but it only creates more confusion. And this isn’t 85 year old Uncle Billy we’re talking about, who we’d forgive for mixing up some details after all this time, but this is from a guy in the prime of his life who just couldn’t ever get things straight in the years immediately following this pivotal event, causing the kids to fidget awkwardly wondering about what they were hearing.
I know. This is a lot to take in. Since this can all get very confusing, I’ve taken the effort to combine Billy’s different variations of this story, along with our common sense observations, into this helpfully paraphrased compilation:
It was the single most memorable moment in my entire life, which either happened before or after this other important thing, I don’t really remember. I was in the inner sanctum of Namco, in Japan. And in walked Pac-Man himself, who I call the Godfather of Pac-Man. along with either four or ten of his personal chefs, accountants, caddies, and hairstylists. And the very, very first thing I said to him was “Did you know there isn’t a kid in the world who wouldn’t want to be in a photograph with you right here in New Orleans back in 1983 right now?” And I could ask him any question I wanted, so I asked him “When you play the game, and you do this, or when this does that, or maybe it was the other thing, and then something else happens, why do all the doohickeys and thingamabobs go ba-deep ba-deep ba-doop, rock ’em sock ’em goo goo ga joob swingin’ on the flippity flop?” And they all discussed it for a moment, then it came back to the translator, and she said “Dude, what the hell are you talking about?” So I asked it again, adding a couple more ba-deeps and another flippity, and it came back again, and that exact same translator from before, he said “No, seriously, we’re really confused.” And then it was the coolest thing: Over the next either one or two hours, they had questions for me! These questions may or may not have included “Why are you so weird?” “Are you high right now?” “What’s with the stupid ties?” “Have you considered a less douchey haircut?” And that’s why I love it when I get the wise guys who say “You think you know more about the game than the…” [looks around at each person in the room]… “You think you know more about the game than the, uh, regional distributor?” Well yeah, and you know why? [Pulls out sunglasses, flips them on.] Because THEY TOLD ME I DO YEEEEAAAAUHHHHH.
That should be it. That should be the end of this topic. You would think we’ve torn this story apart enough. But there’s one more wrinkle, a newer addition to this fish tale, which defies belief.
After the 2015 Pixels panel, Billy began claiming to have withheld this “boardroom” story for years because it was somehow too “personal” to share. Here he is on After 2 Beers (in 2019), at 59:20:
I never told this story… until 2015, when I met some of those guys again at Namco. And when I met ‘em, and we went over it, it was in front of a camera, and they told the story. Therefore, I felt, I can tell the story now. Cuz it was such a personal thing, I… I never shared it.
This added flourish has since become a staple of this boardroom story, always in the context of his claimed meeting with Mr. Nakamura’s “inner circle”. [S46] Here he is on Autofire Power Hour (in 2018), at 51:50:
I asked questions about Pac-Man, about the end of the game. They had never seen it before. I showed it to ’em. And they said “Mr. Mitchell, you know far more about Pac-Man than we know. We never thought scores were like this possible.” And I never shared that conversation… until just a few years ago because… that same circle of people, we were in Chicago, and we were on a panel discussion that was filmed and very public. And when they made that same statement again, now I feel comfortable enough to share what happened in that very private meeting.
This is baffling, if for no other reason, then because Billy has told both this “story” and this “statement” (as he alternatively puts it) [S47] so many times in so many interviews over the years, including in some of the links provided above. We found three different instances of Billy telling this story from 2012 alone. [S48] Does he just expect people not to check?
Oh, there’s also the fact that we can watch the Pixels panel on YouTube. Surprise surprise, “those guys” from Namco didn’t bring up the story. Billy brought it up himself! You can hear him, at 30:30:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7L_1tCi53Q
Now, someone might correctly point out that there were actually two similar panels for Pixels on the same weekend – one in which Billy is wearing a black suit (as seen on YouTube), and one where Billy wore a white suit:
For the record, it appears the black suit panel was on Friday and the white suit panel was on Saturday. [S49] But for the sake of argument, let’s say it was the other way around. You might think, possibly, that people from Namco really did, for some odd reason, tell Billy’s story for him at the Friday panel, and then Billy said on Saturday “It’s fair game, I can tell the story now!” And maybe you also suffered some head injury and forgot about all the times Billy told the story prior to 2015.
But no, Billy gets torpedoed by his own words once again. Far from having respect for Mr. “Eye-uh-twah-knee”, Billy mystifyingly tries to rope him specifically into this supposed Pixels panel interaction. [S50] Here he is, in his December 2020 interview with Pac-Man Entertainment, at 51:40:
And that meeting was so personal, that I actually never spoke of it for fifteen years. I never spoke of it. It was too personal… to share, I thought that would be insulting. After meeting with Professor [Iwatani] for the second time at Pac-Man Entertainment in 2015 for the 35th anniversary, he actually said those things, he actually spoke of those things, and because he spoke of it I felt the freedom to speak of it like I am now. And I… It was great, because we’re on a panel discussion. You could ask him any question about Pac-Man, the development, his thoughts, knowledge, his experience. You asked him any question about the gameplay and… He would just shrug his shoulders and say “You have to ask Billy.”
So now, it wasn’t “those guys” at Namco who told Billy’s story for him? Now it was the guy who wasn’t even there when all this supposedly happened? What is even going on!?
Also, I shouldn’t have to tell you that nowhere in the filmed panel does Toru Iwatani answer any question with any variation of “You have to ask Billy”, despite this becoming another staple of Billy’s story since 2015. [S51] (When you think about it, it would also be a bit weird for reporters to use this Pixels movie forum to ask Professor Iwatani general questions about Pac-Man play that he couldn’t answer, but which Billy could.)
But the real nail in this coffin comes from Billy’s introduction to his own boardroom story that he himself told at that Pixels panel, at 30:30 [S52]:
And I’m actually gonna speak slow, because I want Professor to hear this, because he’ll be hearing this for the first time.
He says it himself! The story wasn’t told by “those guys” at Namco at the filmed panel on Saturday. And it wasn’t told at the Friday panel, because Professor Iwatani would have heard it at that time.
In fact, Billy kinda gives the game away altogether here, does he not? If I’d had some notable interaction at someone’s workplace when they weren’t there, and then I went to tell them about it, I wouldn’t start by saying “Listen up, cuz I know you’re gonna be hearing about this for the first time.”
LOST IN TRANSLATION
The previous section delivered plenty of laughs, but it’s time to switch to a more serious note. In this series, I have preferred to stay focused on Billy’s numerous fibs, fictions, fabrications, falsehoods, fish stories, fairy tales, frauds, bluffs, perfidies, exaggerations, deceptions, delusions, dishonesties, duplicities, dissemblings, inconsistencies, insincerities, myths, misinformations, misrepresentations, mendacities, half-truths, double-dealings, four-flushings, and brazen, bald-faced lies, rather than delving into general issues of personal character (except as to where they directly relate to said falsehoods, etc.). However, there is an unfortunate element to many of Billy’s Japan stories, which cannot go unremarked.
If you only listen to a couple Billy Mitchell interviews, which is the most any normal person is likely to tolerate, you might not notice this, but when you listen to several dozen, one thing becomes apparent: Billy seems to have a real penchant for doing his caricature of a Japanese accent. While it’s more stunning to hear this impersonation being verbalized, the broken English in Billy’s lines comes through even when transcribing these lines to plain text: “That look like Mr. Walter Day”, “We never thought scores like this possible”, etc. [S53] Nearly every Japanese character in Billy’s stories speaks in this exaggerated manner.
One might wonder, did nobody in Japan speak English with a neutral accent? Has Billy ever considered simply repeating their lines in a neutral accent even if they did not? Does Billy imitate all accented speakers in this manner? Or is this a deliberate choice to give his Japan stories a sense of authenticity?
This might not be worth mentioning, if not for Billy’s own claims that nobody involved spoke English except for his translator, who spoke it fluently. [S54] First, from The Five Count, at 14:40:
I sat there and I said hello to everybody. Nobody spoke a word of English except for me and the interpreter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlLQdRwis1Q
And then at the Louisville Arcade Expo in March 2016 (at 9:20):
When the interpreter came in the room, the assistant to the CEO came in the room. He spoke English as well as me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5XGZXzkwhg
Heck, on Kurt and Corey, Billy pairs this description with the broken line, not two minutes apart. First at 5:30:
And I had one gentleman with me, who was Mr. Nakamura’s… personal assistant, spoke English as well as you and I.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdd3uS-7NOE
Then at 7:00:
Then they came back with the answer, and their answer was “Mr. Mitchell. We have no idea…” They said “We never thought scores like this possible.”
So if the translator speaks perfect English, where is this broken English coming from? Who is saying “We never thought scores like this possible” (without “were”)? Is this how Billy imagines Japanese people speak? Do these broken English lines represent how Billy believes the Namco executives would talk if they spoke English themselves?
In Exhibit A, at 28:50, Billy pads out his illustration of Nakamura’s “inner circle” by mocking Japanese speech, using sort of a “jarjarjarjar” sound [S55]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfNvVnG_cZk
Even worse, Walter Day joins in, providing his approximation along the lines of “hoshoshosho”. This is especially peculiar, given that we could find no definitive claim of Walter Day ever having been present at the alleged “inner circle” meeting on Thursday (as the story is typically told). So how can this be a direct recollection of the event? Is that supposed to be what Walter Day thinks Japanese people sound like in general?
Even if you’re inclined not to put much stock in these sorts of impersonations as described so far, the inconsistencies don’t stop there. Recall Billy’s later revision of the “inner circle” story, identifying his translator as Mr. Iki (who we have reasonably identified as executive Shunji Iki). In Exhibit B, after Billy does his beatboxing demonstration, he specifically cites Mr. Iki as speaking fluent English (at 27:10):
…ask ’em all these questions, or I ask ’em this particular question, and it goes to the interpreter, very nice guy, Mr. Iki, speaks English better’n me…
I should hope Shunji Iki is fluent in English. After all, Shunji Iki is an American! And we don’t mean “American” merely by way of being a director of Namco Cybertainment in the U.S. Shunji was born in Washington state in October 1939, to his mother Haruko who immigrated from Japan in 1935. [S56] Shunji grew up with dual nationality between both Japan and the United States, in addition to later serving in a director role for Namco in the U.K.
In the interest of fairness, given that we could not locate audio of Shunji Iki speaking English for comparison, we did go to some effort researching his background, attempting to affirmatively establish Mr. Iki as a native English speaker. [S57] Obviously, if Shunji was simply born and raised in the United States, this would not be a question. However, what gave us pause was a newspaper article in 1943, listing Haruko, Shunji, and his brother Teisuke among those being (dramatic air quotes) “repatriated” to Japan from one of Roosevelt’s internment camps in Minidoka, Idaho. [S58] Shunji was young enough at the time that we had to consider the possibility that he was not raised as a native English speaker beyond that age despite his stateside birth. However, in our continued research, we discovered Shunji and his mother still living in the United States years later, with no definitive proof the family ever left in any long-term fashion. In 1952, a local newspaper referenced a young Shunji playing catcher in the Seattle Little League championship in 1952. [S59] Most notably, in 1955, future corporate executive Shunji Iki was a member of student government at Lincoln High School in the Portland, Oregon area – the same high school attended by cartoon legends Mel Blanc and Matt Groening years apart:
In other words, despite legally having dual nationality, Shunji Iki is indeed as American as apple pie. (You weren’t expecting another baseball analogy, were you?)
The only direct reference to Mr. Iki’s English ability from a non-Billy source comes from David Bishop on the Pixels panel. First, Billy gives his usual line about his translator’s fluency (at 31:40):
And I was there simply with his… assistant… Mr. Iki?… Yeah. And… and he speaks English better than me, so I was happy.
Bishop then offers Billy a rare real-time correction, adding:
More grammatically correct, anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7L_1tCi53Q
Lest there be any confusion, Billy pairs all these elements together in his 2020 Q&A with Pac-Man Entertainment. First at 49:20:
I had just met a gentleman by the name of Mr. Iki, who was a terrific guy, and a personal assistant to Masaya Nakamura. He spoke English better than me.
And then back to the caricature accents, at 50:50:
And it’s translated to him, and the eight others, and they came back and they said “Mr. Mitchell, we have no idea! We never thought scores like this possible!” And I thought “Jeez, I didn’t get an answer?” And so, I asked ’em another question, really the same question a little differently. And it went back and forth, back and forth, and Mr. Iki brought back the answer. They said “Mr. Mitchell, you know far more about Pac-Man than we know! We have no idea!”
So if Mr. Iki is a born and raised American, and if his corporate colleague notes his English as being, at the very minimum, “grammatically correct”, and if even Billy himself acknowledges Mr. Iki’s English as better than his own, why is it in Billy’s impersonations Mr. Iki always sounds like a Japanese version of Tonto?
Whether Billy likes it or not, whether he thinks he’s just being cute with racial caricatures, these impersonations do play directly into questions about the veracity of Billy’s stories. Setting aside questions of political correctness, if Billy can’t stick to a consistent presentation of what’s supposed to be the most memorable moment in his gaming career, why should we give any weight to his other claims? [S60]
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you have some lingering doubts, that maybe you think Mr. Iki’s English ability has for some reason been exaggerated, and that maybe this corny accent represents a genuine interaction which Billy is trying to convey as sincerely and authentically as possible, warts and all. Of course, the “authenticity” argument is hard to reconcile with the times Billy flubs these lines, [S61] as if it doesn’t matter to him exactly what mangled English line he delivers as long as it sounds funny. However, we do have another iteration of this broken accent for you, attributed to a totally unrelated party. In a video with his friend Robert Childs, the topic of Donkey Kong’s kill screen is discussed, as Billy’s Japanese racial caricature comes out yet again (at around 1:30):
When I first talked to them about this, back in 19… ’82, they just says “Ohhh, we have no idea scores like this possible.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6QCcxis_lA
Imagine that! Everyone related to Japan, even Japanese-Americans, they all speak to Billy, not only in the same cartoonishly racial accent, but they even use the exact same style of broken English, dropping the same words in the same way each time, even seventeen years apart from each other. [S62]
Either that, or Billy is really into doing that caricature.
THE NAMCO BOOTH
Getting back to more light-hearted matters, aside from the time he allegedly bewildered a bunch of old suits with confusing questions about a video game they only know from their profit projections, Billy’s other favorite Japan story pertains to his appearance at the Tokyo Game Show, which he ties into the “Player of the Century” award he received from Walter Day in Las Vegas (usually leaving the Las Vegas part out altogether). In Exhibit D, at 3:30, you can hear Billy attribute the award to Masaya Nakamura, personally:
And there on stage at the Tokyo Game Show, with a list of accolades that went back to as far as 1982, and as recently as the perfect Pac-Man in July of ’99, he crowned me the Video Game Player of the Century. It was… It was ridiculously flattering that he did that.
Let’s start by digging into some background on the Tokyo Game Show. TGS was a creation of Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association (or CESA), a Japanese organization whose goal was to “promote the computer entertainment industry”. In short, TGS is a Japanese version of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3), a venue for gaming publishers to promote their latest games and hardware. (Note that there are a few such conventions in Japan. We’ll hear about another one in our next installment.) After the first TGS in Autumn of 1996, it was held twice-annually until 2002, when Nikkei Business Publications joined CESA as TGS co-organizers, and the event was changed into a once-yearly affair:
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/2001autumn/english/
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/2002/english/release/release20020715.html
But of course, the TGS we’re interested in was Autumn ’99, held at Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba (the capital city of Chiba prefecture), about 40 kilometers (25 miles) southeast of Tokyo. The event lasted from Friday, September 17, through Sunday, September 19, with Billy’s appearance coming on the first of those three days.
As one might expect, there are plenty of Japanese language resources relating to Autumn ’99 TGS on Internet Archive, many of which are not relevant to our main topic. [S63] But what is particularly interesting is that the official CESA site from 1999 is still in operation on the open web, including pages in both Japanese and English:
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/99autumn/english/
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/99autumn/english/info/info02.html
From there, you can find various itineraries and a list of exhibitors (including Namco). The official list indicates Namco was one of 74 exhibitors at Autumn ’99 TGS – a number confirmed on the Spring 2000 TGS site:
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/99autumn/english/shutten/index.html
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/2000spring/english/kaisai/index.html
The Japanese site has a couple pages with information on Namco’s exhibits [GT]:
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/99autumn/shutten/na01-1.htm
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/99autumn/shutten/na01-7.htm
The site also includes some daily recap pages, including this wide shot from Friday:
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/99autumn/english/info/info07.html
A lot of stuff going on there. Sega Dreamcast, Konami. Don’t really see any Namco, though.
There’s some helpful material on YouTube as well. [S64] First up, there’s an old Playstation Underground video, which characterized Tokyo Game Show as “like E3, but only about half its size”. The video includes TGS footage from Spring ’97, Spring ’99, and Autumn ’99. Still no sign of the Autumn ’99 Namco booth, but we do get another wide overhead shot (at about 2:00):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mVFFi7XbFY
Basically the same vantage as before. We see glimpses of the Namco exhibitions from the other two events, but no sightings of Namco or Pac-Man from September 1999.
Ah, but I know where we can find Namco! Let’s check out the event map:
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/99autumn/english/map/index.html
So there are eight “halls” dividing up this large convention floor. Let’s take a closer look at halls 4-6:
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/99autumn/english/map/map2.html
There’s Namco! Down in the corner, tucked between Square and SNK. For some strange reason, this map has south at the top and north at the bottom. But at any rate, based on this, the above photo would be facing south (up), and Namco would be off-screen to the left.
Going back to YouTube, here’s another video from Autumn ’99 TGS, uploaded to YouTube in 2018 by “Orion”. Skip ahead to about 6:48. Check out this horde of Japanese gaming fans, in late ’90s low-resolution, awaiting their first glimpse of their superstar Billy Mitchell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtVGn5TJq8A
Haha, just kidding! No, that’s the crowd at the Sony booth, eagerly anticipating the actual star of the Show, the brand new Sony Playstation 2. At the risk of sounding obvious, much of the media from this event gives you a sense of how important that console unveiling was. While this video was particularly dedicated to the PS2 unveiling, we do see basically the same overhead angle as before, with Konami and Sega all in view. However, if you pause really quickly before the camera pans over, we get our first actual Namco sighting (at about 6:27, assuming you don’t blink and miss it):
Our first good look at the actual Namco stage comes from a Japanese site called “G@me’s”. (Don’t ask me how that’s intended to be pronounced.) A main page acts as a hub for links to several developer-specific coverage pages, including one for Namco. Here we see tiny (as in, 1999 dial-up tiny) photos from Namco’s booth, along with some captions that are rather amusing after a trip through Google Translate:
http://www.a-one-office.co.jp/game’s/gameshow/gameshow99/gs99_nam.html
A dive into Japanese language YouTube videos gives us several more ganders at the Namco stage. First up is an original Japanese television ad for Pac-Man World, featuring a view of the stage and surrounding area [S65]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyB5x30zfU0
You can also hear that Pac-Man birthday song during an overhead shot of the Namco area in this TGS 1999 “B-Roll”, at 25:20:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76gkWdcp4uc
It’s really a catchy song! It makes yet another appearance in this upload from 2016, at 25:30, featuring the plain clothes dancers from the ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LQeyVMHa8c
But still no sign of Billy’s big moment, part deux!
Late last year, two videos were uploaded from magazine CDs from Hong Kong. The last few minutes from the second of these videos show a lot of wild goings-on at Makuhari Messe in September ’99:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znWxajRXzy0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFTfqFIm86E
In 2011, one user uploaded twenty extended videos with Japanese titles from Autumn ’99 Tokyo Game Show, each one featuring a different publisher (Sony, Enix, Square) or theme (cosplay). This includes the following 11 minute video dedicated to Namco’s exhibition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy-7tyB5oWY
Starting at about 1:20, we get a nice, clear look at the actual Namco stage:
That’s a lot of Pac-Man! Don’t suppose there was a new Pac-Man game they were trying to sell? Indeed, if you continue watching, you see scenes from the upcoming Pac-Man World on a row of side televisions. At about 2:00, you get another good look at the giant billboard just offset from the Namco stage [S66]:
You also see exhibits for Namco’s other big release games, such as Dragon Valor, and an advance preview of Tekken Tag Tournament for PS2. At about 5:40, we even see one of the Namco dancers taking a break to play some Nainai’s Stray Detective:
After that, at about 6:00, is another great look at the Namco stage, this time with the Pac-Man presentation and dance routine already underway:
So you’re telling me this person filmed eleven minutes of highlights from the Namco booth, and just… didn’t catch a glimpse of Billy’s big celebration? Or didn’t care?
WHERE’S BILLY?
We weren’t able to find any video of Billy at the Tokyo Game Show, but we do know he was there, and that he did make an appearance on that Namco stage [S67]:
But surely there must be some media coverage associated with this appearance. After all, is this not where he was proclaimed “Video Game Player of the Century” by the entire Japanese gaming industry?
Let’s start our search with our friends at “G@me’s”. Granted, they paired a picture of the Konami stage with text about Namco, but they seemed comfortable reporting on Pac-Man’s 20th anniversary celebration without any reference to any Floridians [S68]:
http://www.a-one-office.co.jp/game’s/gameshow/gameshow99/gs99_namco_e.html
(“Hatachi” is a Japanese word for “twenty years old”.)
Well hey, maybe it was just Japan that didn’t care. Let’s check out some English language coverage. Here we have GameSpot, operating under the banner of videogames.com, with a whole page of links covering all aspects of the Autumn ’99 Tokyo Game Show. Let’s check out their links for Day One:
All those links, and not a single one devoted to the new King of Video Games. (Oh wait, that’s Todd.) Does literally “videogames.com” not care about the person being ordained “Video Game Player of the Century” right before their very eyes?
Heck, they apparently didn’t even think the new Pac-Man game was worth a write-up. It’s not like they were thumbing their noses at Namco. There you see coverage of Ridge Racer and Dragon Valor, as well as advance previews of Tekken Tag Tournament:
GameSpot’s at-length write-up on TGS Day One doesn’t bode any better for our Condiment King:
You heard it, folks. Biohazard: Code Veronica was a big draw. Enix and Square also had “hot booths”. Odd, no mention of Namco.
Oh, but it gets worse! Check out this bit from their Day Three coverage:
Hahahaha! It’s like they knew!! It’s as if they deliberately left that there, knowing we’d find it 20 years later. Either that, or Dwayne is flying around in his DeLorean planting all this fake evidence throughout the timeline again.
Someone will argue that since this was an industry expo, media coverage will be focused on new games releases, and not sideshows. However, this argument is not reflected in the wide array of covered topics seen above. It’s not as if GameSpot was a print magazine pressed for space, nor does it seem they had any standards of what they wouldn’t write about in their search for website clicks:
It’s also not like GameSpot had some irrational hatred of Pac-Man. On Monday, September 20, they reported on a short web video released by Namco of a dancing Pac-Man (likely a play on the then-popular “Dancing Baby” animation) [S69]:
Are we ever going to see any coverage of this monumental milestone in video gaming history!? We’re talking about the coronation of at that point the greatest single video game player who ever lived, are we not?
The December 1999 issue of the Official Playstation Magazine in the UK also didn’t seem to take as much interest in our Sultan of Seasoning as they did in the Namco dancers:
https://archive.org/details/opm052/page/n11/mode/2up
They even had a four-page feature dedicated to cosplay at TGS.
I mean, sure, pretty girls are pretty girls. But not even a mention of our Titan of Tabasco? Just in a corner somewhere?
The November 1999 issue of the Australian edition of the Official Playstation Magazine doesn’t fare any better for Colonel Mustard. Of course, like everyone, they were excited about upcoming Playstation 2 games:
On the opposite page, we find their synopsis
Namco had a strong presence at the show, and had one of the most entertaining musical shows with their “Happy Birthday Pac-Man” dancing extravaganza. Show-goers were keen to play Pac-Man World and action role-player Dragon Valor, which is looking extremely promising.
Glad they didn’t miss that dancing extravaganza!
Along with that recap, we had this photo of the plain clothes dancers, which was captioned “The hilariously cheesy ‘Happy Birthday Pac-Man’ stage show”:
We even get another photo of Namco dancers slacking off (this time, playing Namco game Rescue Shot), but still no sighting of ol’ Sergeant Pepper:
The Autumn ’99 Tokyo Game Show also garnered American newspaper coverage via the Associated Press, from Orlando, Florida all the way to Centralia, Washington. Again, lots of attention on Sega Dreamcast and Sony Playstation 2. But no mention of anything Namco:
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/235564654/
https://newspaperarchive.com/centralia-chronicle-sep-18-1999-p-17/
Going back to the land down under, the Sydney Morning Herald printed original coverage from TGS in early October, including a nod to Namco. But not only are we missing a glimpse of Señor Spice, they didn’t even seem particularly impressed in the big Pac-Man celebration at all:
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/119675411/
Night is about to fall, so we’ll have to resume our search for our missing “Video Game Player of the Century” later. That seems like the kind of thing you wouldn’t miss. We know he was there. We just have to find him!
HEY JEALOUSY
In all seriousness, while Billy was clearly not a star of the show, and while he makes zero appearances in the above sources during TGS coverage, he does show up in some media reporting for the event, which will be a topic for “Dot Seven”. However, even the coverage that does mention him doesn’t quite live up to his outlandish stories of being the center of everyone’s attention in Japan. Here he is in a clip from a Q&A at the Louisville Arcade Expo in 2016 (at 25:30):
There was probably a hundred thousand people at the Tokyo Game Show. It was me and two other Americans, and that was it. And I walk around, and I’m walking with people this big. And as I walk… I didn’t have any security, nothin’. It was crazy… and the crowd would just part. I felt like I was Hulk Hogan walking through the ring or somethin’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwVsWyuJIvI
And with Retro Gaming Radio at CGE 2003 (published in ’04), at about 13:30:
And so he asked me to hold my hand up, and I hold it up, and I’m giving the thumbs up. And she says… and the translator says “No no, hold your hand up.” So I put my hand up like this. And what he’s saying is “This is the hand that did the perfect game.” And I’ve got my hand up. And then, I’m standing there, and I thought there was a fire in the building, because there’s a… there’s a mad stampede to the… to the right side of the stage. And I says “What’s goin’ on?” And she says… she says “Oh, he’s telling everyone this is the hand that did the perfect game. Who would like to shake the hand that did the perfect game?”
https://archive.org/details/rgry6/07+Episode+2004-08+Part+02.mp3
At TG’s “Coronation Day” event at Funspot in January 2000, just four months after TGS, Billy told an elaborate story of being bombarded with gifts by everyone (starting at about 59:10) [S70]:
Yeah, they wanted to shake the hand that did the perfect game, and as I’m shaking hands with people and they’re walking by I’m asking the interpreter, you know, “What did that person say?” She says “Oh, that kid said he’s never gonna wash his hand again.” And next person, “What that guy…” and she says “Oh, that guy said now he has the magic touch, he’s going to go do a perfect game.” Yeah, it was so monotonous and the line was so long, finally they just cut the line off. Constantly as people walked past me, they handed me gifts. I guess that’s a Japanese custom. I was taking them and handing them to the person who was helping me next to me as fast as people were walking, and she was putting them in a box. It was so much I couldn’t take it. They had to ship it to me.
https://archive.org/details/bit01112000
And in other footage from the 2016 Q&A, Billy told a similar story, adding that multiple people asked him to sign their clothing (at about 8:40):
Everywhere I went, I guess part of Japanese customs, they were giving me gifts, and they were asking me to sign stuff. I had guys that were in dress shirts, and said “Will you sign my suit?” One guy had me sign his actual suit coat. Somebody had me sign a bathrobe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5XGZXzkwhg
Billy often complains about being the subject of others’ jealousy, in a way similar to how a dysfunctional person might “complain” about having too much money, or being too good at something. Recall his words from the Mark and Me podcast (at 26:30):
And I realized how important that was, when I was on stage in Japan, and afterwards I sat in the executive offices with Masaya Nakamura. What I took away from the conversation is, the responsibility that was put upon me, that was put on my shoulders, simply cuz I was in the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time depending how you look at it, was that I had to take a position, an ambassador type position, to push, to advocate, to promote, and to drive forward the hobby of competitive gaming.
https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/markandme/episodes/2019-02-25T10_00_00-08_00
“Wrong place at the wrong time.” Meeting Masaya Nakamura is such a burden!
And yet, for all his hollow complaints, his tall tales seem to be tailor-made attempts to invoke that sort of jealousy in others. (That is, if you believe any of these stories to be true, which you have every reason not to.) The claimed experience itself was somehow not enough to satisfy him. He needs your acknowledgment, too.
JUST BUSINESS
Let’s go back to a boilerplate Billy story about his appearance at Tokyo Game Show, this time from his Guinness reinstatement video, at about 1:50:
That spirit, that passion to want to be the best took me throughout North America, took me to Europe, took me to Asia, where in 1999, after having performed history’s first Perfect Pac-Man, on stage at the Tokyo Game Show in front of 70,000 people Masaya Nakamura presented me the Video Game Player of the Century Award.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2x6ZrWUkWo
We’ve established that Billy was not on any sort of central stage, just the stage at the Namco booth in “Hall 6”. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a main stage! Here we have the itinerary of the “event stage”, with no acknowledgment of our newly coronated Electronic Entertainment Poobah of the Centenary [GT] [S71]:
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/99autumn/press/press08.html
But this brings us to our next point. Do you notice anything different about Friday the 17th compared to Saturday and Sunday?
September the 17th, Tokyo Game Show’s “Business Day”, was not open to the public. [S72] It was all just media and industry cats roaming around. That’s the day Namco slotted Billy in for his big appearance.
Which honestly makes sense. Why would a significant number of Japanese players and local attendees be expected to care about some tall drink of water from America who got a high score on a 19-year-old video game? Hosting Billy at their arcade is one thing, as it allows for closer interaction, and to see a game being played. (And it doesn’t look like he was being overrun there either, no matter what he says.) But why would Namco think Billy would be a big draw at their version of E3, versus the first public reveal of the Playstation 2? The answer is, they knew he wouldn’t. It was a nice photo-op, which only needed to be captured by the photographers.
Billy often references the presence of 70,000 spectators for his appearance (or in the Louisville panel quoted earlier, a hundred thousand). Well, here are Autumn ’99 Tokyo Game Show’s attendance figures:
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/99autumn/english/index.html
There couldn’t have been 70,000 people watching Billy on the Namco stage on Friday if literally everyone who had been in the building at any point during that day were all watching him, and they all spontaneously multiplied into three. There weren’t even 70,000 people there on general admission day on Saturday (again, over the course of the entire day). Sunday could have gotten there, if you had literally every adult and almost half the children from the whole day all stuffed in front of the small Namco stage watching this one guy.
The way Billy describes it, he would have you think he was the center of attention in a coliseum. 70,000 people is beyond capacity for over half the home stadiums in the National Football League. The Chicago Bears could sell out a home game, and still come almost 10,000 short:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_National_Football_League_stadiums
In classic Billy fashion, the way he tells the story, he wants you to think he was the main attraction. “Me, me, me.” Every story has to be amplified, every number has to be stretched beyond reason. (And yet, we are to believe he does not do the same with his gaming scores.)
Again, you would think a trip to Japan and an opportunity to meet Masaya Nakamura would be sweet enough, but it seems the truth (that he was but one character in a show much bigger than him) was never good enough.
PLAYING THE GAME
We’ll continue with more TGS coverage in “Dot Seven”. But for now, I’d like to emphasize something, in case it was not made clear already. From Namco’s perspective, their focus was on marketing their new game – the 3D platformer with “20th anniversary” slapped on. That’s what Tokyo Game Show is there for: showing off their new games!
In drafting up this report, I was originally going to highlight the fact that 1999 was not actually Pac-Man’s 20th anniversary (with the idea being that the “anniversary” fanfare was pushed up a year to coincide with the new game’s release). Work began on the original arcade game in May of 1979, but anniversaries are typically traced back to release date. After a brief trial run in May 1980, the game was released as “Puck-Man” in Japan in July, and then as “Pac-Man” in North America that December. (I’ll let you figure out why they didn’t want American arcade cabinets emblazoned with the name “Puck-Man”.) The actual 20th anniversary saw no Pac-Man promotion, or “Happy birthday” anything. At Spring 2000 Tokyo Game Show, the Namco dancers were back, but this time it was all about Tekken Tag Tournament [S73]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG527DVKfIU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK7TqS3R5vQ
However, the truth is a bit more complicated than that. It turns out, even Namco themselves couldn’t make up their minds what Pac-Man’s birthday was!
Going back to the Nours magazine feature linked above, there’s this very blatant declaration, which translates exactly to “Born on October 10, 1979”:
But wait! The previously linked email about Namco’s partnership with Hasbro says the fall of 2000 was Pac-Man’s 20th anniversary:
https://www.atariarchives.org/cfn/12/03/0062.php
Owing to Namco’s own indecision, there are references across the Internet to Pac-Man’s “birthday” being both October 10, 1979, and May 22, 1980. You can read more about this in today’s supplemental material, [S74] but the situation is probably best summed up by this 2007 Wired piece, originally titled “Oct. 10, 1979: Pac-Man Brings Gaming Into Pleistocene Era”. The authors received a correction from Namco themselves:
(So… Namco was planning a “25th anniversary” celebration… in 2008? Oh, never mind.)
I wonder if one of Billy’s savvy questions that befuddled Nakamura’s inner circle of elite gaming know-it-alls was “What year did Pac-Man come out?”
At any rate, I think it’s safe to say little can be inferred from Namco’s choice to celebrate Pac-Man’s “20th anniversary” in 1999, even if that did conveniently make their birthday celebrations coincide with the release of their new game. But regardless of whether it was the correct year, it was a year, and Namco was looking for some Pac-Man promotion. And Namco’s choice to bring Billy out to Japan very much did coincide with this new game’s release, with Billy’s stage appearance occurring during their overall Pac-Man birthday celebration.
There are plenty of reasons to think Billy’s appearance was strictly about boosting mentions and promotion of their new Pac-Man game. Surely, the suits and paper-pushers at Namco didn’t bring Billy Mitchell out to Japan just to flatter him and enshrine him on their nonexistent leaderboard. Remember, these are the same people who never cared to track high scores all those years. (“We just collect the quarters.”) They didn’t spend their valuable industry expo time suddenly caring about high score competitions. Nor did they bestow these sorts of honors onto other arcade high scorers for more difficult games, like Ms. Pac-Man. And they certainly didn’t grant him a certain award which had already been bestowed on him by his friend Walter Day. (More on that award in our next installment.)
And yet, one can’t help but notice that the working relationship between Billy and Namco seems to have ended there, with Billy’s appearance in Japan, at least until much later after the principals from Billy’s 1999 trip had largely moved on. One might wonder if such a commemoration of a top score on their most famous game would have happened when Pac-Man was not on the docket. [S75]
Of course, we’ll never get a straight answer from Billy himself. But he does acknowledge the role the new Playstation game had in his fortuity. Talking with The Obsolete Gamer Show, Billy described the various circumstances which were in his favor, listing among them the fact that Pac-Man was celebrating both an anniversary and a console game release (at 56:10):
In 1999, when I did the perfect score, I did not put together… you know, all the energy that would happen. In other words, it just so happens that it’s about the 20th anniversary of Pac-Man. It just so happens that they’re comin’ out with the 20th anniversary of Pac-Man… obviously, you know, a home system. It just… It just so happens that I was in a race against the Canadian. And it just so happens that I did it on the Fourth of July weekend, and it just so happens that there was nothing significant that weekend and the story ran around the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfb_SBUh08o
If you’ve listened to Billy Mitchell interviews, you have no doubt heard him disparage new video games in favor of the classics. He does it so routinely, he’ll do it even when he thinks someone is asking him about a new game, when they’re actually asking about a classic re-release compilation:
https://web.archive.org/web/20011211122729/http://hub.ngenres.com/pacman_interview.html
And yet, Billy has a notable soft spot for Pac-Man World for Playstation. In the Back in Time webcast from January 2000, Billy was asked about how video games have changed. To answer that, Billy once again disparaged new games while talking up the inherent “intrigue” (his word) of the classics. But when the host asks him specifically whether he considers the new Pac-Man World to be more “style over substance”, we hear words you never thought you’d hear from Billy Mitchell about a new (at the time) home console 3-D platformer (starting at about 53:30):
Actually, I think Pac-Man World is an exception to the rule. It is a… It does have the classic version, which is very appealing to me, and people from my era. It does have a new, challenging 3-D maze, which is appealing to me because it’s new, and it is challenging. Yet it does have, what it calls its quest mode, or what I call the adventure mode, which is appealing to young people. That one is very appealing to me, but again, that is an exception to the rule. As a matter of fact, that’s one I’ll be playing, and that’s very much an exception to the rule.
https://archive.org/details/bit01112000
In fact, in late 1999, Billy expressed a desire to turn to home console competition, with Pac-Man World as the catalyst:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161223041234/https://www.wired.com/1999/11/pac-rat-2/
Somehow, I have a hard time seeing Billy Mitchell on a Playstation controller, jumping around Ghost Island and rescuing his 3-D friends.
One possibility is that Billy’s appearance was indeed intended as direct promotion, a way to generate more mentions about Pac-Man in general and their new game in particular, and that it was ultimately a flop in that regard. It’s not like it would have been a terrible gamble at the time. The Twin Galaxies story did show an impressive ability to make media rounds that summer, appearing in newspaper after newspaper, week after week. And surely, Billy’s accommodations didn’t break the bank, no more than it does to fly their American executives to Japan for TGS.
While this brief invitation was a drop in the bucket for Namco, it ended up being far more valuable to its recipient. As my research colleague remarked:
Namco rolled the dice with no luck. They were content to leave it at that. Pac-Man had its 5 mins of fame in the spotlight again and they were ready to move on to where the big money was – The times were a changing. Mitchell however can’t just leave it at that.
And who knows, maybe someone successfully sold Namco USA on the idea that Billy Mitchell (who Walter Day declared “Player of the Century” in August) was a big deal among gamers, and that this “perfect score” tie-in would be a big moneymaker for them. I’m sure a certain “Game of the Century” award for Namco didn’t hurt, either.
We’re about halfway through chatting about Billy at the Tokyo Game Show. Join us next installment, when we talk a little more about Masaya Nakamura, see actual photos of Billy at TGS, discuss a bunch of made up titles, and follow along with something I call “The Transference.”
I’ve always wondered who actually thought up the verbiage “Player of the Century”, especially considering that classic arcade video gaming had only been around through but a fraction of the 1900’s.
Not player of the year, or even decade, but century.
And to put it a bit more into perspective, he basically scored 90 points more than Rick Fothergill had just a few short weeks beforehand. So…3,333,270 warrants a blurb in the Boston Phoenix and the Weirs Times. And 90 points higher warrants ALL of what was discussed above. For 90 more points. Stop the press !!
Fast forward two decades to the attempted and the over-hyped “Beyond Perfect” attempt at getting a whopping 60 or so points higher (again, Stop the Press !!) on the “reunion” machine…took the “Player of the Century” nearly ten entire days of on/off trying to actually pull it off. Unfortunately, no massive media hype this time…after all, it was only 60 more points, nothing more, nothing less.
Besides, considering that about a dozen gamers have since also achieved the so-called “Perfect Pacman”, it’s less of a “Holy Grail” achievement and instead is more appropriately a high profile checklist item of accomplishments for hardcore classic arcade players to attempt.
Can we get a TLDR on this?
For the moment, no, at least not from myself. I realize it’s a lot to read, and that a project like this won’t be for everyone. My hope is that summaries can come down the line, after the research is fully published. And of course, I encourage any interested parties to provide their own summaries, citing my work, if they so wish.
wire fraud
[ˈwī(ə)r frôd, fräd]
NOUN
US
financial fraud involving the use of telecommunications or information technology.
HMMMMMM…………………………. since the very synopsis of the “so-called” documentary was predicated on a premeditated fraud that makes it subject to the afore mentioned definition even before any MAME spliced games were played. TG knowingly and willfully conspires with film makers to commit a global fraud is easily proven…………the MAME issue is not even worth discussing beyond that. MAME is a Strawman/Red Herring argument at this point
Never mind TG willfully helped in the commission of a global fraud involving manipulation of who was given credit for the topic material, yes this has been adnited that the scoreboard was fraudulantly altered to give false info…………….we’re concirned if he cheated during playing the games in the fraudulant “documentaty” afterwards…..WTF!? I guarentee a lawyer is NOT going to see it that way.
TG had a duty as “official score keeps” to provide accurate historical info the film makers…………they obviously did not. TG’s lawyer is going to have a field day with the underlying circumstances before the “documentary” was even made. Lets not forget about the life rights checks involved with exploiting the stolen topic matter afterward shall we.
Walter C./Erstaz too bad you have no “historical researchers” to help you clarify this one. Does this mean if I just stare at the floor blindly with a stupified look on my face that I I can say I “researched” a given topic matter afterward?
Amazing how much and how valuble “history” can be erased when its not to the benifit of the people controling the purse strings.
Good thing Seth Gordon has people in the industry to cover this up. ( I know it will be) There’s plenty of movie money for everybody……………………….(except the people screwed over from the start)
I’m stating the current TG vs. Billy Mitchell lawsuit will be settled out of court in favor of Jace Hall. I stated 13 years ago KoK was a fake and involved cheating…..I was right………….given the material TGs lawyer has to work with , I will be right again.
[…] If you’ve time to kill, you can read the series here—parts one, two, three, four, five, and six are currently up—and judge for yourself. Fair warning: Each section is […]
Now do the one where the pro-gamers are using hacks while in tournaments to play call of duty, etc.
BTW, that shot of Roy in Guinness…in this case it wasn’t that Billy did not merit a pic, it was that Roy orchestrated things so that his was the only pic that would be printed.
Oh yes, the so-called “Beyond Perfect” Pacman score…David pointed out it’s not 60 more points, it’s 5060 more (must be another key).
3,333,360 just LOOKS “cool”…3,338,420 looks like “so what ?”…may as well be 3,339,580 or 3,338,790…all just “numbers” and nothing aesthetically pleasing about them like 9,999,975 or the like.
I got a laugh out of that Wonderpark image about Mitchell being from “Hollywood, USA”. Hollywood, Florida is not exactly Hollywood, California haha.
Debunking a high score? Go for it. Debunking every statement Billy has ever made, that seems more petty and gossipy than proof of anything, IMO. I came here for the facts, not the RASHOMON of Billys trip to Japan which has no impact on the truth.
Oh hey Robert, hows the art collection?
Rashomon…Billy’s Tokyo visit…kinda funny.
Then you know the whole premise that was central to the film: The “unreliability” of witnesses, like the “unreliability” of Billy as a truth-teller around his various claims associated with his visit to Tokyo. You’d think that establishing the veracity or truthfulness of any claims Billy has passed on as “fact” since 1999 would be important for someone who “came here for the facts”…
link
essay introduction essay title
how does motrin reduce fever https://ibuprofenusca.com/
You really should consider changing the Lost In Translation section, or at least all the times you harp on the phrase “We never thought scores like this possible.” Whatever other times Billy might have been putting poor grammar in the mouths of his Japanese hosts, that phrase in particular is 100% standard, grammatical English. If you don’t believe me, Google a phrase like “We never thought this possible,” or “We never thought something like this possible,” and you will find plenty of examples from professional sites by fluent English speakers.
Maybe leaving out the “were” is old-fashioned or formal, but it is certainly not a caricature of ignorant foreigners. Treating it as if it were is only going to detract from all your valid points, at least for people like me who spend a lot of time with old-fashioned and formal writing.
Fortunately, all those many, many other points, and your otherwise excellent arguments, are more than enough to keep this grammar nazi convinced! I’m very glad I saw your YouTube video about this case, and found myself down this particular rabbit hole. And that paraphrased One True Version of the legendary boardroom story had me rolling on the floor!