Last October, Billy Mitchell did something very, very stupid. So, of course, we’re here to discuss it.
While embroiling himself in losing lawsuits, Billy went to the Music City Multi-Con in Lebanon, Tennessee, to do what he intended to be a public performance of a perfect score on Pac-Man (on the game’s “jumper” revision). He failed in his attempt, coming 5,090 points short. Which is okay. There are few people so good at Pac-Man that they can just pound out a perfect score on demand, and it’s okay if Billy isn’t one of them. But what isn’t okay is that Billy lied to the crowd, and to the media, and claimed that it was indeed a successful perfect score after all. The crowd trusted the event’s special guest, since he was being presented as an authority on the subject, and thus it was reported (albeit briefly) that Billy had graced this Tennessee event with a perfect score on Pac-Man.
Unfortunately for Billy, this isn’t the 1980s anymore, and people can actually record and document Billy’s lies. While some poor, lost souls have attempted to run interference for Billy on this matter, the evidence is clear as day. Today, we’re treating you to an entire hour-long video going over all the evidence on Billy Mitchell’s “Music City Con”, as well as his whole so-called “Road to Redemption” leading up to it.
What follows is the video script, for easy searching, interspersed with additional material. Everything that’s not part of the video’s spoken narration is separated in block quotes. This includes links to sources, relevant on-screen text, and a few additional notes.
Howdy everyone! This is ersatz_cats, or just Walter if your prefer. Last month, Karl Jobst did a TREMENDOUS video about various recent developments in the ongoing saga of video game cheater Billy Mitchell.
lol Yes, I said “last month”, even though Karl’s video was in April. I recorded the audio, and then it took me longer than I expected to put this all together.
Among these developments was a claim that BILLY [gasp]… had LIED [gasp]… about a video game score, specifically at the Music City Multi-Con, in Lebanon, Tennessee, on October 31st of last year. In short, at the event, Billy claimed he had just gotten a perfect score on Pac-Man in front of a live audience, when in fact, he had achieved no such thing.
Now, despite the evidence Karl provided in his video, I’ve seen a few special individuals on social media claim that this is NOT what happened at all, that they were THERE, and that Billy was CLEAR with EVERYONE that this was NOT a perfect score.
Really, it was just one guy. I’m not going to give him a platform, because he is a liar.
I know, it’s pretty shocking that someone would lie on the Internet like that. But really, I’d like to thank these people, because without them, I probably would have just left the matter alone.
Obviously I’d be citing this incident in relation to Billy’s other fraudulent gaming claims and his lawsuits filled with lies. I just wouldn’t have made a whole-ass video about it.
Sure, Billy lied. Also, water is wet, and dogs bark a lot. But since someone out there might see those competing accounts, from people claiming to have witnessed the situation first-hand, and since the EVIDENCE might otherwise become forgotten or lost to time, I decided it’s important to put everything in one place, where everyone can see it. And rather than my usual platform of 10,000 word screeds, I thought it might be fun to try my hand at an actual narrated video this time.
So join me, as we take another look at what I call “The Music City Con”.
If you want to skip ahead to just the stuff about Music City, I’ll put a timestamp link in the description. Otherwise, stick around, and we’ll discuss the series of events leading up to it.
Before I continue, I do wish to make a technical note that SOME of the materials I’ll be referencing belong to Billy, and while fair use for commentary IS a thing, ostensibly even on YouTube, Billy Mitchell is a petty man, and he has filed copyright strikes for the use of such material before. So I’m choosing to just avoid that altogether. If he really wants to be known as the guy who doesn’t want anyone to see the evidence, I will let him wear that mantle. None of his footage is essential to what I’ll be talking about today.
Note: Literally, as I was wrapping up this project, Billy filed another copyright strike against another channel. Apparently, he thinks he’s the copyright owner of his friend Chris Ayra’s perfect score tape? Dude definitely does not want you to see stuff for yourself.
Also, since I will be talking about Billy Mitchell and about Pac-Man, I should tell you all about two written works of mine. One of them is “The Evidence against Billy Mitchell”. Have any questions about those cheated Donkey Kong scores? Want to know what a girder finger is? Want to hear about that fake board swap again? Or that old MTV interview? You don’t need to borrow Dwayne Richard’s time machine. You’ll find it all at our website, perfectpacman.com, which funny enough, used to be Billy’s website. But that’s a long story, and I wouldn’t want to BORE you with the details.
The other written work I’d recommend is a bit longer, but I think it’s well worth the read. It’s a nine-part series called “The Video Game Fraud of the Century”. That presentation was the result of a ton of research into Billy’s claimed perfect score of Pac-Man in 1999, his “Player of the Century” award, which he got from Walter Day, and his trip to the Tokyo Game Show. Spoiler: Billy Mitchell LIES a LOT. That dude lies like McDonald’s does fries. That’s also available at perfectpacman.com, as are links to the sources for this video. Check it out. We don’t even have ads! This isn’t even a commercial plug. I just think, if you like this video, you will find that project VERY interesting.
[PAUSE NOISE]
Hey, future ersatz here. After recording most of the audio for this, I wrote an update to the Billy Mitchell / Twin Galaxies legal battle. Billy’s original lawyer bailed on his law firm, and his replacements recently took a big fat L. In fact, they’re probably wondering if they’re actually going to get paid for any of this. You can find that update at perfectpacman.com as well. Okay, back to the show.
[UNPAUSE NOISE]
So first thing’s first, we’re going to have to explain what we mean when we say a “perfect score” of original Pac-Man.
I prefer to use the term “perfect score” rather than “perfect game”, as “perfect game” can infer flawless play. In a perfect score of Pac-Man, you can make a limitless number of mistakes, as long as those mistakes don’t cost you points.
Basically, it means eating every little dot, every power pellet, every blue ghost, and every fruit for 255 levels, THEN getting the limited points available on the game’s kill screen, also known as the “split screen”, which we’ll get to in a moment.
Yes, bells and keys are “fruit” now. Don’t @ me.
Now, you might say “Geez, that sounds insane! You’ve gotta get all four blue ghosts off each power pellet? And there are four power pellets on each board!? And there are 255 boards!? That’s like four thousand ghosts!!” Well, no, not quite that many. On original Pac-Man, the ghosts only turn blue for seventeen boards. And on some of those boards, the “blue time”, as they call it, lasts a little while, so you can take those somewhat casually.
The most difficult boards are the “one second” boards, as they call them, where the ghosts’ blue time only lasts a single second. There are six of those one second boards. For those, you have to either use a pre-arranged pattern, or one of various clumping techniques, where you can manipulate the ghosts into a single pile and lead them to the power pellet to get them all at once. These usually make use of the fact that the ghosts slow down in the side tunnel while Pac-Man does not.
And there are other cool tricks you can do, to help you PERFECT your score, or just for extra swag. You can run patterns where Pac-Man goes right through the ghosts, due to poor collision detection.
Ghosts can never make these turns, unless they’re turned blue, in which case their turns are pseudo-random.
There are turns that the ghosts can’t make, allowing you an easy escape when you need it.
You can even park Pac-Man in certain hiding spots, in some cases indefinitely, just in case maybe you’re feeling sleepy and you want to pick up your game the next morning.
This is just one of many ninth key patterns available.
At any rate, once you’re at board 21, which people call the “ninth key”, the ghost speed stays the same for the rest of the game. So from there on, you can use the same pre-arranged pattern on each board, to collect all the dots and keys, just running this one pattern over and over for three hours or so, all the way to the split screen.
The Japanese and U.S. versions have slightly different garbled graphics on the split screen. This example is from the Japanese version.
For those who don’t know, on board 256, the byte which tracks game levels rolls over, going from 255 to 0. And thus, the game tries to DRAW board zero. The game would actually succeed in doing so, if not for the little algorithm that draws your fruits in the corner. Instead of drawing seven of them, it tries to draw 256 of them, which end up appearing as computer garbage overwriting about 52% of the board on the right side. You cannot pass this board, because you can’t eat enough dots to register a board completion. You can only eat enough to make one key appear, and alllmost enough to make the second one appear too. On original Pac-Man, THIS is the end of your game.
The game requires that 244 dots be eaten to advance to the next board. The four power pellets count as dots toward that total.
As a quick note, there seems to be a phenomenon of casual players seeing this screen, and thinking that it IS the perfect score, that you’ve BROKEN the game, you made all the crazy stuff appear, and therefore, you did the cool special thing. And the screen does look really weird. But this is just what happens when you reach board 256, whether you minimized or maximized your points or whatever. On the original game, it always happens here, no matter what. Will the FACT that casual observers mistake the split screen for a perfect score be relevant later? Hmmmm, there’s a chance.
Most of these dots appear discolored or otherwise invisible.
As far as doing an actual perfect score, the split screen is a little complicated, in that there are actually nine dots among the computer garbage which regenerate for each of your lives. What this means is, under today’s definition of a perfect score, you have to carry all your spare lives to the final screen, so you can effectively cash them in for maximum points.
Actually playing the split screen is fairly simple, though. Just park your Pac-Man in the bottom right corner, facing down, near the letters “BC”, which of course stand for “Billy Cheated”. Then, watch as three of the ghosts trap themselves in an inescapable tunnel. You don’t even have to do anything more, just sit there, and they neutralize themselves. This gives you almost complete freedom to collect all those hidden dots. You do have to watch out for Clyde still, but he’s not much of a threat anywhere except the bottom left corner, which happens to be his home. And even then, if you have six lives, you’ll have six chances to get those regular dots near him.
Clyde is the orange one.
As a quick bit of history, the first documented perfect score on Pac-Man occurred on September 6, 1982, by Bill Bastable of New Jersey. The score was acknowledged with a personalized letter from Bally-Midway, the American manufacturers of the game, although to be fair, game companies mostly couldn’t tell you what the top scores in their games actually are, typically relying on the players themselves for that sort of expertise. But Bastable’s score WAS real, and he repeated the feat a few times in the following months. This was before players discovered all the hidden dots on the split screen, and in an era when the rules weren’t really clear about what was in or out of bounds.
From the Twin Galaxies book of records published in 1998.
Over time, Twin Galaxies founder Walter Day was happy to craft those rules to the benefit of whichever player he happened to favor at any given time, giving Billy an opportunity to be the, air quotes, “FIRST” to do a perfect score seventeen years later, for a claimed score which, it turns out, he may not have even actually finished. We’ll get back to that a bit later, wink wink.
For another example of changing rules:
I know this is a lot to throw at you, but the important takeaway in all of this is that there are actually different perfect scores on Pac-Man, depending on which platform you’re playing, which settings you have for the game, and at least historically, whether you’re going for the later-discovered hidden dots. Usually today, when someone refers to a perfect score of Pac-Man, they’re talking about the original arcade game, with the maximum 6 lives for a final score of 3,333,360.
But you can play on the factory default settings, which only grant four lives, for a perfect score of 3,333,180.
If you WANTED, you could even use the game’s dip switches to set the game to only one life with no bonus, which would allow for a perfect score of 3,332,910.
Or maybe you don’t have access to the switches, and you can only play at whatever number of lives the machine happens to be set to. That’s fine. There are also variations of the original game, which can have their own maximum scores. And it just so happens we’ll be talking about two of those variations later. But as far as perfect score variants go, the only requirement is that the game has to have a final screen, like the original does, otherwise you could just keep playing and accumulating points forever.
Some re-releases of Pac-Man have corrected the split screen flaw, allowing you to play indefinitely.
Okay. With all of that out of the way, let’s talk Billy Mitchell. I’m going to assume you know about Billy’s overall backstory, The King of Kong and all that, so I’m going to skip ahead to the summer of 2018. Billy’s scores had just been removed from Twin Galaxies and from Guinness World Records, after it was proven his Donkey Kong score tapes could not have been produced on an original unmodified arcade machine, as Billy had always claimed. In response, Billy appeared at that year’s Southern-Fried Gaming Expo to announce the beginning of his “Road to Redemption” tour. Obviously this “Road to Redemption” didn’t involve, you know, actually apologizing for cheating and for lying to people for all those years. Instead, Billy told a bunch more lies, waved around a stack of secret papers, called Jace Hall silly names, and smacked his lips a lot.
It’s ironic to think though, if Billy had just confessed there, in 2018, most people would have forgiven him by now. He wouldn’t have had to put together all these legal threats, and wouldn’t have had to pile on a bunch more lies to make up for the old ones. He wouldn’t be $100,000 deep in losing lawsuits on two different continents, and he wouldn’t be getting sued for SIX MILLION DOLLARS!?!?!?
Dude, WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?!?
What are you doing!?!?
All of these are lies.
You know as well as I do that your sworn testimony is full of LIES.
Don’t you have a family? And a business?
Next Halloween, I’m gonna go as Billy Mitchell. I’m not gonna wear a suit, or a tie, or a wig, or any of that stuff. My entire COSTUME will just be me making a series of exceedingly poor life choices.
So… getting back to this “Road to Redemption”, that SFGE panel was where Billy announced his intention to redo the contested Donkey Kong scores, as if doing so would make everyone forget about the evidence, or something.
“The scores outside of Donkey Kong, don’t worry about a bit. The other ones, I’ll do. Not only will I do ’em, I’m gonna do the exact score… exact score. And just let the game die. ‘You mean, you’re not gonna go higher even if you can?’ No. ‘Why?’ Cuz I’m Billy Mitchell.” – Billy Mitchell, 2018 SFGE
The Music City Con is actually just the latest in this series of attempts by Billy to interact positively with the public and to show that, perhaps, he does actually have some talent at some of these games he cheated at. Let’s take a look at how well this campaign has gone for him so far.
First up, after some practice, Billy did two Donkey Kong scores of exactly one million points. That’s nice, except of course that it doesn’t prove anything. Playing Donkey Kong in 2018 does nothing to answer the question of whether Billy cheated at Donkey Kong in 2010. But to make matters worse, Billy went around LYING and saying he did THREE such scores in a week instead of two.
“When the question came up last July, and we started streaming on Twitch, I did a million points three times in a single week.” – Billy, Retropalooza, October 2019 (at timestamp 23:00)
“Well, when my son set up Twitch, in the first month, I hit three one million point scores within one week, something that people said I never did. I did three in a week.” – Billy, SFGE interview, July 2020 (at timestamp 6:30)
His stream on August 3rd of that year even concluded with him saying, quote, “Sorry we didn’t do our third million”, endquote. And then he just didn’t get back to it. Again, I would show you the clip, but Billy Mitchell hates evidence.
Note: In a June 2020 interview with RCadeRadio (at timestamp 58:00), Billy introduced the idea that his “third” million was actually his first, achieved offline just before he started streaming on Twitch. There are a few problems with this story, including that he was streaming several nights prior to his first streamed million. However, those nights were not consecutive, so I suppose we are to believe this happened on his off night. While I can’t strictly prove he didn’t get a secret million point score while no one was looking, Billy loves to tell this story in a way to lead people to believe this secret million was done on stream. In addition to the above quotes, see also the following quote from Billy’s 2020 interview with SFGE (at timestamp 8:30):
“Once again, I like to… because it was in a public venue. Because I made this commitment to myself that, each time I approach a score, and I’m at home on Twitch, I would just kill it at a million, because I like significant things to be done in, you know, in a public venue.”
And also, as stated, Billy ended his stream on August 3rd saying “Sorry we didn’t do our third million.”
Truly, I’m not sure why Billy would even lie about that. Two scores of a million on Donkey Kong? That’s already a solid outing, at least for a non-1.1 million player like himself. Is it some weird game where he thinks if he lies and says it was three, it’ll compel people like me to go around reporting that he hit a million twice? Because dude, I’m not afraid of the truth, and if Billy Mitchell WANTS me to call him a lying sack of shit, I am more than willing to do so. My guess is, he had his heart set on getting three, and he just can’t admit even to himself that he failed at something he wanted. He may have even convinced himself on some level that his fantasy really did happen. But really, who even knows with this guy?
Billy continued streaming Donkey Kong on Twitch that year. A couple weeks later, on August 16, he did a score of 1,047,500, and on November 23, he did a score of 1,050,100. But of course, he couldn’t help but lie about that, too.
“Then I went to a major event in Indianapolis, and I… matched the high score I had, that they were cryin’ about, and I killed it on the high score. I didn’t even go higher. Just to be arrogant, you know. Then I went to another event, and I got another score that they were questioning, and I killed it at that score, I could’ve went higher, just to be arrogant.” – Billy, Retropalooza, October 2019 (at timestamp 23:10)
“Like I said, I started streaming, and I knocked out the million point scores like that easy, and then I hit the other scores, you know, I hit ’em like exactly on the head. And I thought “Well, that takes care of that.” – Billy, RCadeRadio interview, June 2020 (at timestamp 1:37:10)
“Then, at a live event, I hit an exact score and killed it, another live event I hit an exact score and killed it.” – Billy, SFGE interview, July 2020 (at timestamp 6:40)
Specifically, he has said many times, in many interviews, that he showed up his detractors by hitting the EXACT scores that were contested in the score dispute. The problem, of course, is that objective reality disagrees with him, yet again.
He overshot the lowest score by 300 points due to a stray fireball, then he fell 100 short of the middle score due to an untimely death. In reality, he just sort of got within the range of those old scores, on his last life, way behind the score pace from his cheated tapes. And he relies on people not understanding any of that, and looking only at his final score, which, oh yeah, he had to lie about anyway.
“So I went there, and I’m playing, and there it is I’m pounding away, and I said to somebody, I go ‘Don’t let me go over a million-47-thousand.’ ‘Why not? You got all these extra guys? And extra boards?’ I go ‘No no, promise.’ ‘Okay, okay.’ And she says uh… she’s calling the scores as we get close. And I get a million-47, [makes noise] and I killed it. And it was ‘What are you doing?’ Because I killed it on that exact score, even though there’s, you know, points to be made, men to be had, boards, and I killed it because… because I wanted to be arrogant. And I was.” – Billy, The Lab interview, October 2020 (at timestamp 34:30)
The truth: Billy went to his last life at 790k, so he had no “extra guys”. A stray fireball forced him to end the final rivet board early, advancing him to the kill screen. So there weren’t any “extra boards” either. Also, he missed his target. Also, he’s a liar.
In one interview, he even gave this elaborate description of a conversation he claims to have had with someone during his game in August. Except… he uploaded that stream to YouTube? And you can just watch it? And you can see that none of this bullshit ever happens? [sigh] Oh, Billy.
He continued streaming Donkey Kong for months, until July 2019, when he set his sights on Pac-Man. Streaming live from Funspot in New Hampshire, he sought to do a new perfect score on July 3, which was the 20th anniversary of the day he claims to have gotten his first perfect score back in 1999.
July 3rd went by, no perfect score. July 4th went by, no perfect score. But hey, he got it on July 5th, which honestly is close enough. It’s not like there are better players who can hit perfect scores on demand at any time.
SPOILER: There totally are.
A month later, Billy traveled to Australia to play, not in the Kong Off, which is the standard Donkey Kong tournament series, but in the Australian Kong Off, despite, you know, not being Australian. None of the top 25 players in the world were there, which was fortunate for Billy. No McCurdy, no Lakeman, no Copeland, no Saglio. There were some, ahem, REPORTS that Billy didn’t play by the RULES. SOME might even go as far as to say he CHEATED, but the organizers who PAID for his flight out there didn’t disqualify him, and in the end he won the top spot, which is where he got that belt he loves to show off. I’m sure that, after spending his life evading top competitions and making up stories about hitting world records in front of his mortgage broker friends, it must feel pretty good to actually have an actual trophy from an actual competition.
Billy did occasionally show up for competitions, such as the early Funspot tournaments and Kong Offs, but historically always performed poorly at those.
Billy kept on the Donkey Kong grind on Twitch, even through filing his legal threats and lawsuits in early 2020. It was during this time that he floated the idea that he would attempt a world record on Ms. Pac-Man. Without getting too deep into it, the Ms. Pac-Man game was given a few modifications to thwart the continuous motion patterns that defeated the original Pac-Man. What this means is, one has to play using freehand grouping techniques if they want to maximize points from ghosts. But more importantly, there are major RNG elements not present in original Pac-Man. After a certain level, the fruits are random, with the 5,000 point bananas being the most favorable. Also, when you reach Ms. Pac-Man’s kill screen, the game can randomly give you as many as eight extra boards. Thus, the world record really can come down to who gets the best RNG on a given run. What I’m getting at is, this declaration is actually majorly suss coming from someone who has NOT ONLY lied and cheated, but has gone so far as to produce ENTIRE FAKE TAPES to substantiate BOGUS high score claims. Nothing has come of this declaration yet, but who knows, maybe Billy’s toadies just haven’t found the version of MAME that looks like arcade yet.
Moving ahead a few months, on May 26, 2020 Steve Wiebe, the original King of Kong, showed up on the Twin Galaxies website, announcing his intention to take another shot at a new high score. Four weeks later, Wiebe had reached a new personal benchmark, with a score of 1,106,200, which was his first time breaking the 1.1 million mark. Wiebe was the 21st player to reach that milestone. Billy must have felt a little… jealous?… because on his stream three days later, he tried REALLY hard, and he notched a new personal best as well.
Now, you might have noticed earlier that Billy had three contested Donkey Kong scores, right? And that he kinda got close to the bottom one, then kinda got close to the middle one, and then… just didn’t bother trying to match the third one? Well, he didn’t bother trying to match it here, either. When he finally got the opportunity, he just zoomed right past it, eventually landing at 1,092,100. Yes, that’s right. In less than a month, Steve Wiebe nailed a 1.1 million score, which Mr. Mullet couldn’t do in two years of streaming, and still has not done in any sort of public venue.
I should probably specify “in any sort of public venue”, because otherwise he’ll say he did one in private, he’ll get his friends to claim they witnessed it, then he’ll sue me for defamation for suggesting otherwise.
As I said before, the score pace on each of these Twitch scores is still well behind Billy’s two highest cheated tapes. The easiest way to compare them is to see what score Billy was at when he reached level 21. As you can see, his cheated scores were quite an exaggeration of what he has actually shown himself to be capable of. But again, there’s no need for him to actually match his bogus tapes, when he can just lie and say that he did, and some people will still choose to take him at his word.
So we’ve looked at a few examples now of Billy misrepresenting scores to the public, either by lying about the actual scores themselves, or at least misrepresenting their significance. But we have one more stunt to cover before we get to the Music City Con, and that is Billy’s so-called “beyond perfect” score on Pac-Man in November of 2020. Better get comfortable folks, because you’re gonna be here a while.
Every year, Guinness announces a “Guinness World Records Day”. It’s kind of like one of those oddball holidays you see in trivia books, like “Stupid Haircut Day” or “Pass Emulation Off As Arcade Day”. I’m sure that’s in there somewhere. Obviously this is a promotional vehicle for Guinness, but since Guinness and Billy were back in good graces by this point, Billy used the opportunity to attempt something which, so he claimed, no one had ever done before. Billy streamed several hours that day from Galloping Ghost arcade near Chicago, who rolled out the red carpet for their special guest.
BTW, “Namco” wasn’t there, lol. It was the guy who managed the “Pac-Man Entertainment” restaurant near Chicago. That restaurant is now called Enterrium, and is completely disassociated with Namco, but the same guy still manages there.
Billy was cryptic about what exactly he was trying to achieve, simply playing Pac-Man on the “20 Year Reunion” cabinet, released in 2000. This machine lets you choose between Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga, however, if you execute a variation of the famous Contra code, you can also play original Pac-Man, as sort of a bonus feature.
That code is up, up, up, down, down, down, left, right, left, right, left
It didn’t take long for the community to figure out what he was up to. For whatever reason, the split screen on this version of Pac-Man has a tenth hidden dot. It’s doubtful this was intended. The original Pac-Man overwrote the board with random code, and since this version has slightly different random code, the results are a little different. At any rate, this extra dot allows a player to boost their score an additional 60 points. Not only that, those six extra dots cause the second key to appear, resulting in a higher perfect score of 3,338,420 when playing with six lives.
This is all fine, as long as you’re clear that you’re playing on a variant. But what made this stream peculiar were the between-game cutaways. Billy restarted his game eight times that day, and these were no short games! And almost every time Billy restarted, the feed would cut away to avoid showing the Reunion machine menu. In some cases, Billy would just physically stand in front of the camera, blocking the view, while someone else reinitialized Pac-Man for him. This led people to wonder if MAYBE Billy was hoping to trick the general gaming audience into believing he had found a way to exceed the known perfect score on the original game, rather than simply being up front about the fact that he was playing a known variant.
UNFORTUNATELY for Billy, he’s not as good at Pac-Man as he thinks he is. One day of failed attempts became two, which became three. And these weren’t short days, either! The first day, he streamed for over eleven hours! The third day, over ten hours! I’m reluctant to say just how many new game attempts this involved, because I feel like I probably missed a few.
Things got worse for Billy’s little publicity tour when a new challenger entered the battlefield. On Billy’s third day of attempts, the true reigning Pac-Man champion, David Race, fired up his stream opposite Billy’s. It just so happens that David and Billy have a little history together. You see, David kept trying to prove Billy’s innocence, much longer than most people. Eventually he realized, “Wow, this dude really has been lying to me the entire time.” David then turned over his materials to Twin Galaxies for their legal defense, so Billy started spewing a bunch of slander about David.
The best part was… actually, hold up. We’re gonna detour for a bit, because this is too good to gloss over. In April 2018, during the Twin Galaxies score dispute, Billy called David Race on the phone to tell him about his MASTER PLAN. He was going to record a NEW game of Donkey Kong, then try to make it look like it was one of his missing tapes, then he would EXPOSE all the HATERS when it was revealed to be a new score done on arcade, and not an old score on MAME. This plan was so hilariously dumb for so many reasons. People in the dispute would have immediately sussed out that it was arcade and not MAME, since they were using actual science and not witness statements from their friends. They also would have compared this game to the limited footage we have from the missing tape and seen, no, this isn’t the same game at all. Also, why would Billy want to be known as the guy who plants fake evidence to cover up for his old fake evidence? Even David Race himself, on the call – and this was at a time when David was still firmly in Billy’s camp – even he was like “Dude, are you SURE about this? Have you actually thought this through for, like two seconds?” You can listen to this for yourself, linked in the sources.
Those quotes from David are paraphrases, of course.
This was all revealed in court filings which were published in October 2020, merely one month prior to Billy’s big stunt at Galloping Ghost. Which brings us back to day three of Billy grinding away for hours and hours at that poor “Reunion” machine, when David Race fired up his own stream.
David made one attempt. And he nailed a perfect score, on original Pac-Man, live, on his first try.
Sure, this was on the original Pac-Man cabinet in David’s home, and not on a “Reunion” machine, but it’s the same game for 255 boards. The only difference is the number of free dots you collect on the split screen, which are effectively irrelevant in terms of difficulty, and which in this case are moot anyway, since Billy had yet to get anywhere near the split screen in his attempts.
The Twin Galaxies website commemorated David’s perfect score with a feature article. Remember, this was while Billy’s failed attempts were STILL streaming on. Someone at TG was clearly having some fun. Check this out:
“It is important to understand that an average player attempting to achieve such an accomplishment would simply be reaching beyond their ability – embarrassingly struggling for hours and hours, day after day, resetting the game, to try over and over again with nothing but frustration and failure.”
[DUNK CLIP]
Day four, and Billy was still at it. You could see him on stream, like a true video gaming champion, blaming his controller. And you can’t say “Oh, well, maybe this version of Pac-Man is just slightly different from the original Pac-Man he’s used to, and maybe that was tripping him up” because… if you go back, you can actually see a “Reunion” machine inside Billy’s home, alongside his Donkey Kong cabinet, in streams at least as far back as October 2019. No excuses, dude. You had over a year to figure this out.
Update: After doing this audio recording, I found another stream from Billy’s friend “Triforce” showing Billy’s Reunion machine all the way back in October 2018! So Billy actually had TWO years to figure this out. Sad, dude.
Also, even if there was a genuine malfunction with Galloping Ghost’s equipment (one which staff did their best to address throughout Billy’s attempts), it is not uncommon for arcade game competitors to bring their own control panels to events and competitions, both to have equipment they know is in working order, and for the comfort of playing on the same panel they always play on. Ultimately, it’s Billy’s fault if he chose to forego this option. However, I still don’t put much stock in the idea that Galloping Ghost’s equipment was faulty, given Billy’s wildly missed turn on day six (described below), which was clearly the result of poor play and which Billy still chose to blame on the controls anyway.
[quiet] Day five. Still no end in sight. The children keep asking about you, Billy. They want to know when you’re coming home. I told them you had to chase away some evil ghosts. That’s true enough, I suppose.
During that evening’s stream, Billy whiffed on a key, worth 5,000 points, but… just didn’t notice. He kept on playing for six more boards, while the chat was trying to urge anyone on-site to inform Billy that his game was over.
We’re now up to day six, when Billy’s stream got bumped from Galloping Ghost’s Twitch channel to their Facebook page, to accommodate some regularly scheduled Monday content. I’m guessing they didn’t expect all of this to last this long. Oh, and for whatever it’s worth, that arcade was totally supposed to close back on Billy’s day three for new COVID-19 protocols.
On day six, there was a great clip. I wish I could show it to you, but in their multi-camera display, you can see both the game board and Billy’s hand on the control. You see him running the same ninth key pattern he always does. Up, left, up, right, up, left. He’s buffering a lot of these turns very early. So early, in fact, that when he gets up to the ghost pen, he attempts to buffer his turn above the pen, and goes under the pen instead. How do you miss that badly? That’s like missing a barn! And of course, he got right up and complained that the controls weren’t working right. Another day goes down, and still no perfect score.
I forgot to clarify in the video, this error resulted in Billy running right into an oncoming ghost, ending his perfect score attempt.
While actual top players do make big mistakes from time to time, perhaps even as bad as missing that turn by that much, it’s the arbitrary blaming of the controller when it was very obviously a player error that really sets this one apart.
By day seven, watching this toilet fire wasn’t even funny anymore. It was HILARIOUS at first, but now it was just sad. Why would anybody watch this? At this point, even I, yes, ersatz_cats, jealous hater extraordinaire, even I sincerely wanted him to get the STUPID score, just so that –I– wouldn’t have to keep paying attention to this fiasco. If hell exists, it’s being forced to watch Billy Mitchell fail at Pac-Man over and over and over… and over… and over… and over… for all of eternity… and the only interruptions… are from a jukebox… that plays nothing… but Achy… Breaky… Heart…
We’re now up to DAY EIGHT. Remember this? The epic roasting from Twin Galaxies? That was DAY THREE. We’re up to DAY EIGHT now. Galloping Ghost started having some Internet connectivity issues, so they switched back over to Facebook recording via the host’s cell phone, which resulted in some mirrored footage. As Billy continued playing on the long stretch of ninth key boards, the host excitedly described the scene, and then panned over to film Billy’s game play, just in time for this:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=838477280301419
Around this time, there were a lot of murmurs on social media wondering what was going to happen next. For those who don’t know, in the United States, we have a major holiday in late November called Thanksgiving. And in 2020, this holiday fell on November 26th, which would be Billy’s ninth day of attempts. And people were wondering, is he gonna give up? Is he gonna fly back home for a day and then return? What’s gonna happen?
We didn’t have a clear answer until that ninth day came, and that Galloping Ghost stream fired up as usual, for another ten hour stream. Yes, the Galloping Ghost staff came in to accommodate this guy, on Thanksgiving. And surprise, surprise, after ten more hours, he still couldn’t complete a perfect score.
Finally, on day ten, “Black Friday” as they call it, he got the stupid score. Mercifully, it was over. Billy immediately took to Twitter to declare victory, without really being clear that this wasn’t the original Pac-Man, or that difficulty-wise there isn’t any meaningful difference between collecting ten hidden dots on the split screen as opposed to nine.
Disappointingly, there were a few gaming commentators who repeated the party line, as it were, expressing astonishment that Billy had BEATEN the IMPOSSIBLE record. These casual observers seemed to be under the impression that Billy had found a way to squeeze a few extra points out of the original game, without asking or addressing fundamental questions like “How were these new points not found until forty years later?” and “If this is a new perfect score, then why did you go around telling everyone the lower score was a perfect score?” I’m not going to put these individuals on blast here, but you can check out the video notes, if you want to see examples.
The biggest offender was the YouTuber Tipster, who as soon as he’d heard the news jumped on to do a video titled “Billy Mitchell Has Achieved the IMPOSSIBLE!!!” His coverage in the video makes clear that he hadn’t looked into the situation at all, as multiple commenters were quick to point out the holes in his reporting. He spoke about the score as though Billy had simply squeezed more points out of the original game, while also repeating various “facts” he’d heard from Billy without question (such as Billy’s erroneous explanation of the split screen).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTYVyCqOiBg
Another YouTuber, vanburen20 (who has worked with Billy numerous times) also reported this as a “new world record on Pac-Man”, although he does eventually clarify that it was on a later remake. But in his pinned comment, he unquestioningly repeats what his friend Billy told him, declaring “No one else has achieved this score because the 20th anniversary edition is harder due to the different joystick that is used.” (lol Yeah, sure dude.)
Of course, the fact that Billy struggled for TEN DAYS at a game which he claims to be a master of took a bit of shine out of Billy’s celebration, as SOME people were more than happy to point out. This must have needled Billy a bit, because the next day he tweeted out this “Keep grinding” affirmation, attempting to spin this whole ten day fiasco as some sort of virtue. To go on a short tangent, this message sounds really good in isolation. “Yeah, keep on that grind! Chase your dreams! Don’t stop believing!” Until you realize that this is just Billy’s way of trying to gloss over the fact that it took him ten days to do what an actual Pac-Man master could smash out in a day.
I actually used to be a fan of Billy’s, before the cheating evidence. I really liked his motivational talk, but I hadn’t picked up on the fact that, coming from him at least, it was all self-service.
“I made 94 attempts before I got the world record!”
No, Billy. You cheated, and you want to make it sound like you earned it.
“I spent ten days because I’m an achiever!”
No, Billy. You spent ten days because you suck.
Those quotes are paraphrased, of course.
And to be clear, too much cynicism is unhealthy, and all of you SHOULD work hard toward your goals and chase your dreams. But actually do it, for reals, and not for pretends. Don’t be a total fraud like this guy.
When Billy announced his “Beyond perfect” score, it was reported that perfect score player Greg Sakundiak had already achieved the feat earlier that year, albeit without recording it. Since this appeared to be accepted by the Pac-Man community (including a temporary note on the site Pac-Man Forum), I included a reference to that score in this video. However, in late May 2023, I was notified that Sakundiak’s claimed score was most likely fictitious, conjured either by Greg himself or by Dwayne Richard. At the time I write this, I don’t yet have all the details, however this did warrant an immediate correction to this transcript and the video itself. I ended up clipping out a little extra to make the discontinuity seamless. The removed portion was as follows:
Anyway, getting back to the Pac-Man stuff, this stunt must not have satisfied Billy, as you didn’t hear much about it after the initial news cycle. And as if it wasn’t bad enough, remember how Billy said he was going for something no one had ever done before? It turned out that perfect score player Greg Sakundiak had already done this exact feat on a “Reunion” machine earlier that year. He didn’t record it, because he just didn’t think it was that big a deal. Because it wasn’t. In the end, it was a perfect score on Pac-Man, and hey, listen, just doing a perfect score on Pac-Man is neat. But it DOESN’T matter whether the split screen has nine dots or ten.
This is where the timestamp mentioned at the beginning of the video skips to.
So to recap, starting in 2018, we’ve seen Billy lie about Donkey Kong, then lie about Donkey Kong again, then struggle at Pac-Man, then CHEAT at Donkey Kong, then threaten us with Ms. Pac-Man, then get his butt kicked at Donkey Kong, then go back to Pac-Man again for an epic faceplant, while carrying on as if all of this was his plan all along. But what we hadn’t yet seen, what we needed to fill our whole bingo card, was for Billy to lie about Pac-Man… well, a recent Pac-Man game, I mean. Billy has told many, many lies about his Pac-Man scores of the past, which you can read all about in our nine-part series “The Video Game Fraud of the Century” available for free at perfectpacman.com. *click* But whereas Billy had been lying to us about his Donkey Kong scores on Twitch, Billy had yet to tell straight-up, bald-faced lies about a recent Pac-Man score, which brings us to the town of Lebanon, Tennessee, in the greater Nashville area, the site of the Music City Multi-Con, or as Billy calls it:
Billy refers to the event as the “Multi-City Comic Con” in this video, at timestamp 8:07.
Billy was part of the official itinerary for the October 2021 event, as seen here listed under room one. Noooooot everyone was excited to see him, but a few people were.
People who were not excited to see Billy:
https://twitter.com/GloobaMk8/status/1454297127480401920
https://twitter.com/Kitana_Prime/status/1454875965021212678
https://twitter.com/scottjacob865/status/1454618078457774083
But some people were taking photos with him:
https://twitter.com/ShriveLeFleur/status/1454279955982979073
https://twitter.com/ThatUmbrella/status/1454516894388662275
Billy had a booth where he took photos with people. And, present for the festivities, were a Donkey Kong cabinet and a Pac-Man cabinet. The event was three days, but we’re mostly interested in Billy’s perfect score attempt on Sunday. But before we talk about that, we need to talk about… parallel universes… Just kidding! But we do need to talk about yet ANOTHER revision of Pac-Man.
Back in the day, someone figured out that if you solder two specific connections on your Pac-Man circuit board, the game plays just a little differently. The first board plays like the second board, the second board plays like the [fourth] board, the third board plays like the fifth board, etc.
The fruits you receive still go in order, so it’s still a cherry on the first board, then a strawberry, then a peach, etc. They just play the way later boards play on an unmodified game. This came to be known as the “jumper” revision, and was a popular way to boost the game’s difficulty and spice it up a little back in the old arcade days. Gotta get all those quarters somehow, you know?
“So I do the interview, and they say ‘Now, will you give us a demonstration?’ ‘Sure,’ I turned around to play, and there’s somebody on that one, so I played this one. Well, this was… the advanced chip, where the second board plays like the fifth board. Well, I played the first board… the first board plays like the second board. But I didn’t know that, and I start playin’, and I go into the bottom corner, and I mean, two corners, and something’s wrong. All of a sudden I bail out.” – Billy, GameWarp, July 2013 (at timestamp 6:40)
In interviews Billy refers to this version as the “advanced chip”, which isn’t really accurate. It’s not a different “chip”. It’s the same board, just two of the connections are soldered differently.
“We believe there’s not enough room on the board, in the memory for the entire board, and that’s why it’s garbled.” – Billy, Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown, 2016 (at timestamp 28:30)
“You play 255 boards. On 256 there’s enough memory left in the game for the left half of the board and not the right half.” – Billy, Great Big Story, 2016 (at timestamp 1:20)
“There’s enough memory for the left half of the board, and not for the right half. And that’s exactly what it is.” – Billy, Minnesota lottery presentation, 2017 (at timestamp 0:39)
(Remember, the split screen happens because the fruit algorithm goes astray and overwrites half the board.)
This is the same guy who still thinks the split screen happens because the game only has enough memory to draw the left half of the board and not the right half, so obviously technical explanations are not his forte.
As an aside, I do kind of wonder why Billy keeps saying that, though. People figured out what causes the split screen long ago. My guess – and this is just a guess – is that Billy feels the need to stick with his inaccurate version, or else he’d have to admit he was wrong, even though literally nobody would care that he was wrong about this. LITERALLY. NO. ONE. But, as long as he sticks to his story, then it’s his word versus all those technicians and programmers and magazines and experts and… yeah.
Anyway, getting back to the jumper revision, Billy calls it the “advanced chip”, which as I said is inaccurate, but also, it’s misleading. I know, put on your shocked faces! Let’s hear Billy, in his own words, at the event:
[FACEBOOK VIDEO CLIP]
This is from a video that was posted to the Music City Multi-Con Facebook page. This video was later deleted, for what I’m sure are wholesome reasons. It’s hard to make out some of what Billy’s saying at first. It KIND of sounds like he’s saying all previous perfect scores were only attempted on the original version of Pac-Man, but OBVIOUSLY he couldn’t POSSIBLY be saying THAT, given all the emphasis he gave to his quote “beyond perfect” score a year before. So let’s just pretend we didn’t hear that part. The important part is much clearer. I’ll repeat it here:
Quote: “This one is an advanced chip. It gets harder faster. It maintains a harder level of difficulty. So it’s just never been done. No one ever wanted to attempt to do it. Why would you make things harder on yourself?” Endquote.
Let’s bring that chart back up again.
Refer back to the jumper fruit chart above.
What’s misleading about this characterization is that, while the jumper version, or the “advanced chip” as Billy calls it, is harder for novice players, who get thrown in deeper water earlier, it’s actually EASIER for advanced players. Look at that. Normally, you’ve got to get to board 21 before you’re “home free”, just running the easy pattern to the split screen. But in the jumper version, you’re skipping five boards! So you get to the final pattern at board 16. Not only that, three of those boards you skip are “blue time” boards, which are when the ghosts turn blue. Those boards, where you have to eat each ghost off each power pellet every time, are the real challenge of a perfect score. And you just skip them!
The split screen still appears on board 256. Remember, it’s caused by a byte overflow, prompting the game to attempt to draw board zero. But on the jumper version, you get to do easy ninth key patterns instead of three of the difficult blue time boards.
As I have heard from actual top Pac-Man players, one of the difficulties of playing on the jumper version is simply remembering that you’re playing on it, since there are no visual cues beyond sprite speed. In other words, you have to remember to unflinchingly run your strawberry board pattern, even though the fruit that’s coming up is a cherry. This itself can be difficult if you’ve more accustomed to playing the original unmodified game. However, this actually doesn’t affect Billy’s game play at all, since he doesn’t use patterns on the early boards, instead running freehand grouping techniques that basically work the same on all the early boards, but that’s a more complicated topic for another day.
This isn’t an exact comparison for a few reasons, but imagine a version of Super Mario Bros. where you just skipped the first 12 levels and started on 4-1. Billy would be trying to say “Well, this is the HARDER version, because you start on a harder level.” But that doesn’t make it harder to beat the game! You just skipped a bunch of levels. That actually makes it easier!
Note that some expert Pac-Man players do still refer to the jumper version as “fast/hard” settings, given that it was a common name for the upgrade. But that’s entirely different from going on a spiel trying to convince people that it’s significantly more difficult to reach the kill screen.
Anyway, we have one more Billy lie to address before we can move on. Billy said that no one ever wanted to attempt a perfect score on the jumper version, rhetorically asking “Why would you make things harder on yourself?” Well, different players had indeed attempted perfect scores on the jumper version, going back to the ’80s. Bill Bastable acquired a Pac-Man game because he wanted to do a perfect score with the hidden dots, but the game he acquired had the jumper soldered. So what did he do? He smashed out a perfect score on the jumper version, before scraping off the solder so he could do his perfect score on the regular version. I should note that these two scores are now considered unofficial, since Bastable used the game’s internal pause switch to freeze his game in progress, which didn’t violate any rules at the time, but which today would be considered disqualifying. But you certainly couldn’t say that he didn’t attempt a jumper perfect score.
These hidden dot scores were the only ones Bastable used the pause switch for. His earlier perfect scores were done at arcades, where he had no access to the cabinet switches.
More recently, in 2016, current Pac-Man champion David Race – yes, him again – David Race ATTEMPTED a perfect score on the jumper version, coming 90 points short on 3+1 settings. It seems that any time Billy does anything, he likes to proclaim he was the first.
NOTE: David did refer to the jumper as “fast/hard setting”, as many players know it as. But he doesn’t go on a spiel trying to convince anyone that a perfect score on the jumper version is especially harder than on the standard version, because he knows that isn’t true.
Okay, now that we understand what was special about this perfect score attempt at Music City Multi-Con, there are two basic questions we need to answer:
Did Billy get a perfect score at the Music City Multi-Con?
And if not, did he misrepresent a failed attempt as a successful one?
Let’s start with the first question. Did Billy get a perfect score on Pac-Man that day? What’s interesting about a perfect score on Pac-Man is, as long as you’re on perfect pace, every board will end on a certain score. In other words, you can’t carry over point-scoring opportunities from one board to another.
Here are all the scores you should have, after all 256 boards, on perfect pace on the original version of Pac-Man.
[PAUSE NOISE]
Future ersatz here again. It turns out that this is A LOT of data to stuff onto one screen. It is legible on my desktop monitor, but it might not be legible on the tiny phone screen you’re watching on. That’s okay. You’re not gonna miss anything. The narration will still work. If you want to see these charts at full resolution, they can be found in the video notes. Okay, back to the story.
[UNPAUSE NOISE]
Here are all the scores you should have, after all 256 boards, on perfect pace on the original version of Pac-Man. But we’re talking about the jumper modification, which produces different score totals, which you can see… here.
Note that both of these charts reflect six-life settings.
Now, we’re going to look at a few still shots from a newscast from WTVF NewsChannel 5 in Nashville. Based on Billy’s score, we can determine these are from board 171 through board 192. I’m going to highlight that range of scores now.
They’re broadcast out of order, as news reports do, but the game’s score lets us keep everything sorted out. To show you an example of what I mean, at 1:58 in the newscast, we see Billy end a board with a displayed score of 428,800.
“Top Pac-Man player in the world”? lmao, I wonder who told them that. Between Randy Tufts, Bill Bastable, Chris Ayra, Rick Fothergill, and David Race, Billy has literally never been the best Pac-Man player in the world. Billy Mitchell loves nothing more than to claim honors he never earned.
Note that I say “displayed score” here. Pac-Man does not display a millions digit, so that’s the only unknown we have to figure out. Now, LET’S go back to that chart of jumper scores.
Hmmm… Gosh, I don’t see any score ending in 428,800, do you? The closest I see is board 187, where you should end the board with 2,433,800. But if that were the board Billy was playing, he would be 5,000 points short, would he not?
Let’s try another one. At 1:00 in that same newscast, you see Billy with a score of 227,090, with eleven dots left on the board. I’ll get to why we know those are the only remaining dots in a moment. This means he would end that board with a displayed score of 227,200. Let’s go back to the chart again.
Can you see a score ending in 227,200? I can’t. Remember, he can’t be ahead of a given perfect score, he can only be behind. I do see this one, board 171, which should be 2,232,200. But again, that would mean Billy is exactly 5,000 points short.
Let’s take a look at a few boards-in-progress. But to do that, we need to look at the ninth key pattern Billy uses.
Ah, here it is. This is a modified version of a pattern called “Stacked”, the origin of which traces back at least to a 1982 book by early Pac-Man pioneers Jim Sykora and John Birkner. Billy uses this ninth key pattern throughout his streamed Pac-Man attempts, so as long as he doesn’t go off-pattern, we can identify exactly what board he’s on when he’s on perfect pace. And when he’s not on perfect pace, we can at least make an educated guess.
Notice that this pattern ends in the upper left corner. This is how we know those were the only eleven dots left in the previous example.
Let’s go back to the newscast, this time around timestamp 1:50. Pac-Man has just eaten that dot at the junction, bringing the displayed score up to 221,600. Using that pattern, Billy collects 8 dots, worth 80 points, until he reaches the key, worth 5,000 points. From there, Billy collects 42 more dots, for 420 points, and two power pellets, for 100 points, pushing his displayed score up to 227,200. Hey, look at that, that’s the score we had on the previous clip, which we determined was on board 171, except Billy, once again, is 5,000 points short.
For what it’s worth, that clip also lines up with the video seen behind the reporter in the opening of the segment, showing that it was also from Billy’s game at the Multi-Con, and was not simply stock footage.
Pac-Man is partially visible behind the on-screen graphic, behind the “D” in “World”.
Let’s do another, this time at the start of a board, as seen at 1:32 in the newscast. This one’s easy. Pac-Man has just eaten the dot at that junction, behind the on-screen graphic. He’s literally just eaten seven dots to start the board, meaning he began that board with a displayed score of 479,200. Let’s go back to the chart… Hmmm…. once again, I don’t see any perfect score boards ending with 479,200. The closest is board 191, which ends at 2,484,200. Again, 5,000 points short.
Since we’re starting to get into overkill territory, I’ll speed these up a bit, but I do want to make sure to catalog all of these, JUST SO THERE’S NO CONFUSION IN THE FUTURE.
At 2:26, we see Pac-Man approaching the first key with a displayed score of 253,120. Going by his usual pattern, Billy has eaten 72 dots on that board, meaning he started this board with a displayed score of 252,400, making this board 174, but 5,000 points short.
At 1:59, we see those same 72 dots eaten, plus another 8 dots, plus a key worth 5,000 points. That means Billy started this board with displayed score of 378,400. That makes this board 184, 5,000 points short. We can do this all day!
Here’s a photo from Twitter. Looks like poor Billy broke his pattern and had to play free-hand for a while. Either that, or this was a deliberate attempt to park the game. Anyway, the photo was high enough resolution, we can actually zoom in and see the displayed score.
You can also see the whole board, you can see all the dots that have been collected, totaling 109, for 1090 points. And the key has come out by then, so that should be another 5,000 points, meaning Billy started that board at displayed score 328,000, which makes this board 180, but 5,000 points short.
You want to see how good we are at this? At 1:19 in the news clip, we see a close-up of the score. LITERALLY. JUST the score. You see almost none of the game board itself. Now, watch what happens:
As you see, it counts up by tens before pausing on 429,300. Since we know Billy’s playing the jumper version, and since we know what pattern he’s using, and since we know he’s down by 5,000, we can actually identify that as this stretch on board 188.
Billy collects those dots, bringing the score up to 429,300, then Billy enters the empty area around the ghost pen, and the points stop accumulating. If Billy was on perfect pace, between two and three million, he would have bypassed that score altogether when he ate the second key on board 187.
Whoops! Missed one in my audio. A Facebook photo from Celina Golden shows Billy on board 199. It’s hard to read, but the current displayed score is 573,920. Billy has eaten 147 dots, one pellet, and a key, for 6,520 points. That means he started that board with score 2,567,400, which is 5,000 points short of the 2,572,400 he should have begun that board with.
Okay, point is, Billy definitely definitely for sure for reals missed 5,000 points, with the most likely explanation being that he missed a key somewhere. But there’s something else going on in these shots. Let’s take a look at what a standard ninth key board should look like.
Take a look at the display along the bottom. Five lives in spare. Seven keys along the fruit display. The keys take up a bit more than half the row, since there’s seven of them. Either way, it’s awfully crowded down there! You might be able to slip like a little dot between those keys and those spare Pac-Mans… Pac-Men, I guess?… But it wouldn’t be very comfy. Now let’s go back to that Twitter photo…
GASP! Oh no! Billy! Somebody stole your Pac-Man! Let’s see if we can track it down. Let’s go back to that newscast.
Here we are at 54 seconds in to their segment. That’s Billy playing, but that fifth spare Pac-Man is still AWOL.
Here’s a shot at 1:18. It’s gone there, too!
Let’s go back to that vanishing Facebook video, and see if we can find it there.
Remember, that missing life was staring Billy in the face for almost his entire game. In other words, there’s no way he could have simply forgotten that he was down a life, if he was playing with six lives.
This video shows Billy playing the final few boards up to and including the split screen. And there you see that big gap between Pac-Man and the key, like a hockey goalie’s grin.
You can also see the missing life several times in the newscast via the wall projection of Billy’s game, as well as in a vlog by Cujo Kate (at timestamp 6:19).
This is kind of a problem for Billy. Remember, you have to get to the split screen on your first life. Actually… I’ll let Billy himself explain this one, from that same Facebook video:
In this clip, Billy speaks into a microphone while continuing to play. He describes the nine dots among the computer garbage, saying that once those dots are eaten, there’s nothing left to do but die, causing those nine dots to reappear. Billy describes the process of getting those 90 points over and over, then concludes by saying “That’s why you have to get there on your first guy.”
Just in case you didn’t understand the first time, Billy explained it again, like a minute later:
In this clip, following a question from their host about the regenerating dots, Billy reiterates “Yes, they keep coming back. So that’s why, if you get there on your second guy, it’s not a perfect game, because you’ll still be 90 points short of perfect.”
Well, that settles it, then. Forget these gaps and missing points and science and stuff. Billy’s not hiding from the truth! He’s just looking straight at you and telling you what’s what, just like an honest man would. He wouldn’t do all that and then just LIE to everyone… would he?
Let’s skip to the very end. Here’s a photo from a random attendee’s Facebook page:
You can see Billy’s final displayed score of 292,270. I know, it’s a little fuzzy in that photo, but don’t worry, we’ll be seeing more of it soon. On the jumper version of Pac-Man, with all six lives, a perfect score should read 297,360, with the millions digit missing of course. So that’s a difference of 5,090 points. We’ve already beaten that missing 5,000 points like it’s a dead horse. The missing 90 points is due to Billy being down one life. Because remember, when you get to the split screen, there are nine hidden dots that regenerate each time you die, so you cash in all of your lives for 90 points each.
Now… it is certainly possible that, for some reason, Billy simply chose to play on settings that granted him five lives instead of six. Four lives would at least be factory default, but it can be set to five specifically instead of six. It seems very uncharacteristic, and I remain highly skeptical that this would be the case. We also have photos and still shots from Billy playing his earlier attempts, in some cases showing four spare lives BEFORE the bonus life, or in one case a row of all five spare lives in addition to his current life, for a total of six.
On the left, you see Billy’s playing the first board of the game. Note the lone cherry icon in the corner. Notice also that he has five lives (one active and four in reserve). This would be before he gets the bonus life (if the machine was set to grant a bonus life).
And in the other shot (from Cujo Kate’s vlog, at timestamp 10:02), it looks very much like a full line of spare lives and keys. If that’s the case, then Billy did play some of his attempts on six life settings.
We can’t prove that either of these are the same game Billy played to completion. But it’s highly doubtful that he would later change settings to reduce his lives on perfect score attempts.
But we can’t necessarily say those were the same game he later played to the split screen. Nor could we prove that Billy didn’t open up the cabinet door later and say “Hey, I’ve been playing on six lives, but why don’t I switch it down to five now, for no discernable reason.” –I– think he lost one of his lives at some point, probably when he failed to get a key. But I can’t strictly rule out that he simply chose to play five lives instead of six.
FWIW, in all the streams I’ve seen of Billy playing Pac-Man, he always plays on the maximum number of lives allowable. This goes back to the infamous rule change in 1999, where Billy was allowed to submit a score on 5+1 settings, whereas all previous Twin Galaxies scores were limited to 3+1 settings, thus allowing Billy to submit a score higher than anyone else had been allowed to before. As a result, Billy refers to a 5+1 score as though it is the only true perfect score, in an apparent attempt to dismiss previous perfect scores by Bill Bastable, and perhaps others. This narrative is maintained even today by only playing for perfect scores on six-life settings. In other words, for Billy to choose now to do a perfect score on anything less than the maximum number of lives, on any machine on which he has access to the switches, would be very, very, very uncharacteristic. But, again, I can’t strictly disprove this highly unlikely scenario, as opposed to the much more likely possibility that he simply lost a life on this game when he missed that 5,000 point key, and chose to continue playing.
However, none of that would excuse the missing 5,000 points. He botched something, somewhere, and he came up short. No doubt about it. We have all of this documentation. It is not a thing that could possibly be argued otherwise. It. Is. Mathematics.
You might speculatively say “Well, maybe he simply played a different game later that day. Maybe he played this one, all the way to the end, for three or so hours, took some handshakes, then fired it right back up again for another five or so hours, and THEN he got the perfect score, and THAT would be the game everyone is referring to.” Well, no, that doesn’t work here, either. And this is where our second question comes in:
We’ve already beaten that first question into a pulp. So let’s address the other one: Did Billy misrepresent a failed attempt as a successful one? You could try to hypothesize whether there was another complete game that day, which by the way, there was not, or else there would have been some media associated with it, some photos or videos like the ones seen above except where Billy is actually on perfect pace. But we don’t even need to establish that there wasn’t another game. All we need to demonstrate is that Billy misrepresented this game, with the lower score, as though it were a perfect score.
Let’s start with a clip from the newscast.
You can literally see, as he’s saying that he hasn’t missed any points, that he’s already down one life. That’s already a thing. And it’s not a voice-over, where you could maybe argue that it was edited. No, that’s just him in the clip, saying it to the camera.
Now, here’s where pedantic Billy defenders, really grasping at those straws, might come in and say “Well, ACKSHUALLY, TECHNICALLY, he hasn’t missed any points from losing a life, he doesn’t lose out on those points until the split screen, so he hasn’t missed any points YET.” Which, given the way Billy is presenting his game in progress, would be quite a stretch.
While you don’t lose points right away just for dying (meaning, your score can still appear perfect up until the split screen), you do lose points immediately if your death causes you to miss a ghost or a fruit.
But either way, a death does mean your perfect score attempt is immediately over, if you’re going for the bonus dots, since you’ll have one less life to cash in.
But, along the same lines, let’s say for the sake of argument that Billy really did play on five lives instead of six, which would mean that at the time he made that declaration he truly wasn’t down a life from where he started. We also don’t really get a good shot of the score during that part of the newscast, thanks to the on-screen graphic. So, while common sense says that Billy’s perfect score bid is already sunk by the time he said that, we can’t reeeally prove it yet, so let’s move on.
Keep in mind, all the other clips from the newscast were filmed during the aforementioned stretch from board 171 to 192 where, as we’ve established, he was 5,000 points down the entire time. So while we can’t see the score on the screen as Billy’s saying he hasn’t missed any points yet, nor can we determine for sure which board he was on when he said it, he was almost certainly down 5,000 points as he said that. We just can’t prove it for certain.
On the Facebook video, you can watch Billy playing the last eight boards of his game. Well, I mean, you could watch it if they hadn’t deleted it. The camera starts out a bit too far away to see the score, but as we discussed, you do see the missing Pac-Man at the bottom. Billy’s just carrying on, discussing his game in progress, all the way into the split screen, where he begins cashing in his spare lives to collect those nine regenerating dots. When Billy’s on his penultimate life, the host asks Billy for confirmation for what is about to happen:
[FACEBOOK VIDEO CLIP]
The host said that Billy had to play two more Pac-Men, eat eighteen more pellets, and that Billy would then have a, quote “perfect game”. Billy then nodded in affirmation. A moment later, when Billy played his last life, he began counting down the final dots, starting with nine:
[FACEBOOK VIDEO CLIP]
“And that is a perfect game”, or so it was declared. And look at that, the cameraperson was nice enough to swing right in and show us the final score, ending in 2270.
Remember, the perfect score should be ending in 7360 on six life settings, or at least 7270 on five life settings. I don’t know about you, but that digit after the nine does not look like a seven. That sure looks like a two to me. Lest you think I’m merely beating that same 5,000 point horse again, it is NECESSARY to show that the same game we saw all those clips and photos from, the same game in which Billy was down 5,000 points all along, is the same game being celebrated here. Billy simply played that same game to completion, and passed it off as a perfect score, so he could declare victory.
The effectiveness of this lie is demonstrated by all the people who, in the absence of a perfect score chart, simply accepted what they were being told. At 58 seconds into the newscast, the event host declares to everyone that Billy, quote, “still has a perfect game going”, endquote. A moment later, one observer refers to Billy making history, an apparent reference to the suggestion that Billy would be the first to do a perfect score on the jumper version. The segment also ends with the reporter declaring, a bit vaguely, that, quote, “in the end, Mitchell did win,” endquote.
If that’s too vague for you, let’s go back to the end of Billy’s game again. Just in case you had any doubt as to what you saw on the Multi-Con’s own Facebook page, Joe Hills on YouTube was also in attendance, and filmed the same scene from a distance.
The same countdown, the same score ending in 2270, and the same declaration of “That is a perfect game”. As if reality itself wanted to make sure we weren’t confused, Joe titled his video, quote, “I just saw a perfect game of PacMan completed at Music City Multicon”, endquote.
So yes, actual people in actual attendance very much believed they had just witnessed a perfect score of Pac-Man. And honestly, why shouldn’t they believe it? After all, Billy made the crazy screen appear. I’m sure it looked like a perfect score. I’m not trying to pick on any of these individuals specifically, as none of this is their fault.
Okay, the event hosts really should know better.
When you go to a gaming presentation like this, you’re expecting it to not just be a bunch of lies. Imagine if you tuned into like Games Done Quick or something, and you enjoyed watching nail-biting speedruns, and then found out that the entire show was fake? Like, what good does that serve? How does that help anyone?
You could argue that such an event could still raise donations for charity, but those donations would surely be fewer and smaller if the gaming was staged.
Also, since my video may not have made this clear, and since there’s always conspiratorial nonsense thrown around about GDQ, I should state on the record that GDQ is a fantastic event and always a treat to watch. While they have occasionally made mistakes and platformed people they shouldn’t have (including people who were later discovered to have cheated their qualifications), some such mistakes are inevitable, and (to my knowledge) have been properly addressed.
This MIGHT have helped Billy himself on his little publicity tour, but since this isn’t the 1980s anymore, and since people actually have the ability to record things and preserve evidence, it doesn’t seem this helped him either.
Now, some people might say to all this “Oh, so what? It was still a great score, and it was still close enough to perfect. I bet you can’t do a perfect score on Pac-Man!” And… well… first of all, don’t bet too much on that… but more to the point, if the score Billy got really was good enough, then why lie about it at all? If the distinction really isn’t important, then that just makes all of this sadder. The entire thing was a farce that cheapened high score gaming FOR LITERALLY EVERYONE.
The classic “Who cares?” defense. People are certainly allowed to not care about high scores on Pac-Man, but that doesn’t make Billy any less of a liar.
Billy stayed fully committed to the bit, though. Two of the people seen in the newscast are hosts of the Broken Token podcast, who also bore witness to Billy’s alleged milestone feat. Here’s one of the hosts, in his own words, in a December episode:
A month after the event, the hosts were STILL under the impression they had witnessed a perfect score, and were thus still telling listeners that they saw Billy ACHIEVE such a score. And because apparently this situation wasn’t already preposterous enough, the hosts then described what Billy did to mark the occasion:
The host continued telling the origin of these Pac-Man game marquees, which he brought to the event without apparently knowing that Billy would be attempting a perfect score. The host then continued:
Listen to the episode from 1:52:32 to 1:54:02.
In case there’s any confusion, these marquees were the property of the Broken Token host (Brent, I believe). They were not some charitable gift from Billy. Billy just vandalized the marquees with lies about his fake perfect score. Gotta maintain the lie, I guess?
Yes, Billy Mitchell literally signed game marquees, to commemorate the perfect score he didn’t get. Now, at the time of my recording, I have not yet found a photo of one of these marquees to confirm exactly what was written. The inscription as read by the host, “History’s first Pac-Man, original advanced chip”, is a little odd. The hosts’ probably inaccurate reading of it did not include the words “perfect score” or “perfect game”. But the implication is obvious, is it not? What else would have been first that day? I hope Billy doesn’t think he was literally the first person to ever play the jumper revision.
Recall Billy’s claim that no one had ever attempted a jumper perfect score before.
At any rate, the hosts themselves made it clear what the signed marquees were intended to commemorate:
So yes, much to the disbelief of witnesses and much to the chagrin of lying trolls on the Internet, Billy Mitchell really did lie about a perfect score of Pac-Man to a whole crowd of trusting spectators, who took him AND his hosts at their word. I know, OF ALL PEOPLE. It just goes to show you that, if someone lies to you hundreds and hundreds of times, you can just never be sure that they won’t lie to you again.
I’m not saying the Broken Token guys are lying. I take them at their word that they genuinely believe what Billy told them, as dubious a proposition as that may be. I’m referring to any trolls who claimed they were present at that event and that Billy did not misrepresent the score, which he very demonstrably did.
As to the matter of what exactly did happen at Music City Multi-Con, and how this whole ruse was executed, there’s one last question to be addressed, which I think is rather illuminating. If Billy had indeed lost a life, playing Pac-Man in front of everyone like that, wouldn’t everyone have noticed? Wouldn’t they have heard that Pac-Man death sound [example] and gone “Oh no! What happened!?”
Now, I do wish to be clear that, in general, Billy has shown himself to be an accomplished bullshit artist, so I don’t really put that sort of subterfuge beyond him. “Oh, I was SUPPOSED to die there.” “Don’t worry, I can still get the perfect score.” “Don’t believe your lying eyes.” That sort of thing. But for the purposes of discussing the Music City Con, let’s stipulate that someone would have noticed Billy losing a life.
Once again, this assumes Billy played his fake perfect score on six-life settings instead of five, which he almost certainly did.
There’s a common theme among these publicity campaigns of Billy’s which is misdirection. When trying to redo his Donkey Kong scores, he wanted everyone to focus on whether he could hit the final score of the contested tapes, and not pay attention to things like score pace or play style which, as a competent Donkey Kong player, he knows the relevance of. Oh, and even using this misdirection, Billy had to lie about those final scores anyway, because he couldn’t actually do what he was proclaiming to be capable of. Cutting away between all his “beyond perfect” attempts might have also worked out better for him had he gotten the score on the first day, and not his tenth day.
Many of Billy’s antics resemble the act of a stage magician. “Everybody, look over HERE… and while you’re looking here, pay no attention to what my assistant is doing over THERE.” Since magic isn’t real, the performer always has a curtain, or a trap door, or a colleague they can randomly select from the audience, or something, to make the illusion happen. For the Music City Con, Billy used his favorite magic curtain, which is the passage of time.
The passage of time was a big component in Billy’s lie about being named “Video Game Player of the Century” by Namco. He did travel to Japan, and he did receive a plaque commemorating his claimed perfect score. However, Walter Day named Billy “Player of the Century” at the Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, shortly before that Japan trip. Billy and Walter simply waited a few months to start claiming that it all happened differently. Check out “Dot Five” and “Dot Seven” for more details.
What wasn’t readily apparent in the initial reports was that Billy’s phony perfect score was actually carried over from the night before. Here’s a photo, courtesy of Jacob Spencer Scott on Twitter, showing Billy playing the cherry board, the first board of the game. This photo was publicly posted on Saturday night.
Cujo Kate’s vlog, filmed on Saturday night, contains multiple shots of Billy playing around the 600k score range. You can also see darkened doors at the end of the hall. Another attendee photographed those same doors the following day, brimming with daylight.
Here are a couple other examples of Billy playing the early boards on Saturday night, which future-me accumulated after doing this audio recording. Of course, you couldn’t necessarily say that any of these were the same almost-perfect score Billy played the next morning. But thankfully, we have the Broken Token guys to help fill in the blanks yet again.
You also have the event host, as heard in the newscast at about 56 seconds, saying that Billy was about to resume his perfect score in progress from the night before.
So there you have it, Billy started his game Saturday night, then parked it overnight to continue it the next day. See? Remember how I told you way back at the beginning of this video how you can park Pac-Man in hiding spots and leave your game running indefinitely? That’s called good writing, my friends. In that Broken Token clip, we also got a bit of emphasis on how Billy wasn’t going for any sort of time attack, and thus leaving his game running for hours wasn’t an issue, along with an admission that the only witnesses from Saturday night sort of lost track of the point count.
And as you saw in those earlier photos, it wasn’t exactly a big crowd around Billy Saturday night, probably because Billy didn’t want to draw everyone’s attention to him failing at the “blue time” boards over and over. Someone could have stood next to Billy, watched him die, heard him say “Well, I’ll just play this one a little longer for practice,” watched him park his game, then returned with him the next day, and be taken in by Billy’s assertive confidence. “No no, this is a new game. That was an earlier game I died on. This one’s still perfect.” Or without even being prompted, they might have assumed “Well, if Billy’s saying this one is still perfect, he must have come in really early today and started again, and I just didn’t see it.” Just like how Billy’s stack of secret papers says whatever he wants it to say, the passage of time obscures whatever Billy says it obscures.
And before you say “Oh, no one would fall for that, not if they were standing right there” we’ve just gone over a pile of evidence showing that Billy whiffed on a perfect score, and told a crowd of people he didn’t, and the crowd believed him. As someone who has researched the Billy case for four years now, it is AMAZING the mental lengths people will go to, to avoid confronting the obvious conclusion that Billy simply lied to them, and that he did it effectively. Even actual gaming enthusiasts in attendance at Music City Multi-Con, who were making an effort to understand the situation, even they got the wool pulled over their eyes on this one. It happens. Live and learn.
There is a bit of extra material here, where David Race reached out to the Broken Token hosts after their initial podcast and tried to explain the situation to them. Rather than simply acknowledging “Okay, I guess Billy lied to us, that’s disappointing” the hosts had a follow-up segment in a subsequent episode where they basically said David was taking it too seriously, and that Billy was nice to them, and in the end, that’s all that really matters. Gee, I wonder why Billy is nice to podcast hosts while he goes around suing people who correctly point out what a massive liar he is.
Billy was nice to them… aside from lying to their faces, of course.
The follow-up segment starts at 2:32:47 here.
Note that, despite my audio as I recorded it, David actually reached out to the Broken Token hosts prior to their first episode on the subject. David discusses the situation here.
While I didn’t discuss this in the video, I also left a comment on Broken Token episode 104 on their website, after I had been made aware of their dismissal of David’s concerns. It looks like my reply sort of disappeared into the aether, as I don’t see any evidence of it on their site. The text of my reply (posted on March 5 of this year) is as follows:
Howdy! I heard your segment on Billy Mitchell in this episode, and… I guess I don’t really understand your position.
With regard to the claims of a “perfect score” at Music City Multi Con, Billy Mitchell straight up lied. He lied to you, to your faces, to the crowd, to the media. It isn’t a particularly obscure thing to prove, either. Numbers are numbers, and the score Billy got is not a “perfect score” of Pac-Man by any measure. Indeed, you don’t even seem to be particularly contesting whether Billy lied (which he did), aside from a brief remark of “Why would somebody lie about that?” Instead, you focus on Billy’s character (aside from said lies), and on dismissing attempts at competitive high score verification.
Apologies, because I don’t have a full frame of reference for you both, but imagine if someone (let’s call this person “Ronald”) came along and took credit for your podcast. Ronald went around telling everyone “Yeah, Broken Token was my idea. I came up with the name. And I did all the work to get the ball rolling on it, before they took over.” You two rightly would say “Uhhh, no you didn’t, and who are you?” But imagine that Ronald just kept going around telling people this. Worse yet, a lot of people believed Ronald instead of you. Ronald started getting donations intended for the podcast, because they see him as the guy behind it. You and some other loyal listeners kept trying to say “Stop indulging this liar! He’s just lying to you!” But the answer you would get from people who came across Ronald is “That’s so dumb, though. Why would Ronald lie about that?” Or maybe “I met Ronald. He’s a good guy! You don’t see how good Ronald is to people when the cameras aren’t looking”, as if that has any bearing on the objective fact that the guy is lying about something important to you.
Now, if I may be blunt, the creative origin behind the Broken Token podcast is not something I wake up thinking about. But it’s important to you, and I recognize that. Likewise, while you may not care about high score competition, it’s important to other people. The people looking to set the historical record straight in that regard aren’t doing it on a whim, and aren’t just out to dig up dirt on people. Remember that there are actual lawsuits going on right now over Billy’s scores, each of which was initiated by Billy (aside from TG’s counter-suit, which still originates from Billy having sued TG first). Billy’s high score lies are obviously important enough to him to expend considerable resources attempting to force the community to acknowledge them. And the matter is important enough to scoreboards like TG to expend resources fighting it.
You asked the question “Why would somebody lie about that?”, as if asking the question casts doubt on the fact that it actually happened. But it is a fact that it happened. It has been strictly demonstrated by Mr. David Race that Billy lied about doing a “perfect score” of Pac-Man at Music City Multi Con. It happened. And thus, knowing that it happened, I’ll leave you with your own question: Why would somebody lie about that?
Also, some of David’s replies to the newscast were getting deleted. You can find the details on all of that in the video notes if you wish.
Okay, there isn’t much more to say about that, but you can follow the links provided to see the actual deleted comments for yourself if you wish. David’s replies to the Music City Multi-Con Facebook page were also being removed.
So, now that we’ve seen Billy succeed in lying to a crowd of spectators about what they just witnessed, what do we do with this information? I’ll tell you exactly what you do. You take all of Billy’s witness statements for his old scores, and you throw them in the garbage. How are we supposed to believe the word of his mortgage broker friends, or the staff of Funspot, or the staff of Boomers arcade, when even if we assume they aren’t trying to lie, or that they have some idea of what they’re looking at, we can show that Billy WILL lie to people’s faces, and people will believe AND report to others that they just witnessed a milestone gaming achievement, when they did not. Thank you, Billy, for completely destroying what was left of your defense. This is why, when putting the word of witnesses up against permanent, objective evidence, the evidence always wins.
Photo by Tom Fisher
Oh, and I can’t forget to mention, this bodes very poorly for Billy’s claim that he got a perfect score of Pac-Man in July of 1999, where the final portion of the tape has never been published despite Billy retaining possession of it, and where the only photo seen from that day is of Billy standing next to a Pac-Man cabinet that appears to be back in attract mode. You can read all about that in the conclusion of our series “The Video Game Fraud of the Century” at perfectpacman.com.
I will say though, the story of the Music City Con does have a happy ending. Since Billy made a big deal about doing the first perfect score on this specific variation of Pac-Man, and since he failed to achieve it, David Race, the true Pac-Man champion, swooped in, and got the actual jumper version perfect score himself, completing his game with all 3,297,180 points shortly after Midnight on November 10. Granted, this was on factory settings, granting only four lives instead of six, but it’s still a perfect score, and it’s still more points than Billy got. I guess, if we were to believe Billy, that would make this score “Beyond perfect”?
And that, my friends, is the story of the Music City CON. I’d like to give a big thank you to David Race for accumulating much of this evidence in the first place, to Andrew Barrow for answering a question I had about the Aussie Kong Off, a MASSIVE thank you to Jace Hall for fighting the good fight against evil, a thank you to Karl Jobst for his outstanding videos on Billy, and a shout out to the Whistle Crew for that delightful fish recipe. Thank you.
Thank you also to Jeremy Young!
Please be well everyone, be excellent to each other, and the next time you consider having Billy Mitchell on your show, or at your event, so that he can tell everyone about the time he traveled to Narnia and met the Tooth Fairy, Optimus Prime, and Nelson Mandela, please consider that he MIGHT not be telling you the truth, and that maybe, just maybe, you might look pretty foolish for believing him. Don’t be mad. I’m just trying to help.
What’s funny is, unlike Billy’s lie about this jumper perfect score, I can’t strictly prove he didn’t travel to Narnia. So I guess that story would technically be more “believable” than the provable lies he actually tells?
Thank you for watching. Good night.
I look forward to future articles. Silly Bitchell needs to GO DOWN (or away, one of the two).
As always, awesome work.
I thought you might want to know that people are having trouble accessing your links directly to the Twin Galaxies website. If you aren’t a user, practically everything is hidden now. Even certain things (like score disputes) just disappeared for everyone.
Thanks. Yeah, TG is doing their thing. All I can really do for the moment is link there, and trust people to bring up Wayback Machine if they don’t have direct access. Hopefully most of that goes public again at some point, but I’m sure the intention will eventually be to take the Billy dispute thread down for good, and that’ll require more work to redo sources.
I really hope you enjoy writing these as much as I enjoy reading them.