New DK Junior world record by Justin Elliott

On July 3rd, Donkey Kong phenom Justin Elliott destroyed the DK Junior world record with a score of 1,584,400. While it’s easy to report the facts of these scores as they come in, the numbers alone don’t adequately convey the personal aspect of how these scores were achieved

If you’re interested in hearing more about Justin’s origin story versus the big ape, check out this interview I did with Justin in late 2020, shortly after he crossed the 1.2 million barrier on original Donkey Kong:

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So when we did that interview a couple years ago, we discussed how you got involved in original Donkey Kong. Tell us a bit how you crossed over from there to the sequel, Donkey Kong Junior.

I first took an interest in Donkey Kong Junior in September of 2021. I had been going hard on Donkey Kong for a little over 3 years by that point and started to become curious about some of the other DK games. As with most things in life, you never quite know whether or not you’ll become interested in something until you at least give it a try. So I gave it a try. 14 days later, I was fortunate enough to killscreen the game.

That is insane. Obviously some of your DK skills must have carried over to the sequel, right?

Yeah, for sure. But I’m also big believer that if you pursue something at a high level, you will inherit many of those skills upon tackling a new venture. By skills I don’t just mean physical things like hand-eye coordination but also mental skills, strategies, etc. This is especially true in videogames. There isn’t really anything too similar about the two games other than the title and the fact that you can jump around to leech points but there are definitely some shared mechanics between the two games.

So what was the score of this first Junior kill screen?

628,500. I did the absolute bare minimum to finish the game and I believe it was the 3rd lowest killscreen game of all time which was pretty hilarious. I have this philosophy that whenever you have a target goal in your mind, you should do everything in your power to reach it and avoid wasting time with other things in the game that aren’t directly conducive to that goal (unless, of course, that’s fun for you).

The kill screen on original Donkey Kong is pretty famous, from King of Kong. Most people including myself only learned the term from Brian Kuh running around Funspot announcing it. But I think most people aren’t as familiar with DK Junior’s kill screen. Isn’t it the same thing, where you get to a certain stage and there isn’t enough bonus timer to complete the board?

It seems to be the same idea, yes. In fact, DKJ’s killscreen comes at the same level (22) but you get just a bit more time to play on it before the game kills you off than you do on DK.

Okay, so you kill-screened DK Junior. What happened next?

After that, I put the game down for a while. Some time in 2022, as I was still playing Donkey Kong regularly, I got it in the back of my mind to start looking a bit more into the different point-pressing strats in Junior. I wasn’t very serious about it, but thought it could be fun to learn. Periodically, I would fire up save states and start practicing the different tricks but I never stuck with it for any consistent period of time.

By late 2022, the game was starting to really sit in my mind quite a bit. The save state practice picked up a bit more and I decided I’d try for 1.2 or 1.3 million sort of half-assed. By around September of 2022, I dropped my first million point game but died several screens early at around high-1.2 pace. After that, I took another short break from the game.

And by short break, I assume you meant going back to original DK?

Yep, my main focus has always been DK. I do a lot of gaming outside of arcade gaming, as well. Multiplayer pvp, chasing achievements, etc. Sometimes it’s nice to just focus on those for a while since the DK grind can become very burdensome. For me, playing a different arcade game was a huge mental break from DK.

Now, you got your start on MAME, but you eventually switched over to playing on an actual arcade cabinet, right?

Yeah, basically. The story is that I bought my first and only arcade machine, a classic Donkey Kong upright, in June of 2021 from a guy selling games out of some warehouse in Virginia for about $900. Shoutout to Veryape121 (Gary) for being a huge part of that journey. Anyway, I bought it and when I brought it home, I played on it for a very short while but quickly stopped because there was a big piece of the left side of the screen missing due to some CRT issues. Fast forward to January of 2022 and Gary, once again a hero, came to visit me at my apartment to recap my monitor and make it as good as new. From that point on and to this day, I’ve only played DK seriously on arcade.

So I asked this about original Donkey Kong in our last interview, and I know this can be a hard question to answer, but I’m going to ask this anyway: What separates players at the top levels of Donkey Kong Junior? What separates a 1.2 million player from a 1.3 million player, or a 1.5 million player?

Like in DK, there are different progression systems in DK Junior. Killscreening the game is obvious – you just get to the end. But in order to add a bit more meat to your score, you would have to implement some of the various point-pressing techniques that you would find in high-level Junior gameplay. Some of these techniques might only add a few thousand here and a few thousand there, but some of them will add a few HUNDRED thousand. Efficiently leeching the sparks on the Hideout, for example, can bring you from a 800k player to a 1.2 player pretty quickly without much effort. The progression to 1.3 may require spending some more time on the Jungle boards leeching it out (using the apple to smash multiple snapjaws, running the timer down to 1000 by leeching snapjaw combos up top, etc.). 1.4 would ask you to do both of those plus have an excellent understanding of how to maximize points on the Spring and Chains board. 1.5 is all of that combined done at a highly efficient level along with being fortunate enough to sacrifice your extra men for big points (typically at the very end of a well-leeched Hideout board). Getting the world record is essentially just reaching a mastery on all of the 1.5 strategies. There are minute details, as there are in DK, that separate the top 2 or 3 from the rest of the field. And unlike what some people may believe, it never has anything to do with secret strategies or techniques but sheer overall efficiency and minimum wasted time over the course of 3 1/2 hours. You need to be able to go full bore without ever letting off the gas or making any critical mistakes.

Also, my understanding is Junior is a much more patterned game than original DK, which had wild barrels and various other randomness. Is that correct?

Yes – Junior is far more forgiving than DK. You should theoretically never die if you are being careful and observant. The only board that may rob you of a man is the Chains board but even then, you could just play it safe and take your time. But yes – while there are still an enormous number of RNG factors, none of those factors should be able to rob you of a man. It simply comes down to not making mistakes.

Death points are also really important, right? In something like Pac-Man, you don’t really get any extra points from deaths, since the standard dots and energizers stay eaten. But in DK and DK Junior, you have to make sure you’re making the most of each of your lives before you hit the kill screen.

Death points in DK Junior are even more critical than the ones in DK since you can get up to 40,000 per death on the former. You could theoretically play a 1.5 game that turns into a 1.4 because your deaths were all very low. It’s definitely a frustrating thing to have happen but, going back to what I said previously, it’s almost always my fault if I get a bad death, so it’s just a matter of shaking it off, regrouping and trying again next time.

So you took a break and returned to original Donkey Kong, at least for a while. But eventually, something inspired you to really dedicate yourself to Junior again.

In early 2023, I decided to get pretty serious about it. I began truly grinding to learn the game. A true grind, to me, consists of a massive amount of practicing, studying my own gameplay, studying players who are better than me and then rinsing and repeating. I did these things with a fiery passion. I was also looking to take a break from Donkey Kong at the time so it felt like the perfect time to get serious about another game.

Side story: In January of 2023, I decided to learn Crazy Kong – another DK-style game. After about a week of practicing, I was able to drop a new world record. Not much of a grand tale there but it coincided with my desire to learn another game.

Later that month or perhaps in early February, I finally put up my first big Junior game – 1,405,200. This snuck me into the top 5, which was awesome because at the time I was thinking I’d be very happy with top 10. Another month and a couple more 1.4’s later, I finally broke over the 1.5 barrier on MAME with a 1,503,400.

I kept practicing and grinding and some time around April of 2023, I got it in my head that it’d be cool to get an actual Donkey Kong Jr PCB and hook it into my DK cab. After talking to my good buddy Aaron Truitt about it, he decided to sell me his board. It took a couple weeks but I was able to transfer my keyboard skills over to the arcade machine and I quickly achieved a new arcade DK Junior WR with a 1,461,700 score, besting the previous arcade WR held by Corey Chambers (1,425,900). A little later on, I upped that to 1,497,800.

At the time, I was pretty satisfied with achieving the Junior arcade record but I was also getting the itch to play DK again. It had been several months and I was really wanting to play, so I took my Junior PCB out and put my DK PCB back into my machine and went back to playing Junior on MAME again. Shortly after this, I dropped a couple more 1.5’s, including my MAME PB to this day of 1,533,100. My plan was absolutely to beat the overall world record, held by Phil Tudose at 1,555,500 using MAME. Side note: while I did end up taking my Junior PCB out and putting my DK PCB back in, I never did end up playing DK again at that point in time.

Now, we were talking on the phone the other day about the DK Junior MAME badge over at Donkey Kong Forum. Tell us a bit about these badges.

Haha! Yeah, that’s a bit of a silly story. Over at DKF, they have these cool little “achievement” badges that get added to your profile signature every time you accomplish one of them. For example, if you get 1 million points in DK, you get a cool 1M badge added. The same is true of all the world records. DK, DK Jr and Crazy Kong all have unique badges for both the Arcade and MAME WR’s for a total of 6 badges. Since I had achieved the DK Junior Arcade WR badge, I thought it’d be cool to also add the MAME WR badge to my profile. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t pull it off after about a month or so of trying and I also realized that chasing badges, as sweet as they are, can sort of derail your overall goals a bit. The simple story is that I merely thought achieving the DK Junior WR on arcade would carry more prestige than doing it on MAME despite the game being exactly the same on both. There’s just something really cool and fun about doing it on a real arcade machine. MAME is convenient and also the absolute best way to compete in these games and I strongly believe that any MAME player can transition to cab (and vice versa) easily without much of a learning curve as long as they’re serious about it. But of course, not everyone is gonna want to drop heaps of cash on one of those bad boys. I could talk about MAME vs arcade for days but I digress. 🙂

MAME is indeed a tremendous gift to the community. But like you say, records done on original arcade are seen as having more prestige. So, you switched back to the big box. What happened from there?

Yep – I put the Junior PCB back in the cab and I continued grinding. And during the months of May and June of 2023, my pace began to climb higher and higher. I was optimizing my gameplay in every way possible and busting my tail harder than I ever have. Most of my games were played offline but, funny enough, all of my big games were streamed live. It’s as if I needed to stream live to actually land a big one.

What was your playing schedule like, both for your offline games and your streamed games?

I work a full-time job as a software consultant from 8 to 5 Monday through Friday. However, despite the early work hours, my natural body clock has always steered toward being a night owl. So on Friday and Saturday Night, I will often find myself up until around 2 AM or so and usually around midnight during the work week. I live a pretty balanced life where I work, try to get to the gym at least 4 times a week and spend time with family and friends. I lead a pretty typical, boring life. When I stop working around 5 or 6 at night, I try to squeeze in my gym session or I may just go for a long walk or bike ride that day. To me, making sure I hit the weights, cardio and eat relatively well are extremely critical in optimizing my performance in the DK games. If I’m not absolutely on point in that regard, my gameplay suffers. I have a whole system in place that combines the aforementioned with stretching, supplementation, meditation, reading and other similar habits that, if I don’t do, I just feel like trash all the time. I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, to be honest. But I have to do them. Once I complete my workouts, I will eat, stretch and fire up a stream. Often, the stream will go at least two hours minimum and up to a maximum of around six. If I’m not streaming, I’m still probably playing at least five times a week and if I’m not playing, I’m practicing for 20 minutes at a time, watching better players’ gameplay or just bouncing around thoughts in my mind about how I can get better. It is a constant cycle of playing, practicing, failing, playing some more, failing more and eventually overcoming and achieving your goal. With these games in particular, you need to have an incredible amount of resilience to keep failing and keep getting back up, as all my fellow competitors are all too familiar with.

In June, I must have had at least 15 games get to 1 million+ on world record pace before bombing out or blowing it in some way. I kept choking over and over. I would die to the most fundamental things. It’s a funny thing knowing you have the ability to achieve something but your mind creates a mental block. I had experienced this sensation time and time again on Donkey Kong so it was familiar territory for me, but it’s never easy to get to the very last level of a game and blow your shot at world record.

That’s rough. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to cross a hurdle like that.

I’m a massive student of the mental game. I probably have at least 40 books on the subject. Often, I find that I know the solution to a problem (i.e., how to handle nerves, play under pressure, etc.) but executing is far more difficult. It’s easy to think that when crunch time comes, you’re going to simply work on your breathing exercises and that’ll keep the nerves at bay. Or that you’re going to remind yourself that you are not your ego – that thing in the back of your mind reminding you that you’re not good enough. Or, even worse, that you’re not worthy of world record. That you’re an imposter. That world records are reserved for other people. Of all of these ailments, feeling like an imposter has always been my biggest enemy. Fear of success, I believe they call it. Scared to go all the way and see what lies on the other end.

It dawned on me one day in late June. No mental tricks or attitude adjustments by themselves will get my goal for me. I needed to be ruthless and aggressive about it. These concepts might sound ridiculous for a stupid video game, but anyone who’s ever been in a similar position completely gets it. Sometimes, you just have to shut off all of your emotions completely and Work. Hard. There is a book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield that talks about this kind of thing. It was very eye-opening.

On the night of July 2nd, 2023, playing live on my Twitch, I had a great game going. I was at 1.2 million points with a big sac in the bank and 2 men in reserve. I was exactly where I wanted to be.

Until I wasn’t.

Slowly, painfully, I lost my two spare men. Weak death points. But I still had a chance… if I could just finish the game. But I couldn’t. I blew it on the springs stage of the final level of the game. Again.

By this time, it was midnight. I was tired. But it was also a 4-day weekend for me so that meant I wouldn’t have to go in to work the next day, which was a Monday. As I mentioned earlier, I am a bit of a night owl on the weekends and tend to gain energy during the later hours rather than losing it. On this night, I was tired, but I felt a surge of inspiration. I reminded myself that in order to be ruthless, that meant I had to actually follow through on that instead of just thinking about it. The night before, I had watched a video about a guy who ran 7 100-mile races over 7 weekends. I took a lot of heart from this. Everything is impossible until someone proves you can do it.

About 2 hours after my latest bust and at around 2:30 in the morning, I told myself it’s time to work. I turned on my stream and I went to town. I was very fatigued, parched (I try to avoid drinking water for big sessions since having to go during a game sucks) and just overall very exhausted. At some point during my run, the very generous Lord BBH dropped a nice 100-person raid into my channel, of which I am very thankful.

Clutch raid!!

This raid gave me good energy. Many of those people stuck around for the next couple of hours and by around 6:30 am, I had finally cracked the world record.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1862068085

That is amazing. 1,584,400 points. How did that feel?

It’s pretty cliché, but it did feel like a massive amount of weight was lifted off of me. Euphoric and cathartic simultaneously. While I had only been grinding the game hard for a fairly short period of time, it can feel like an eternity when you want something very badly. And I wanted this very badly… because I knew if I could crack my imposter syndrome, it would open the pathway for me to be able to achieve other things in my life. And the biggest thing I want to do in the gaming world is achieve the Donkey Kong world record. I feel that I am now free, mentally, to do so.

Well, with the highest respect to John McCurdy and everything he’s done on original Donkey Kong, many of us are rooting for you to ascend that mountain as well.

I have nothing but the highest praise for Serphy. He is an absolute legend and a guy I am grateful to call a friend. While we are both fierce competitors, I think we both sort of root for each other to do well and are happy when the other person succeeds. I can’t say enough good things about John. He’s a great dude and an incredible champion.

Sir Elliott, thank you tremendously for your time! It’s always great to catch up with you. And I hope people will appreciate the human details behind these numbers.

Thanks, man! It’s always fun to talk to you about this stuff. Just wanted to give a shoutout to Andrew Barrow and Dallas Taylor for allowing me to pick their brains on this game and, more importantly, for their friendship. Looking forward to that ersatz_cats DK killscreen!

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You can see this new Donkey Kong Junior world record here:

And don’t forget to follow Justin on Twitch and on YouTube:

https://www.twitch.tv/rayfinkel

https://www.youtube.com/@rayfinkel7239

UPDATE JUL 29, 2023: A few days after this interview was published, Justin received the following amazing gift in the mail, courtesy of Carl Sharkey (a.k.a. FirebirdTPG), commemorating this new record: