by ersatz_cats
Did you hear the news? Billy Mitchell lost his lawsuit! I know, I know, he declared victory anyway. You know, you really should stop believing everything he tells you.
I managed to get a quick update out the day Twin Galaxies posted the settlement statement, in the hopes of correcting some early misinformation. But now it’s time for a real, earnest, in depth examination of what this resolution means, and what the longer-term ramifications may be. No, the facts haven’t changed. Twin Galaxies still prevailed. They took the fight head on and won. Meanwhile, Billy Mitchell still didn’t get what he wanted. He hopes people don’t catch on to the fact he surrendered. And obviously, he’s still a proven cheater. If anything, the outlook may even be worse for him than I first reported.
“But ersatz! How can you say that? What about all the media messaging saying Billy won? What about the jury verdict we could have received confirming that Billy cheated? Why was Billy able to force TG to say his scores were ‘reinstated’? And what’s to stop Billy from suing everybody else who calls him a cheater?”
Oh, we are going to get into all of that. I know the easy narrative here is “TG blew a slam dunk case.” However, I’ve never been big on easy narratives. It is important to recognize when they’re correct, lest one fall into the trap of overly clever conspiracy theories. But it’s equally important to scrutinize these quick conclusions, and to understand when and how they miss the mark. And in this case, I believe the easy narrative is wrong. Twin Galaxies did defeat Billy Mitchell. They refused to play his game. They completely humiliated him. And, unlike Billy, they did get what they wanted.
I do appreciate the candor of folks replying to my previous updates, and I intend to show my respect by being equally frank with you all. While neither perfect nor ideal, this settlement was among the better outcomes this case could have had. I believe any negative reaction some folks have expressed is largely the result of initial confusion, unrealistic expectations, misunderstandings of legal nuance, and misguided defeatism, and I intend to illustrate exactly what I mean when I say those things. While there are others who, like myself, see this as a positive outcome, I will necessarily focus mostly on addressing the criticisms. I’ve seen the negativity, and I know this may be a hard sell for some of you, who were expecting to see a giant, cartoonish “L” get dropped on Billy’s head in the middle of town square. But it is my duty to help people understand why this outcome was good, maybe even great, but at the very least adequate, and possibly even necessary.
As you may have noticed, this update is so massive, I had to split it into two parts. Unfortunately, it will not be until “Part 2” that we get into the savory meat and potatoes of why the outcome was good. In the continued interest of being thorough, this installment will cover the last few filings and the final sequence of events, up to and including the known facts of the settlement itself. But that doesn’t mean we won’t have some fun today! There’s more judicial nonsense to poke holes in, and some new Team Billy buffoonery to laugh at. Oh, and while we’re at it, we’re going to dispel the notion that the Mighty Mister Tash came away from this battle as anything but a boss.
THE LONGEST RECAP
I’ve been skimping on my recaps lately, but since the case is over, and since this two-part post could end up serving as the definitive analysis of what the hell happened, I’m gonna make up for that today, and take us all the way back to the beginning. Skip to the next section if you think you’re already fully read up to our previous update.
When Billy Mitchell was a teenager in the early 1980s, he became a favored member of the inner circle at Iowa arcade and competitive scorekeeper Twin Galaxies, then owned by Walter Day. Billy and Walter went on to become close friends and business partners, with Billy himself taking over ownership of the TG arcade later in the decade. In 1999, Walter’s Twin Galaxies was instrumental in falsely promoting a claimed Pac-Man high score as “History’s first perfect game of Pac-Man”. This netted Billy rounds of favorable media as a competitive gamer, which TG and Walter then benefitted from by association. In September of that year, Billy was invited to appear with Namco founder Masaya Nakamura at the Tokyo Game Show, where he was given a plaque congratulating him on his claimed perfect score. However, Billy began lying to the public and claiming that this plaque was a “Player of the Century” award from Namco and/or the Japanese gaming industry at large. (You can read much more on this saga in our series “The Video Game Fraud of the century.”)
Billy was later featured in the 2007 movie King of Kong, which inspired renewed interest in the competitive Donkey Kong scene. Over time, among these new masters of the game, the fraudulent nature of Billy Mitchell’s old “direct feed” videotaped DK submissions became an open secret. In 2017, when Twin Galaxies opened a dispute system for challenging old high scores, Donkey Kong Forum moderator Jeremy Young opened a dispute over a 2010 score of Billy’s, on the basis that some ancillary media supposedly filmed at the location of this score was falsified. While the fake “board swap” video was compelling, new TG owner Jace Hall did not consider Billy’s video stunt to be sufficient proof that the score itself was bogus.
However, on February 2nd, 2018, Jeremy followed up those initial observations with the publication of detailed technical examinations of the way various Donkey Kong stages are loaded onto the screen. Most notably, it was discovered that these screens load differently on original arcade than they do on the emulator MAME. To the surprise of most people, surviving copies of Billy Mitchell’s old score submissions did not match original arcade, which Billy claimed to have played his scores on, but were instead an exact match for MAME. This was the dead giveaway, the smoking gun, that Billy’s critics had searched for all these years.
After two months of exhaustive tests by multiple parties, the core MAME transition evidence was confirmed. Most notably, Billy had brought onto his research team an independent technician named Carlos Pineiro, who evaluated the dispute assertions using what Billy claimed was his own, original equipment. In the end, Carlos himself was forced to acknowledge that there was no way Billy’s tapes could have been produced using original, unmodified arcade equipment. Soon after, Twin Galaxies posted their conclusion, announcing that they had removed all of Billy Mitchell’s scores (including scores for other games), and had banned him from future submissions. Guinness World Records followed suit shortly thereafter.
Days after the dispute verdict, Billy published a video filmed in the hallways of the Midwest Gaming Classic, wherein he promised transparency and “professional due diligence” in proving his alleged innocence. This was followed up in June with an angry tirade at Southern-Fried Gaming Expo, where he waved around a stack of secret papers, and accused Jace of promoting the dispute to generate website traffic. As months went on, it became clear that no meaningful rebuttal to the technical evidence would be forthcoming. Instead, Billy made a big show of streaming Donkey Kong on Twitch, achieving scores approximating two of his old contested “world records”. Meanwhile, more evidence against Billy’s claims emerged in the form of a 2006 MTV interview. The footage of Billy’s game play seen in this interview showed MAME transitions over a decade before anyone had discovered these technical anomalies.
Rumors of legal retaliation became reality in September 2019 when Billy, represented by California firm Manning & Kass, issued legal threats to both Twin Galaxies and to Guinness, demanding reinstatement of Billy’s fraudulent scores. Twin Galaxies published this legal threat for all to see, along with a packet of “evidence” Billy’s attorneys claimed would prove their client’s innocence. The “evidence” consisted of misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and idle speculation, which was promptly debunked by experts not affiliated with Mitchell. Also, various other lies in the document convinced David Race, once a close ally of Billy’s, that Billy had been taking advantage of him. This compelled David to begin contributing to the body of evidence proving Billy’s guilt.
The following year, Billy followed through with his ill-advised legal threats, and served Twin Galaxies with a defamation lawsuit in California. TG promptly summoned opposition, and began posting public filings in the original dispute thread. Meanwhile, Billy did not follow through on threats to sue Guinness, as the two parties had already quietly brokered a settlement deal. In June 2020, it was announced that Guinness had chosen to fully reinstate all of Billy’s contested scores, and even offered him more free accolades as well. Billy touted this reinstatement as vindication, while his attorney used it as rhetorical evidence as they continued to pursue their lawsuit against Twin Galaxies.
Meanwhile, TG was not the only entity to draw Billy’s litigious ire. Also in 2020, Billy filed a parallel lawsuit against Twin Galaxies in Florida, as well as a lawsuit against Jeremy Young and J.C. Harrist of Donkey Kong Forum, and another against prominent YouTuber Apollo Legend. Most of these lawsuits were self-represented. The Florida TG suit was dismissed over Billy’s objections, after Billy failed to serve the paperwork. Billy later withdrew the DKF suit of his own accord. However, Billy procured the services of an actual attorney for his lawsuit against Apollo Legend. Despite Apollo’s initial defiance, it was announced not long afterward that Billy and Apollo had settled out-of-court, with most of the terms undisclosed. At the end of the year, Apollo chose to end his own life.
In October 2020, two key rulings came down in the main Twin Galaxies lawsuit in California. TG had filed to strike the lawsuit under the state’s “Anti-SLAPP” law. (These are laws designed to curb meritless lawsuits whose only purpose is to harass critics and stifle free speech.) We’ll get into the legal nuance of this in “Part 2”, as it’s relevant to one aspect of TG’s choice to settle. But in short, the court ruled against TG’s anti-SLAPP motion, deciding that Billy’s case met a minimal merit standard. In other words, he was at least presenting the façade of an actual defamation suit, and not just a bunch of shredded newspaper. Billy announced this ruling as a triumph, leading with the words “I officially defeated Twin Galaxies in court”, which led some to believe and report that Billy had won his entire case outright. However, what Billy’s announcement left out was that the court also ordered him to deposit an $81,225 bond as an out-of-state litigant. The fact that the court granted the entire amount requested by TG was seen by some (including myself) as an indication the judge was not as impressed with Billy’s “prima facie” case as Billy wanted the public to believe.
Twin Galaxies lodged an unsuccessful appeal of the anti-SLAPP ruling, resulting in a year-long delay. But during this time, TG also went on the offensive, filing a countersuit filled with allegations against Billy Mitchell. We’ll get into the details of this countersuit, also in “Part 2”, but the accusations primarily revolve around fraud in the sale of TG to Jace Hall, based on the fact Billy’s Donkey Kong scores were invalid. Interestingly, Twin Galaxies founder Walter Day was added as a co-defendant in TG’s countersuit, formally drawing him into the legal battle as well.
During the anti-SLAPP appeal, the case was reassigned to Judge Wendy Chang. Chang denied competing motions for monetary sanctions over that appeal, which moved the case into its “discovery” phase. In short, both sides of a lawsuit like this are expected to furnish documents and private communications, and to answer written interrogatories. As one example, since Billy had claimed TG’s score dispute statements damaged his Rickey’s hot sauce business, Billy was now obligated to provide bank statements to prove those damages. While things like financial records were kept confidential, TG was able to provide some other documents and interrogatories to journalists such as myself. As a result, the public learned of various preposterous claims of Billy’s, including that TG’s statements had somehow given him a hernia, and that his doctor allegedly refused to see him specifically because he cheated at Donkey Kong. This also led to the publication of Team Billy’s private communications with Guinness, demonstrating that their “reinstatement” of Billy was a total sham.
In January 2023, Billy Mitchell’s sworn deposition was conducted in his hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Despite his attempts to scour the video from the Internet, you can still watch it in full here. It was at this time that Billy introduced his new story that he was actually given two Pac-Man plaques at the Tokyo Game Show in 1999. One of these was the same plaque the public had always seen, congratulating him on his claimed perfect score. However, Billy now claimed there was a second, secret plaque, which looked identical to the first one, but which included the words “Player of the Century”. Among many other lies, Billy also notably claimed that he received none of the money from the 2014 sale of Twin Galaxies from Walter Day to Jace Hall. Oh yeah, and Billy swore he would never ever ever play Donkey Kong using anything but a stock black joystick, before being shown this photo:
Further depositions exposed many more flaws in Billy Mitchell’s case, and in his testimony. Valerie Saunders, one of the organizers at the mortgage brokers convention at which Billy claimed to do one of his scores, testified that Billy’s game began and concluded within the span of about fifteen minutes. (The supposed tape of this game lasts over two hours.) Josh Ryan, the technician who set up that machine, also testified that no “direct feed” could have been recorded using the game present at that event. Meanwhile, countering Billy’s testimony, Walter Day swore under oath that he had given Billy $33,000 of the money from the 2014 sale of TG, and that Billy asked Walter to keep that fact a secret. Also, a photo of two Pac-Man plaques was disclosed, showing that someone from Billy’s camp had fabricated two replicas of his 1999 Pac-Man plaque in an apparent attempt to justify the lie that there were two such plaques all along.
While the facts were clear, both about Billy’s testimonial lies and about his attempts to defraud the court, Judge Wendy Chang seemed unmoved, and denied a major motion from TG seeking sanctions up to and including the outright termination of Billy’s case. Instead, Chang focused mostly on Team Billy’s allegations of inappropriate conduct on the part of TG’s lawyer, David Tashroudian. (More on that a bit later.)
Tash, however, pressed on. Billy’s secret payment from Walter Day led to yet another incongruity for Tash to pursue. Remember how Billy was required to turn over his Rickey’s bank statements? While Billy’s attorneys had been crying rivers over alleged discovery violations from TG, subsequent disclosures revealed that Billy had sneakily tried to withhold the statements which evidenced this secret payment. Tash filed another motion for sanctions, this time asking the court to certify as fact that Billy received the $33,000 payment he had tried to hide.
Meanwhile, Team Billy were hot under the collar about the ongoing publication of discovery and deposition testimony. In December, they successfully compelled Judge Chang to designate all such material confidential going forward. Chang denied an attempt by Team Billy to outright disqualify Tash from representing Twin Galaxies, but still entertained approving a formal disciplinary referral. And when compelled to reprimand Billy’s side for their blatant discovery violations, Chang decided that she hadn’t really ordered Billy to provide the contested bank statements after all, even though she totally did. Following this, Tash filed for sanctions against Billy yet again, this time in light of new evidence that Billy had lied about being a director for the International Video Game Hall of Fame – a lie which falsely implied that the fake plaques he “donated” were out of his reach. Meanwhile, Walter Day was quietly dropped as a co-defendant in TG’s countersuit, for reasons undisclosed.
OLD NEWS
Even with that recap out of the way, we’re still not caught up to the settlement itself. There were a few more filings and loose ends coming in after our previous January 5th update, some of which do bear relevance to how things ultimately transpired.
First up, after the weekend of the 6th and 7th finished, the court site finally updated to include Tash’s Jan. 4th reply brief on the topic of sanctions:
Right away, Tash digs in hard on the fact that neither Billy himself nor any of his crooked friends are willing to actually testify to the fake plaques, because doing so would require them to perjure themselves:
The only “evidence” being offered from Billy’s side is a declaration from his attorney Kristina Ross, asserting things which she had been told by others. Of course, this isn’t admissible, since she isn’t testifying to anything of her own personal knowledge. (In court-speak, they call that “hearsay”.) Tash goes on to address various other bits of technical bullshit, and to remind the court again that Billy lied about being an IVGHOF director, while running through the full sequence of events one more time:
This timeline conclusively shows that Plaintiff used Ms. Carrell, Mr. Grunwald, and Mr. Johnson to stage the discovery of his Namco plaques at the Bridge View Center. Plaintiff then used his attorneys to misrepresent the provenance of the Photograph. This is clear fabrication of evidence. Plaintiff does not deny the timeline nor does he offer any competing version of the events because doing so would necessarily be perjurious. Defendant begs this Court to see through Plaintiff’s smoke and mirror distraction and construe the facts the only way possible – that Plaintiff is committing fraud on this Court.
Next up, we have an “Order to show cause” brief, filed by Billy’s side on January 5th:
This was part of their campaign to pursue disciplinary action against Tash, which followed their failed attempt to have him disqualified from the case outright. Yours truly was a subject of conversation, yet again:
If you recall, Tash had asserted that his communications with me were privileged based on something called “work product doctrine”. I’m not going to share those communications of course, but I will say there’s nothing meaningfully relevant among them. Above, you see Kristina Ross arguing, based on Jace’s deposition testimony, that I was not formally employed by Tash Law Group and was not compensated for my work – both of which are accurate statements. Thus, Ross argues, “work product doctrine” would not apply. (As it’s no longer important to this case, I’ll leave it to the legal scholars to decide if Ross’ interpretation is accurate.)
Also – and this is another thing that could be considered relevant to later events – we learn that Jace admitted in deposition that the damages asked for in the countersuit (a.k.a. the “cross-complaint”) were the totals of Billy’s cheated Donkey Kong scores and his claimed 1999 Pac-Man score. Upon further questioning, Jace reportedly admitted that these numbers were chosen to, as Ross quotes Jace, “send a message”. (To be clear, I don’t trust any selective quoting from anyone affiliated with Billy Mitchell, but it may be a long time before we discover the context around that alleged quote.) Thus, Ross argues the countersuit is illegitimate, citing legal statutes forbidding litigation “presented primarily for an improper purpose”.
Lastly, Ross argued again that Jace’s auto-delete settings on Signal constitute unlawful spoliation of evidence, while implying that Tash must also somehow be culpable for this:
Before we move on, if you’re double-checking my work as you should always do, you might notice that this Jan. 5th filing from Billy is not listed on the court website. (Go here and search for case #19STCV12592 under Stanley Mosk Courthouse to see this list of filings.) It just so happens, there is a good reason why this filing is not listed, and thus is no longer available – except of course from those who, like myself, acquired it before it was de-listed. But we’ll get to that in a moment.
These attacks prompted a very personal declaration from Mr. Tash, which began with the header “Apology to the court”:
Obviously, I don’t represent Tash, but speaking only for myself, both Jerry Byrum and Isaiah “Triforce” Johnson very much were engaged in a plot to facilitate the fabrication of fraudulent evidence to assist Billy’s lawsuit. Tash’s references to Triforce’s religion were uncalled for, but otherwise, Tash did nothing wrong. He was pursuing the truth from hostile and uncooperative witnesses, although Judge Chang clearly didn’t see things that way.
Tash continued by describing his background as the son of an Iranian immigrant, as well as the racial discrimination his family has faced from the days of the Iran hostage crisis up through 9/11. Tash also described the pro bono (meaning unpaid) legal representation he does for the poor and elderly, while urging Judge Chang not to hold his client responsible for his own supposed lapses in judgment. And while Tash was clear to maintain his apologetic tone throughout the declaration, he also cited legal arguments as to why his conduct is being improperly framed by Billy’s attorneys, and why it does not warrant a disciplinary referral.
Toward the end of Tash’s declaration, we get some more insight into the December 1st hearing. If you recall, in my previous update, I highlighted two quotes which Judge Chang dubiously attributed to the Mighty Mister Tash:
As I remarked at the time, I was skeptical of the exact provenance of these quotes, and how they were presented:
I’m a bit curious to know how this December 1st hearing went, and what exactly the full context was behind these quotes. Did Tash say “I respectfully submit that anyone who doesn’t see that Mr. Mitchell and his friends are conspiring to hide away their fake evidence needs to get real”? Did he drunkenly tell the judge “Get real, you ******* ****”? There’s a big difference between those. Also, is that quote “would be a good boy” verbatim? How does that even work? Like, how does one say those exact words about one’s self? “I would be a good boy if… I had… candy”? Maybe Tash said “I will be a good boy”. Or maybe the words “good” and “boy” were uttered in sequence and the word “would” is part of an undeclared paraphrase on the part of the author. I know I’m just a nobody out in the Internet wilderness, but I would really appreciate a bit more academic rigor from whoever’s writing this bullshit.
Well, it seems my skepticism of Wendy Chang’s diligence was well-founded, yet again. As Tash describes it, the Dec. 1st hearing featured a rare in-person appearance from Big Tony Ellrod himself, a remote appearance by Walter Day’s lawyer Rob Cohen, and even the return of ol’ Greasy James Gibbons (Billy’s previous attorney, who left the firm):
A-ha! So Tash did not, in fact, tell anyone representing the court to “get real”. What he actually said was “Let’s be real”. As in “Let’s be real, the plaintiff and his friends are conspiring to hide away their phony evidence”, or “Let’s be real, Judge Wendy Chang is a real piece of work.” (Obviously, that last remark is strictly my own.)
I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a position where you have to say “Okay, I did something wrong, and I apologize for that thing I actually did, but I also have to be clear that I did not do the thing you are describing.” Lemme tell you, it’s not a fun spot to be in. But reading Tash’s declaration, I believe he navigated those waters adeptly.
Tash concluded his declaration with his thoughts on Team Billy’s choice to focus on and attack him personally – a subject we will definitely be returning to:
I know this will not stop. I am now Plaintiff’s and his counsel’s target. The facts support Defendant’s defense and now Plaintiff realizes that. He also realizes that he has dug himself into a hole by lying in discovery. I do not say that lightly. He has lied to me about receiving $33,000 from Walter Day in connection with the sale of Twin Galaxies. He has lied to me about being a director of the International Video Game Hall of Fame. He has fabricated a second Namco plaque and evidence surrounding its discovery. He has lied about playing Donkey Kong for Carlos Pineiro to do technical testing even after he was confronted with a video of him doing that. He has lied about Josh Ryan setting up a recording device at the 2007 Mortgage Brokers Convention when Josh Ryan who was subpoenaed by Plaintiff categorically denied that ever happened. And the technical analysis shows that the videotaped recordings of his score in questions could not have come from original unmodified Donkey Kong hardware. The outlook is bleak for Plaintiff so I am the target now. Plaintiff is chomping at the bit to see me referred to the State Bar and relent. I just hope the Court sees that.
On January 8th, Tash supplemented his opposition to Team Billy’s disciplinary referral with another new filing:
Despite all the fussing and bellyaching from Billy’s side about mean old Mr. Tash including supposedly confidential testimony from Walter Day in a public filing (testimony that wasn’t properly labeled as confidential anyway), you might be shocked to learn that Billy’s half-assed attorneys were quick to do exactly what they were accusing Tash of:
Unfortunately for Ms. Ross, Jace’s deposition is currently confidential, because of the very expanded Protective Order her firm was pushing for. And yet, as you saw earlier, she just threw Jace’s remarks into public filings like it was no bigs.
To be fair though, Team Billy’s carelessness would seem to be contagious. Later on, Tash addressed Ross’ attempts to paint the countersuit as meritless on the basis of the silly dollar amounts chosen, arguing that the “prayer” (the damages requested) are not an essential part of the “cause of action”, and thus alone are not disqualifying. Tash included more of Jace’s deposition testimony to justify why the actual damages incurred are far in excess of what was being asked for. Unfortunately, Tash’s own attempt at redacting Jace’s testimony was haphazard, and easily defeated using Windows Notepad and a simple copy-paste. The “redacted” portion of the filing reads as follows:
Mr. Hall testified at deposition that Defendant obtained an investment of $14,000,000 or $15,000,000 from Vision E-Sports in 2018 based on an enterprise valuation of between $25,000,000 to $30,000,000. Mr. Hall testified that the $6,000,000 damages figure is approximate, but less than, the actual damages that Defendant has sustained. He estimated that the damages derive from the loss of brand value Defendant has sustained from its score database being associated with fraudulent scores. After all, the whole of Defendant’s value and appeal as the foremost authority of video game achievement is based on the accuracy of the scores maintained in its database. Mr. Hall also testified that the damages figure is related to the amount of lost deal revenue attributable to Defendant’s association with the discovery of Plaintiff’s fabricated scores in the score database and the attendant damage to reputation. Accordingly, contrary to Plaintiff’s unsubstantiated assertion, there is a factual basis for the prayer for relief.
I don’t believe Billy’s attorneys ever picked up on this redaction oversight from Tash. On January 10th, Ross filed a brief… brief, basically saying “Whoopsie-daisy! Yeah that other thing totally should have been filed under seal. My bad.”
Ross cited “the intricacies of the protective order” for her “inadvertent breach”. However, given all the ruckus her side raised over literally the exact same fashion of publication of Walter Day’s testimony, I remain skeptical that these “intricacies” were really as perplexing as she would perhaps like others to believe. Regardless, this is probably why that Jan. 5th filing later disappeared from the court site. Good thing you have folks like me, willing to air these lawyers’ mistakes for the world to see.
At any rate, the January 11th hearing was shaping up to be quite a doozy! A massive disciplinary referral of Tash was on the line. Various bits of discovery were still being contested. And don’t forget that motion for sanctions was still on the table!
However, none of these things came to fruition. A settlement agreement was reached the evening before that hearing. (More on how we know that timeframe later.) And so the parties arrived at court that Thursday, and happily announced to Judge Chang that both sides had come to terms.
For those curious, yes the “Potential Disciplinary Referral” against Tash was officially vacated. Curiously, by that reading, it would seem the application to seal Ross’ “order to show cause” brief was vacated as well, and yet the offending filing was removed from the court site anyway. Who knows?
Basically, the judge will review the matter again on March 4th. The parties need not even show up. As long as the appropriate paperwork is filed, the case will be disposed altogether. Indeed, requests for dismissal have already been entered by both parties, meaning the matter is all but officially concluded:
Hillel Aron of Courthouse News Service described the scene that morning, with Tash and Billy shaking hands outside the courtroom. Unsurprisingly, Judge Chang sounds more relieved than anyone, with Aron quoting her as saying:
Oh my word. Can I tell you how happy I am?
(For what it’s worth, I did reach out to Mr. Aron, but I was not able to discover any details which were not already public.)
Many onlookers were quick to assume that any kind of settlement must have been a negative for Twin Galaxies, despite none of the terms being revealed at that time. But not everyone was so pessimistic. As one of the top comments on Reddit remarked, shortly after the settlement was first announced:
However, the cynicism was dramatically magnified after the publication of a stipulated statement on the Twin Galaxies website. Much of this announcement consisted of backstory on the scores and the dispute, as well as an introduction to a “Dr. Zyda” (who we’ll be talking about later). However, I think it’s fair to say the following paragraph was what drew most of the community’s ire:
In fair consideration of the expert opinion provided by Dr. Zyda on behalf of Mr. Mitchell, and consistent with Twin Galaxies’ dedication to the meticulous documentation and preservation of video game score history, Twin Galaxies shall heretofore reinstate all of Mr. Mitchell’s scores as part of the official historical database on Twin Galaxies’ website.
Understandably, people immediately freaked out. “What in the name of Eyewuhtwahknee happened? Why is Twin Galaxies ‘reinstating’ Billy Mitchell’s scores?” However, those who knew with absolute certainty that there was no way Jace Hall’s Twin Galaxies would ever reinstate Billy Mitchell’s cheated scores were able to quickly confirm that this did not happen. And from there, it became a question of which narrative would take hold…
WHO’S TO BLAME?
Speaking of narratives, before we go any further, I’d like to clear the air about one recurring theme in particular. Folks were anticipating a courtroom obliteration of Billy Mitchell, and thus when that did not happen, it’s fair for them to assume – initially, at least – that something must have gone wrong, and that there therefore must be someone to blame for this. Don’t misunderstand me, when we get to “Part 2”, I do still intend to convince you, my intelligent and attractive readers, that this settlement was in fact a good thing. I should also point out, for the record, that sometimes things just go wrong without it being anyone’s “fault”, so to speak. However, for the sake of completion, let’s explore this question of who’s responsible for the anticlimactic nature of our outcome.
Of the fingers I’ve seen pointed, most have been in the direction of this man:
This is David Tashroudian, Twin Galaxies’ attorney, who early on I dubbed “The Mighty Mister Tash”. Sure, I was having a bit of fun casting the good guy as a fighting champ, while giving Billy’s lawyer the nickname “Greasy”. I had not yet met Mr. Tash at that time, but I knew this legal battle with Billy Mitchell would be a real slobber-knocker (figuratively speaking), and given how the initial dispute played out, I anticipated that Jace would only put his money behind an attorney if they were up to the challenge.
The fatal flaw of the “Tash botched the case” narrative is that it relies almost entirely around his alleged “misconduct”, as illustrated in recent filings from Billy’s attorneys. (Read this if you want to know the full details and backstory.) You can’t say “Tash should have filed a good anti-SLAPP motion”, because he did. You can’t say “Tash didn’t ask the right questions at Billy’s deposition”, because he did. You can’t say “Tash should have filed to terminate Billy’s case”, because he did. You can’t say “Tash should have worked more to expose Billy’s fake plaques”, given how he collected testimony from Bridge View Center administrators, and added an expert witness analysis, and reviewed hundreds of hours of CCTV footage, and pursued Billy’s lying cohorts. And even after things hit a rough patch, you can’t say “Tash didn’t continue seeking sanctions against Billy and new testimony proving Billy’s lies”, because he did, right up until the end.
The only strategic criticism of Tash’s work I’ve seen which doesn’t point back to the topic of “misconduct” in some way is the suggestion that Tash and TG should not have filed for all these sanctions along the way, that they should have instead kept quiet until trial, where victory would be assured. (I will generously assume this “keep quiet” approach would have applied strictly to courtroom proceedings, and not to the published deposition testimony we were all happy to see.) However, especially in this case, I don’t believe this is a realistic approach – not when the other side is instigating so many pre-trial conflicts. A judge is going to influence your case, and they will either do so based on a judicial assessment of the strict technical merits of these pre-trial motions, or on their personal sense of which side is full of shit. Either way, you lose by allowing the opposition to dominate that conversation. Tash’s filings were relevant, and were properly focused on actual misconduct and falsified testimony relevant to the case, whereas all Billy’s attorneys could conjure were trumped up grievances and distractions.
But let’s set any Monday morning quarterbacking aside, and stick to the question of “misconduct”. How could anyone possibly say there isn’t at least some merit to the allegations? After all, Mr. Tash literally apologized to the court, and the only reason anyone would ever do that is because they were definitely in the wrong… right?
You may already see where I’m going with this, but allow me to hit the nail squarely on the head. The entire reason Tash’s conduct became a topic of discussion was because Billy’s attorneys made it one, and they had their own agenda for doing so. In the context of zealous advocacy, there was very little Tash did that I would consider worthy of any rebuke, and nothing rising to the career-altering level Manning & Kass were pursuing. As I’ve discussed previously, their disqualification motion was a slapdash stew of whatever scraps and leftovers they could assemble into the appearance of a grievance. From their perspective, with regard to the auto-deleting Signal messages, it didn’t matter that they were trying to punish Tash for the conduct of his client. In the case of the overlooked Jace Hall messages to Paul Dean and Steve Harris, it didn’t matter that Billy’s attorneys were clearly trying to set up a “gotcha” moment which they could then blow out of proportion. It certainly didn’t matter to them that their associates, who were whining about Tash’s text messages, were the ones being dishonest. It didn’t even matter that Ms. Ross later had to admit she and Billy Junior had mishandled some of the supposedly missing discovery themselves. What was important, from their perspective, was that the narrative of Tash the out-of-control bad guy had been asserted.
There are two aspects to these attacks on Mr. Tashroudian which I ask folks to consider. First, notice that Manning & Kass did not seek strictly monetary sanctions against Tash. Granted, they probably knew the gaming community could easily fundraise those costs in his defense, but I think the real reason they weren’t seeking a standard reprimand for standard misconduct is because they knew this was not genuine misconduct, and they were neither offended nor professionally concerned. They went after Tash personally, for reasons we’ll dive into in “Part 2”. The second thing I ask you to consider is the strategic value of this ploy. For starters, by taking every opportunity to put the focus on Tash and his “misconduct”, they were taking focus away from their lying fraudster of a client and his own attempts to abuse the court. But more interestingly, all of this bellyaching did net Team Billy a key concession. I think we can safely assume Billy sought to delay trial as much as possible. And this disqualification motion achieved exactly that delay, first pushing the trial’s start from November to January, and then again from January to April. (For those keeping score, it could be said this case probably would have gone to trial, if not for the delays resulting from this make-believe disqualification motion.)
When dealing with attorneys, you have to keep in mind that they are advocates first and foremost. It’s not an accident that lawyers, as a stereotype, are inclined to tell you something is definitely this, or definitely that. That’s what they do all day! They are poker players whose cards are all subjective. Thus, they are inclined to exaggerate minor oversights, as if they’ve never seen anything like this before. But it’s still the judge’s job to expect this advocacy, and to not let one side’s narrative railroad the truth. And that is what failed to happen here.
If anyone is going to discuss blame, they need to acknowledge one thing above all else: Judge Wendy Chang should have terminated Billy’s frivolous, harassing lawsuit full of lies when she had the chance. She had multiple golden opportunities to at least push the case in that direction – the fraudulent testimony in Billy’s anti-SLAPP response, the fake plaques and the shell game to conceal them, the blatant bank statement chicanery, all sorts of various lies from Billy that continued getting exposed, etc. To be clear, it’s not the judge’s job to act as the jury (the “finder of fact”), but it’s also a gross dereliction for her to ignore a lying plaintiff’s direct abuse of the court itself. That sort of practice only encourages more such abuse, and punishes exactly the sort of innocent people the courts are ostensibly there to protect. While I was reluctant to assume the worst at the time, I do now believe there’s a good chance Judge Chang didn’t even bother reading some of the filings, opting instead to seize on any arcane technicality she could to avoid making serious judgments – sometimes going so far as to invent such technicalities purely of her own devising. Whereas TG may have had a difficult decision to make, weighing the costs and benefits of going to trial versus the benefits of an imperfect settlement, Wendy Chang’s decision should not have been difficult at all. Sure, you have to play the game that unfolds before you, and thus an attorney like Mr. Tash has to be prepared for someone like Judge Chang, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach to every magistrate one may encounter.
In this light, we can make simple sense of Billy’s actions. Jeremy Young didn’t tolerate Billy’s bullshit. The DKF and TG communities didn’t tolerate Billy’s bullshit. Jace Hall and the Mighty Mister Tash didn’t tolerate Billy’s bullshit. And once they had discovered they’d been lied to, Carlos Pineiro, Steve Kleisath, and David Race didn’t tolerate Billy’s bullshit. But as Billy does, he just kept appealing to higher and higher authorities, discarding anyone who held him accountable, until he found someone in a position of power who would indulge his fraud. We can add the amount of attention Chang paid to the nothing burger of Tash’s “misconduct” to the list of strikes against her. In the end, Billy could not have asked for a more favorable judge – one who does not seem to have been malicious, per se, but who he and his attorneys were able to manipulate.
And this is where we circle back around to Tash’s apology. In retrospect, I believe the tone of the case changed significantly at the Dec. 1st hearing. From the available descriptions, it sounds as though Tash walked into that proceeding initially defiant in the face of Team Billy’s accusations of impropriety – after all, Team Billy were the ones mocking the court with their lies – only for Tash to quickly discover that Judge Chang was far more offended at Tash’s aggressive conduct than at Team Billy’s blatant chicanery. While I was not in attendance, I can trust Tash’s apparent on-the-spot assessment that this required a sharp turn of demeanor, resulting in the “get real” and “good boy” dichotomy Chang hyperbolized in her December ruling. Tash’s later apology flowed directly from that fountainhead. It’s not that the apology was insincere, or that Tash wasn’t a bit overzealous with his messages to Byrum and Triforce. It’s that he astutely read the room, and saw the need to do what was best for his client, which is what any quality attorney should do.
With all of that said, if we are going to shine a spotlight on Judge Chang and her misadministration of the case, then it would only be fair to inquire as to how any potential bias of hers may have taken hold in the first place.
I appreciate that I haven’t seen anyone blame yours truly for any dissatisfaction with the case’s outcome, despite Ross’ fervent attempts to connect TG and Tash to my journalism discussing their case. (Although this could merely be a function of nobody knowing or caring who the Hell I am, lol.) But I do think it’s fair to explore the following question: Is it possible that my writing about Judge Chang soured her on TG’s position, and influenced her to rule against the very case I was supporting? She was certainly aware of my update titled “Judge Wendy Chang skips justice day”, given that Billy’s attorneys attached it to a later filing as an exhibit. So is my work the underlying cause of this speculated shift in tone? Am I perhaps even the reason TG chose to abandon their countersuit and settle out of court? Was it really worth the memes after all?
Of course, we’re going to set aside the idealist notion that judges should be ruling on matters of law and factual merit, and not out of things like personal spite. Also, I think it would be obvious that neither TG nor their attorneys would particularly want me putting the judge overseeing their case on blast, and that I was speaking strictly for myself in my role as an independent journalist.
One thing I should point out in my defense is that I never so much as named Judge Chang until I had a reason to. This changed in September, when Tash filed a motion to terminate Billy’s case outright, based on the fake plaque chicanery. Chang’s ruling later that month was astonishingly bad. While there’s no way for me to prove this now, I can attest that my coverage of her would have changed significantly in either of the two following scenarios:
- If her ruling had at least met TG’s requests halfway, i.e. “I’m not going to terminate Mitchell’s case entirely, but this is highly concerning, and does warrant compelling Mr. Mitchell to sit for a second deposition”, or;
- If she had balanced concern for Team Billy’s claimed “separate statement” technicality with some urgency as to the facts, i.e. “Technically, the filing is procedurally deficient, but the facts being illustrated are alarming, and so this court is disposed to rule favorably as soon as a valid motion is submitted.”
Judge Wendy Chang did not care, either to give the filings her proper attention, or to reprimand Billy’s blatant misuse of the court. And while we can debate the practical merits of speaking too much truth about those who wield power over others, I do believe my reporting accurately reflected Chang’s lack of interest. Perhaps my coverage, once brought to her attention, did exacerbate some downward spiral in her demeanor. But I can objectively say I was not the instigator of any such rancor. Indeed, I believe Judge Chang’s continued poor stewardship of the law only serves to validate my earlier skepticism.
I’ll let others come to their own judgments on how my reporting may have influenced the proceedings. Since I am satisfied with the settlement, I’m not terribly concerned what those judgments are. But I can offer this hypothetical exercise: Let’s say, prior to my choice to focus on Judge Chang’s rulings, a time portal had opened up in my path, and out stepped my future self, with a warning: “If you so much as name Judge Chang, or criticize her in any way, she’s going to rule against Twin Galaxies at every opportunity, and she will do it just to spite you and to punish you for besmirching her name.” In that wild scenario, as catatonically stupid as it would’ve been, I would have found a way to somehow continue my public coverage of the case, to the extent I could do so without addressing these forbidden topics. It would have been quite an awkward spot to be in, and I think would have damaged my credibility as an unafraid and sincere purveyor of truth. Most importantly though, I would not have felt the least bit responsible if I ultimately did not succeed in toeing that line. And while each of you are entitled to your own judgments, I do not feel responsible now.
While I may feel only incidentally compelled to come to my own defense, I do wish to sternly reiterate my rejection of the framing and focus around Tash’s supposed “misconduct”. You wouldn’t just trust whatever Billy Mitchell tells you. Nor would you necessarily believe something some attorney asserts (doubly so if that lawyer is working for Billy). And while I have no ill opinion of judges in general, you shouldn’t be trusting anything Wendy Chang tells you, either. So why would you believe something just because the three of them agree with each other?
In fact, rather than being the reason they “lost” the case, both Jace Hall and the Mighty Mister Tash are what made this a case in the first place. Have you ever seen a lawsuit with as much free information as this one? Early on, TG themselves were publishing their filings and declarations, as well as the typically private legal threats Billy’s lawyers sent them. No “normal” attorney or client would have risked their defense or their countersuit by inviting public attention and involvement the way they did. People wanted a formal trial, which would have been confined to a single courtroom in Los Angeles, and would have been restricted to certain designated topics. But what we actually got was far better: A fully public spectacle with all the evidence out in the open, for everyone to access. (Who knows, perhaps the plan always was to drag Billy through the public mud until he threw in the towel himself.) The lawyer who gave us all these things, and the lawyer who brokered this settlement, are a package deal. Oh, and even if this matter was conducted as a “normal” case with a “standard” attorney and a “typical” client, all behind closed doors, that still would not have stopped the case from ending the way it did anyway. Indeed, the fact that the lawsuit ended with an out-of-court settlement was about the only “normal” thing about this case.
“I AGREE TO YOUR TERMS”
Okay, it’s time to actually talk about the settlement itself. The actual written agreement is confidential, and thus some terms will remain undisclosed. However, the most important aspects are publicly observable.
First of all, Billy Mitchell’s scores were not reinstated on the Donkey Kong leaderboard. You can look for yourself. Neither his name, nor his highest cheated score of 1,062,800, are on that list. His other claimed scores on Donkey Kong Junior, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Centipede, Burgertime, and Zaxxon are also nowhere to be found.
Recall that the entire point of this lawsuit was for Billy’s scores to be reinstated, and for TG and Guinness to issue public retractions to that effect. Here were Greasy Gibbons’ own words from the September 2019 legal threat he authored:
This letter demands that both Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records retract their claims against Billy Mitchell, and immediately restore his achievements and good name.
This request for retraction is for all of Billy Mitchell’s records; a partial retraction will not suffice. Both Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records must retract their claims impugning Mitchell’s scores publicly, so the damages done to him will finally begin to reverse.
Each corporation has a 14-day deadline to review the information and issue the retraction, or we will resort to legal recourse, our final option.
I’m going to keep coming back to this, because many people seem to be missing this basic fact of the settlement. Billy Mitchell had one demand, above all else: “Reinstate my scores.” Twin Galaxies had one provision, above all else: “The fuck no.” And here we are; one party got what they wanted, and the other did not.
Billy Mitchell came in for one thing, and one thing only, and he walked away without it. Billy Mitchell surrendered. He capitulated. He acquiesced. He succumbed. He submitted. He turned tail. He about faced. He backed down. He caved in. He gave up. He cut and ran. He called it quits. He threw in the towel. He waved the white flag. He cried “uncle”. He asked for mercy. Billy Mitchell put everyone, including his “friends” and family, through this whole ordeal, he lost friends like Rob Childs and Steve Kleisath and David Race, he spent untold hours gathering “evidence” and providing discovery, he spent countless dollars on travel and accommodations tending to this litigation on the other side of the country (and that’s even with his gullible lawyers working on contingency), he soiled his name far worse than it had ever been stained before, and in the end, he decided the best he could get was to walk away with nothing more than a ham sandwich for his trouble. Billy. Mitchell. Lost.
“But ersatz! The statement said ‘reinstate’! Does that not mean Billy’s reinstated? And isn’t that word itself a big win for him?”
The statement does use the word “reinstate”! And that’s a very interesting point, which we will discuss in “Part 2”. But as has been reported widely, this is only in reference to an archive of TG’s legacy scoreboard, as it existed when Jace Hall purchased it in 2014. Sure, Billy’s scores were part of that database, along with Todd Rogers and every other confirmed cheater scrubbed from the actual leaderboards.
But what was not as widely reported was, this archived scoreboard already existed! Here’s a glimpse of my own screen capture, which I took on October 11, 2022:
You’ll notice the title has been changed from “Original 2014 Database” to “The Original TG Historical Database”, possibly so Billy’s clueless lawyers would think this was some special compromise. Also, this database was originally located at the following link, which as you can see now redirects to a new URL reflecting the new title:
https://www.twingalaxies.com/Original-2014-Database.php
But hey, the archive was previously locked so only registered TG members could see it. And now, it’s public for all to see. So even if Billy and his lawyers did cry to the judge that they got taken for a ride with their own negotiated deal, TG can still tell the court “Hey, it’s not as if we didn’t ‘give’ Billy anything.”
As for the archive itself, I would assume that as part of the settlement TG has agreed to host it into perpetuity, or at least for some reasonably extended window of time. But that’s not just something they’re forced to do to accommodate Billy Mitchell. This is actually just an amazing resource! People always complain when things disappear from the Internet. At some point, someone’s going to want to research the scores of some other suspected or proven cheater. And if this legacy database wasn’t there, they’d be using the Wayback Machine to bring up sporadic snapshots of individual leaderboards, hoping that what they wanted was properly captured. Instead, this information is all in one place, as it had been for over a year prior to this settlement.
Speaking of complaints resulting from the disappearance of things, the old Donkey Kong dispute thread was removed, also following the announcement of the settlement. However, removal of old, fully-adjudicated dispute threads was also a previously stated policy of Twin Galaxies. The several dispute threads chronicling the bogus scores of Todd Rogers (on Dragster, Taz, Wabbit, etc.) had been taken down almost two years ago. As inferred via a statement from the official Twin Galaxies account, the only reason the Donkey Kong dispute thread had been kept up this long was because of the ongoing litigation. Sure, on its own terms, TG may have kept the DK thread up a little while longer. But there isn’t a meaningful difference between, say, removing it in May and removing it now. More to the point, it would be awfully hilarious if the archived leaderboard and the removal of the dispute thread were “offered” to Billy’s side as “concessions” in the settlement – not that it would be any fault of TG’s if Billy and his attorneys hadn’t done any research or known what concessions to seek. (In fairness, one could speculate as to whether Jace began removing old dispute threads in 2022 in anticipation that Billy may ask for this in a future settlement offer. But TG’s reasoning for removing old dispute threads is still sound. He doesn’t want TG to be about permanently cataloguing evidence against old phonies they no longer associate with.)
I guess I should point out, some may see these two items – removing old dispute threads, and archiving the 2014 leaderboard – as contradictory, meaning the philosophical motivations behind them are at odds. But I don’t see it that way. Twin Galaxies doesn’t want to be the “scandal” site. Dumb controversies might drive a little traffic in the short term, but they don’t inspire honest competitors to submit scores and times, and they don’t help build a sustainable userbase. To put it another way, if there are people who associate Twin Galaxies primarily with cheating controversies, and who want TG to reinforce that narrative, TG is correct in deciding not to cater to those individuals. With all of that said, the actual material from the dispute threads is not lost. Preservation efforts are already underway. (I’ll let you all in on a little secret: As soon as I saw the news about the settlement, I began screen-capturing and text-capturing every page of the dispute thread and post-dispute thread. I did not wait until the pages were locked away, which based on established TG practice, I knew could happen at any time.) Once I feel I’ve accumulated the totality of the DK dispute material I can find, I’ll make it available all at once, independently of Twin Galaxies.
There was some early speculation that the settlement may have included some sort of gag clause, preventing Jace Hall from commenting on Billy or on the case any further. But that was dispelled very quickly. Jace clarified that Billy Mitchell is still banned, that his scores are not going back onto the main leaderboard, and that TG’s opinion of the score dispute has not changed:
And that freedom to address the situation (aside from the terms of the settlement itself) would have been another thing TG successfully negotiated. I’m guessing Manning & Kass are not accustomed to settlements where the other party immediately goes out and annihilates whatever bogus narrative their client was attempting to spin. Not that TG did anything wrong, of course. They were just stating objective facts. Anthony Ellrod and company probably also had Billy yelling in their ears the moment he saw the new TG merch store. “Are they allowed to do that!?!?”
The one piece of this equation we in the public don’t know is whether there was a financial payment one way or the other. Remember, this case involved both Billy’s defamation lawsuit against Twin Galaxies, and also TG’s countersuit against Billy for fraud. Admittedly, I am reluctant to make guesses about financial settlements, given that I got one pretty wrong before. (In short, in 2020 and 2021, Billy’s inner circle began floating the notion that the late YouTuber Apollo Legend had given Billy a significant amount of money to settle their legal battle. I collected the available evidence, and statements to this end were made by myself and others based on that evidence. However, it now seems these conclusions were probably inaccurate, and that the claims being floated from Billy’s side were untrue. I know! What a shocker!)
However, as someone who has researched this case about as exhaustively as any one human can, if my word is worth anything, I can assure you (based on my own personal assessment) that there is no chance on this green Earth that this settlement involved TG giving Billy any money. If any money changed hands, it would have been from Billy to TG. At worst, it was an agreement by both parties to walk away. While Guinness World Records did buckle to Billy’s threats and offer him whatever high score recognition he demanded, they did hold firm on their insistence that no money exit their system. After all the money Jace Hall has spent defending himself throughout this process, it would’ve been certifiably crazy of him to then give Billy any significant amount of money when they could have simply spent that money prevailing at trial instead. Additionally, I would say the distasteful language of the settlement announcement is reflective of the fact that Billy wasn’t able to squeeze any money out of Jace Hall or Twin Galaxies, and thus looked to satisfy his ego in some other way. As for the $81,225 bond Billy was required to post back in 2020, assuming that was not negotiated to TG as part of the settlement, only Billy and his attorneys know for sure the fate of that deposit. However, the most likely scenario is that Manning & Kass told Billy they’re keeping that money as compensation for their time. So Billy would be out that money, at least. (That’s probably why he was a bit displeased at the hearing, lol.)
Literally every known part of this settlement was a win for Twin Galaxies, and a loss for Billy Mitchell, except arguably for three things: The language of the public statement itself, the idea that TG would have secured an even better material outcome had they kept fighting this case through trial, and the dashed fantasy of a big, dramatic moment where Billy Mitchell is humiliated and made to pay for his malignance and his hubris.
I know, for folks who were anticipating something else, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a win. And on a visceral level, I can understand that. But I genuinely do attribute that disappointment to unrealistic expectations, as I will outline in “Part 2”. If everyone had known when this dispute started that it would end six years later in an out-of-court settlement, I think people would have been highly satisfied with an ending where Billy didn’t get his scores back, wasn’t unbanned, didn’t get an apology, and didn’t get any money. And while my goal isn’t to put individuals on the spot today, I can quote dispute participants to that very effect, if you wish:
If Twin Galaxies intended to “wimp out” or “give up”, they would have done so long ago. They fought this guy off for far longer than any other video game adjudicator would have, and they did so successfully. Of course TG didn’t win every single battle along the way, and the end victory may look ugly on its face. But in the end, they won the war.
MIKEY LIKES IT
I know, there are still plenty of threads left to address. “What about the public messaging?” “How else will we get legal confirmation that Billy cheated?” “What’s stopping Billy from suing anyone else?” Again, stay tuned for all of that. But we’re going to wrap up today’s installment with another key concession secured by TG in this settlement – one which people may not have appreciated enough.
I’d say I’ve been exceedingly fair to Billy’s witnesses. Sure, some folks like Morningdove Mahoney and Rob Childs know their friend is a crook, and were willing to shamefully lie for him. But I know some of Billy’s “accomplices” were just innocent patsies, who honestly thought they were helping their friend or colleague achieve some big high score. Heck, a couple of them tried to testify in Billy’s favor, and inadvertently sunk his case by telling the truth! I’ve always waited to hear what these cronies had to say before really tearing into them…
…that is, except for this guy:
In October, we were first introduced to USC Professor Michael Zyda, by way of him bragging about his affiliation with Billy Mitchell on his personal website. I began roasting him immediately, because the context made clear that he wasn’t just another simp for Billy; he was going to be Billy’s paid “expert witness”. In other words, Mike’s the guy Billy would call to the witness stand to address the overwhelming MAME evidence. The problem of course is, the MAME evidence is utterly irrefutable at this point, and has been for years. It’s been researched into the ground so far that it came back out the other side. (See, for instance, this comprehensive 48-page analysis by electrical engineer and Donkey Kong expert Tanner Fokkens, detailing why arcade and MAME visuals contrast the way they do, as well as this nearly four-hour documentary by Veritas detailing his own investigation.) Sure, Mr. Z could try to befuddle a jury, but for those of us who understand the evidence, there was literally nothing Zyda could possibly say that would meaningfully refute the existing research to any meaningful degree. As I mused at the time, I wasn’t sure what Zyda would even attempt to argue on Billy’s behalf:
And what is Professor Zyda, game designer and patent litigator, going to say that’s going to counter last year’s ironclad technical analysis from dedicated Donkey Kong expert Tanner Fokkens? “Computers are magic”? “Refresh rates are matters of opinion”? “Screen-tearing is the game’s way of saying ‘I love you'”? My gosh, are we going to see a return of “The Human Element”?
As an apparent ingredient of the settlement, Zyda’s report was published via his website. The first version consisted of only two written pages, which referred to an “attached” photo that was not present. Without any announcement, this was later swapped with another version, which included the missing photo by itself on a third page. As far as I can tell, the two pages of text were identical in both cases. For posterity, both of those versions are available here:
https://perfectpacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Evidence-Zyda-report.pdf
https://perfectpacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Evidence-Zyda-report-three-pages.pdf
I would like to say these sorts of analyses are the domain of experts like Fokkens – and Tanner has already provided a lengthy rebuttal to each of Zyda’s “arguments”, if you even want to call them that. But Zyda’s work is so lazy, so perfunctory, so laughably half-assed, that even educated lay folks like myself could see right through it.
When Billy is recording from the arcade machine running at 60 fps (frames per second), he plugs that 60 fps stream into a Two Bit Converter box (the converter) and the converter outputs a 30 fps stream to a VHS VCR for recording.
Not even a single sentence in, and I already knew this guy was pulling things out of his ass. Granted, this one is a bit on the technical side, but it so happens that Billy’s tapes do run at 30 frames-per-second – not because of the “Two Bit Score” converter, but because of the process that was used to record MAME from a PC.
The “Two Bit Score” converter… which isn’t a “box”… isn’t some overly convoluted piece of machinery. It doesn’t involve a frame buffer, or meaningfully change the content of a signal. It just takes in an RGB signal, and passively outputs it as an NTSC signal. Also, I know that the Two Bit Score converter outputs at 60fps, and the reason I know that, is because others have recorded Donkey Kong game play using those converters, and those those recordings run at 60 frames a second. (Note that YouTube alters this for videos uploaded to their platform. If you use the , and . keys to scrub through frame by frame, you’ll see what I mean.)
Apparently, Zyda really did think refresh rates are matters of opinion, lolololol. Did I call it, or what?
Oh, we’re only getting started on this guy.
In my opinion component aging could produce the anomalies at issue.
“In my opinion” lmao. Do aging components produce MAME signatures, or do they not? It’s not like we’re observing astronomical phenomena thousands of light years away, and are limited to what our feeble telescopes can see. Break out the gear, and try it! Oh look, scores of people already have, and every instance is consistent with known arcade footage. Even worse, both David Race and Carlos Pineiro did tests using what Billy claimed was the exact same equipment he used for at least one of his scores, and it still didn’t show the MAME transitions. Maybe Zyda thinks these components age so much, they flip back and become normal again?
As videotapes are copied and handed out to someone who then makes copies, visual artifacts often appear as second and third generation and beyond copies are made. It is important to note that it is unknown how many generations of copies were created to arrive at the current videotapes. Another issue with respect to this is whether the videotape heads were cleaned before the copies were made, including whether Billy Mitchell was cleaning his VCR’s heads before he recorded the Donkey Kong play. It is my understanding that he was not. Further, it is my understanding that Billy Mitchell recorded his tapes at long play (LP) to save on the cost of videotape. LP recordings are lower quality recordings and often record with much on tape visible noise.
Ah, the classic “Dirty VCR heads only made it look like I was cheating”.
Zyda seems to be getting a lot of his “understanding” of the case from Billy’s mouth. I’m old enough to remember VCRs, and the difference between SP, LP, and SLP. Sure, LP records at “lower quality”, in the sense that the image looks less crisp, but I certainly wouldn’t say it results in “much on tape visible noise”. I used to record TV on the even worse SLP setting, and no matter how many times I watched and re-watched those same six Star Trek episodes, I didn’t see a bunch of girder fingers show up everywhere.
Up next, we get to Zyda’s interactions with a guy named Neil Hernandez. Neil is Billy’s local friend and “technician” (although that latter designation seems quite generous). Neil is a story for another time, but after Billy discarded all the other technicians who helped investigate his tapes, Neil became Billy’s point man for technical outlines. This included an “orientation assessment” wherein Neil amusingly speculated that the reason Billy’s tapes are upside down is because Billy’s Donkey Kong machine somehow suffered two major malfunctions, vertically flipping the game display twice, so that the direct feed recording could be rendered upside down while Billy played his game right side up. You know, normal non-cheaty stuff that happens to people all the time.
Neil changed out the capacitors in the converter and as a result had an almost perfect picture output with proper colors. With replacing just the capacitors, Neil saw the “girder finger” on the monitor receiving the output from the rebuilt converter. Neil took one still picture of that girder. A copy of that picture is attached.
Some of you longtimers may recall this whole bit about recording in color using the Two Bit Score converter. David Race was eventually able to achieve this using an optimal VCR, but before then, Team Billy pushed the story that a color recording was achieved by replacing old, dried out components, without disclosing that this only worked when someone physically pressed down on the converter’s chip the entire time. (Suffice to say, in contrast to the open and transparent investigative processes conducted by TG and dispute participants, there always seem to be a lot of things Neil and the rest of the Team Billy chucklefucks don’t tell you.)
But here’s where we get to the photo that was later added to the third page:
Wait, so this is the secret arcade girder finger Team Billy have been crowing so much about? This is literally just rolling shutter. We’ve been over this a million times. Does Professor Zyda think drone propellers actually look like this?
Also, does Mikey not understand that “direct feed” shouldn’t produce any rolling shutter artifacts like this? Also, why and how was this screen being output upside down? (The bottom of the television should be on the right side of the DK screen, not the left.) And even if we ignored all of this, that’s still not the actual three-girder screen from Billy’s tapes, and thus does nothing to verify the possibility of that anomaly:
I asked Neil Hernandez to rebuild the converter with the old resistors to see if we could get a consistent “girder finger” output from that converter to the connected monitor.
Wait wait wait… Hold the fuck up…
He’s asking Neil, on the other side of the country, to run tests for him?
Has Mr. Michael Zyda… Billy Mitchell’s “expert witness”… ever been in the same room as a Donkey Kong machine?
“Uhhh, some guy did some stuff and then told me about it later.”
Yeah, thanks for the science, dumbass.
However, Mr. Hernandez’s experiment, which I saw recordings of, depict numerous anomalies, including different numbers of girder fingers, Mario teleporting around the screen, barrels rolling the wrong directions including uphill, pies disappearing, and the hammer not vanishing when it is dropped. These resulting anomalies are consistent with my expert opinion that the game play on the subject video tapes, including the anomalies depicted, could be from original Donkey Kong hardware, and that the anomalies are the result of component degradation in the Two Bit converter.
Zyda attributes these bizarre anomalies to the Two Bit Score converter, which seems a bit outlandish. Again, there’s no frame buffer. It’s not processing anything, and thus barrels aren’t going to start rolling uphill lmao. However, serious malfunctions have been observed when operating the game at radically altered voltages. Fokkens, the actual expert, has explored this as well, scoring 20-million “points” on such a setup.
While Zyda has enough formal education to know that what he’s saying are lies, he may genuinely be unaware that the theories he’s advocating would still result in the disqualification of Billy’s scores. Pies disappearing? Wacky barrels? Mario teleporting around the screen? For the sake of argument, let’s say we accept the extraordinary premise that the underlying malfunction was present throughout the entirety of Billy’s tapes, and that the only observable symptom was dozens of girder fingers of a specific stripe, all appearing exclusively during screen transitions. How do we know this hasn’t affected game phenomena we can’t see? Did this give Billy a higher likelihood of 800-point barrel smashes? Was this the cause of Billy’s astronomical luck?
Let’s be clear about this: Billy Mitchell’s tapes are so thoroughly bogus that he’s not even able to pay a desperate liar to say his scores are genuine. All his side can do is try to explain why the MAME signatures were the result of some bizarre, otherwise-disqualifying malfunction, and not because he intentionally set out to cheat.
Oh, and of course Zy-duh doesn’t even attempt to address other MAME signatures like “Barrel without Kong” and “Barrel before bonus”, or the complete absence of the arcade-signature “Rivet ramp”, or the bizarre gray border, or the phantom pause. He was getting his info exclusively from Billy and Junior, and they’ve been lying for so long about the technical evidence “only” being a couple girder fingers, that they’ve come to believe it themselves. And Zyda can’t be assed to do the least bit of research himself, because there’s no money in that. Woe be to anyone who hires this guy as their “expert witness”.
But my favorite part of all this was Zyda’s Facebook brag:
LMAOOOOOOOOOOOO
That post used to be located here, but we’ll get to that in a moment. He’s clearly discussing the Billy Mitchell case, as it’s the only one listed on his website which remotely resembles his description. Notice that this was posted at almost 7:00 p.m. on January 10th (in the same U.S. Pacific time zone as myself), which is how we know the settlement was reached the evening prior to the Jan. 11th hearing. But everything else about this post is wrong. The case hasn’t “been running since 2007”. (The second of Billy’s three cheated scores were staged in 2007, but that’s all.) There have been many technical examinations of the evidence, but there weren’t 20-or-so “expert witnesses”. And while I’m willing to believe Zyda was told by Ms. Ross that his document was the reason the other side settled, it certainly was not.
His brag at the end, though, I find most amusing. “My declaration is one page long”. Yes, their “expert witness” who was so super-smart that he was flummoxed by rolling shutter, just showed up, shit out the most negligent, no-effort piece of nonsense perhaps anybody in this case had ever produced (and that is saying something) and in doing so, single-handedly settled this matter once and for all. I’d like to say Michael Zyda knows he’s a liar, but part of me isn’t so sure. He might actually believe he’s God’s gift to electronic analysis. I guarantee, this guy sits in a closed room so he can really take in the smell of his own farts. I can see why he and Billy Mitchell run together.
Also, you may have noticed that Mike’s declaration is objectively, observably longer than a single page. It would be easy to chalk this up to another Billy-style exaggeration. However… I think it would be pretty hilarious if, at the time Zyda posted this, his analysis was a single page. Imagine him submitting something even lazier than what we’ve seen, then bragging about his marvelous engineering insight to his Facebook friends, before being told that part of the settlement involves his “expert analysis” being published for the world to see. And a nervous bead of sweat rolls off his brow, as he realizes… he’d better try to pad it out at least a little before people see it.
But let’s be real. You didn’t come here just to listen to me mock this pretentious douche for thinking he’s the Hercule Poirot of Donkey Kong.
You came here… for some hot dominatrix action!
OUCH!!! Actually, DO NOT WATCH THAT.
If you’ve seen Karl Jobst’s latest video (which you should watch), then you know where this is going. Naturally, when Professor Zyda’s “analysis” was published, folks began looking into this guy, which included his public social media activity. And boy, this guy was into some raunchy stuff! All the titty pic solicitations were pretty standard, but I don’t think any of us were expecting to scroll through Zyda’s Twitter likes and see some poor shmuck getting repeatedly kicked and punched in the nads. (Billy’s star technician did know anyone can see his Twitter likes… right?)
To be clear, everyone has a kink, so if that kind of thing is how Mikey gets his jollies on his private time, that’s not really an issue worth drawing attention to. What is an issue, however, was that Zyda was an active USC professor during some of this social media activity, and that this activity was being done using his public-facing account. Between this, and recording people without their consent, it seems clear that Zyda doesn’t understand professional boundaries, which is a serious problem if he’s left in a position of authority over young college students.
Unsurprisingly, Zyda nuked his Twitter not long after Karl’s video. Soon after that, Mike also privated or deleted his Facebook and Instagram, which is why his settlement boast is now unavailable. Don’t worry though, strictly for archival purposes, I am making available this screenshot of Zyda’s Twitter likes, scrolled all the way back to September 2022, with a few naughty bits censored out in red. (Every so often in life, you’ve gotta censor out a few dicks.)
Oh, but this somehow gets even worse. It turns out, in a Connecticut court, Zyda’s being sued by a former student at USC. A friend of this site acquired the following four filings from that lawsuit:
We’re not doing the full deep dive on this case, but in short, the student is accusing Zyda of coercing her into living with him, urging her to have a family with him, making “inappropriate sexual advances”, posting photos and videos of her without her consent, trying to extort her into giving him massages, mocking her potential cancer diagnosis by calling her “Lumpy”, and lastly, refusing to pay her as they had agreed. In an attached interrogatory, the student cites several wildly inappropriate text messages from Mr. Professor:
Holy moly! And that’s only a portion of the messages. Karl didn’t really get into this in his video, but this Michael Zyda guy sounds racist as fuck! Maybe he and Billy Mitchell can go on tour together, with that mock Japanese caricature Billy likes to do.
Zyda has responded by countersuing the student, denying many of the allegations and accusing the student of defamation. (Sound familiar?) In his own filing, Zyda is forced to admit that he began what he called a “friendship” with this young student in 2016, and that they began living together in 2018. And as seen below, Zyda suggests the student’s claims expedited his retirement as a USC professor in 2023:
So this guy was allowed and urged to retire? Sounds to me like some administrators at USC were less concerned with wrongdoing and more interested in sweeping a potential Professor Pervert scandal under the rug. But hey, it was sure nice of them to keep Michael Zyda on their public faculty directory, on the off chance Mikey needed to rely on an image of prestige as he sought that student’s replacement.
I’m not interested in pursuing this Zyda case to the extent I’ve dissected the Billy Mitchell fiasco. But still, I do wonder what Billy’s “expert” will have to say that could somehow make this conduct any less unprofessional.
Bringing this back around to our real topic of the day, let’s not lose sight of the fact that Billy Mitchell and/or his attorneys gave this dude money for his fraudulent “expert” testimony – money which Zyda can then turn around and spend on other “sugar babies”, or to coerce other former students. Creeps like him should be excluded from gaming circles forever, right alongside the abusive litigants they lie for.
Anyone with any knowledge of the Billy Mitchell case could see Zyda’s “analysis” made exactly zero impact on the body of evidence. Every observation he farted out had already been adequately addressed. And if Zyda’s report really truly exonerated Billy’s scores, Twin Galaxies would have been happy to reinstate them to the main leaderboard, since that would’ve been the easiest resolution of all.
I have no doubt that, in their settlement talks, TG negotiated for the publication of Zyda’s laughable “analysis” as part of the resolution. Recall how Billy and his cronies previously bragged about their non-existent “secret evidence” which, so they claimed, compelled Guinness to reinstate his scores. We should be glad, at the very least, that TG was able to stave off this “My secret evidence has exonerated me” narrative. Meanwhile, in those same negotiations, I’m sure it was very important to Billy’s side that TG somehow acknowledge Zyda’s “work”, so that the announcement doesn’t read so blatantly as “This idiot doesn’t know what he’s talking about, we’re just settling because we came to terms we like”. And thus, the negotiated statement uses carefully crafted language, such as that TG gives “fair consideration” and “publicly takes note” of Zyda’s opinion.
But if there is any remaining doubt of TG’s position, as with Billy’s current status at TG, Jace Hall later made it clear:
Zyda is entitled to his opinion. Just like you. I do not agree with Zyda’s opinion. TG never said it agreed with it. End of story. Throughout the dispute, Twin Galaxies has always provided a means for the public to have access to the information. As a “qualified expert,” Zyda has new information for the public to consider. It has now been presented, just like everything else. People can make their own judgments about his opinion. TG was unmoved by Zyda’s opinion and believes what was presented is not credible or sufficient.
LIVING ON A PRAYER
Dunking on Billy idiots is always fun, but I’m afraid that’s all the time we have for today. Soon, we’ll be delving into more serious matters in “Part 2”. We will get to all these lingering questions folks may have, about the settlement statement, about why TG didn’t take this case all the way to trial, and what the alternative outcomes would have looked like. We may even discover that wily Jace Hall was unironically playing 4-D chess the entire time, while dumb Billy Mitchell was stuck shuffling checkers. Oh, and since this is about much more than one specific lying fraud who sucks at video games, we will also look at what this settlement means for Twin Galaxies, for other scoreboards, and for the gaming community at large going forward. Hope to see you back. And as always, thanks for reading!
I tried to fool around with pull quotes a bit, to offer a bit of an in-line tl;dr. Unfortunately, the pull quote feature here is terrible, so I gave up. I’m reluctant to make firm promises of when write-ups will arrive, lmao, but “Part 2” should be up in the not-too-distant future.
Thanks for the update. You may well address this in Part 2, but ultimately I think the issue most observers have is that what Mitchell wanted most isn’t having his scores reinstated. What he wants is for people to think they’re reinstated… because screw the truth, appearances matter most. And to the 95% of gamers who weren’t following closely that’s probably what they think because IGN said so (most of them forgot about Mitchell two hours after reading the news). Hall, who presumably cares more about the actual leaderboard integrity and perhaps $$$, got what he wanted too. It feels a bit like the end to the Star Trek TNG episode Sins of the Father and Mitchell is Duras.
Like you say, I’ll definitely hash all of this out in “Part 2”. And I do point out that Jace and Billy were basically catering to different crowds, with Billy targeting the casuals, while Jace is here for dedicated competitive gamers who know their craft. But I also don’t think it’s true to say Billy didn’t want actual, true, real reinstatement, or that he didn’t care about the difference. Otherwise, he would have stopped with his Guinness victory, because that would have provided all the “reinstatement” propaganda he would have needed. (Copy-pasting from my “Part 2” draft, he would have said “TG is a joke, just like all the loser haters. My scores are recognized by the only world record adjudicator that matters.”)
I don’t mean to imply he doesn’t care about the true leaderboard AT ALL but let’s face it he never cared about actually “earning” a world record in the first place, at least not in the 2000s, but spent a lot of effort making us think he did. He really loves the recognition from whoever doesn’t know any better, and now there’s a lot of people willing to give him props. It wouldn’t shock me If the settlement involved him literally paying a handsome sum for the public statement TG put on their website a few days later, though of course that’s speculation.
It’s a good point about Guinness though. I suppose he did have a couple months in there between Guinness caving and the fraud counter suit from TG where he could’ve dropped that suit and declared victory (or worked out a deal in 2021-23). Maybe his ego probably felt he was far enough in with the TG legal proceedings to just give that up?
Personally to me a happy ending would involve Mitchell being sufficiently dissuaded from ever threatening legal action against anyone calling him a cheater again, and people don’t have to be scared about stating the truth. That was what really ticked me off about Lance Armstrong from 15-20 years ago. I definitely look forward to your Part 2!
Oh, and great Star Trek reference. At least this time, most everyone knows Duras is dishonored.
While i get the general idea of billy actually surrendering.
I still prefer if billy beaten in court trial and forced to pay cost, so he or someone else wont dare to try this Gambit again, i guess karl’s case is last hope for these outcome ….
As karl once mention in interview few days ago, no matter the cost, Beaten him in court also good investement it will definitely boost TG credibility of not bending the knees and
“TG winning lawsuit over banning donkey kong cheater” absolutely sounds better than “settlement” or “reinstatement in history database” in news outlets … And it will not be misguided articles like what we read for the past few days after settlement
You and me both, Ayaya. I also wanted to see him fall, but between the judge and the opposing lawyers, things were not going to go smoothly at all. Both sides were spared from greater turmoil in the long run in this situation. Mitchell is the type of person who runs away and ignores his problems. Going through with trial would have only caused TG to be in a larger deficit than they’d be right now. Even then, he’d still try to make his situation seem better than it actually was through the media like he just did here.
While wish for one I know that’s impossible, like I mention months ago in one of the articles here, I simply want TG make an example of him, he can say anything he want, but court judgement is a nail to the coffin.
IF not for those clickbait articles or Wordings in TG statement, it’s enough, His reputation tainted further worldwide and he don’t get the million dollar retirement payday from winning the defamation lawsuit, so I believe no one else, will try this gambit expecting big bucks using Justice system (as non American that’s how i see US civil lawsuit a gamble for millions payout).
Yes thats definitely a good way of understanding what the settlement was, where you said Jace was playing 4d chess and Billy was playing checkers.
I’ve heard everyone say TG could have had this or that, but from Billys point of view I’m wondering what he wished he got instead of this because its nothing.