How Twin Galaxies defeated the dumbest lawsuit in gaming history: Part 2

by ersatz_cats

We’re back! We all know why we’re here, right? It’s time for our final update on the Billy Mitchell / Twin Galaxies legal battle, before we close the book forever on one of the stupidest chapters in the history of competitive gaming.

I’m going to proceed under the assumption you’ve read “Part 1”, but as a quick refresher, we recapped all the known events up to date, we hopefully put to rest any doubts about TG’s attorney, and we had a good laugh at Billy’s creepy “expert” and his toilet paper “analysis”. We also reviewed the known terms of the parties’ out-of-court settlement, including the fact that Billy did not satisfy any of his demands (score reinstatement, etc.) while Twin Galaxies did satisfy theirs. We also acknowledged that the initial news of an out-of-court settlement elicited a mostly negative response exacerbated by an official statement that included the word “reinstate” in reference to an archive of TG’s 2014 scoreboard, which includes Billy’s scores alongside the scores of other known cheaters like Todd Rogers. Towards the end of today’s update, we’re going to discuss what all of this means going forward. But for the most part, today I will be laying out the case for why, despite those negative reactions, this settlement was actually a good outcome, and was in many ways preferable to the alternatives TG and the gaming community would have faced. Oh, and I’m gonna talk about some old movies you should have seen already, but if somehow you haven’t seen them, that means spoilers. (Don’t worry, there will be warnings when I get to those.)

Before we proceed, I’d like to explore some boundaries and definitions. It’s easy to say “This was a good outcome”, but that’s a loaded statement. Who exactly is this outcome good for? And are there any groups for whom this conclusion sucks ass?

In consideration of this question, I can identify four basic groups involved, although obviously there can be some overlap with certain individuals:

• People with direct material stakes in TG – We’re talking Jace Hall, Mr. Tash (who will no doubt continue working as TG’s attorney), and any TG investors or employees;
• The active score-submitting and adjudicating TG userbase;
• Those with personal investment in this Billy Mitchell legal battle (the Carlos Pineiros, David Races, and Tanner Fokkenses of the world – I’d include myself in that class as well);
• The broader gaming community in general who wishes to see this toxic scumbag punished and humiliated.

And here’s the first thing I ask people to consider: When I discuss certain benefits of this outcome, any given benefit may not apply to the group to which you belong, but that doesn’t make that benefit any less real. If an end result was great for TG the organization, good for the TG userbase, fine for those personally invested, and not terrible for the community in general, that would make it a good outcome overall, even if members of the latter group don’t see it as a good outcome for themselves. As a journalist, I have to be fair and mindful of these differing perspectives. This isn’t me trying to set up some “gotcha”, where I end up arguing exclusively from one group’s perspective. I’m not going to say “This was good for TG, so the rest of you can deal with it”. I truly, genuinely, sincerely do believe this was a good outcome for each of the aforementioned groups, but as you’ll see, the reasons this outcome was good will be different for each class.

Okay, let’s get to it!

THE RULES OF THE GAME

So Twin Galaxies had a literal mountain of evidence, they had technical experts and analyses for days, they had witnesses lined up around the block, they had several outright bald-faced lies from Billy Mitchell at their disposal, and Billy had… himself and the fart-sniffer. So why not just go to trial? Why would TG end all this with a settlement?

The easy response, which I don’t think people want to hear, is “Why not?” A settlement is like a bowl of soup – it can include anything you want. The court can’t force Billy to confess and apologize, nor can it force TG to unban or reinstate him – thus why both the lawsuit and countersuit asked strictly for monetary damages. But such extracurricular concessions can be negotiated out-of-court. If Billy was suing you, and he eventually agreed to withdraw the suit for basically no concessions, and to pay you a bunch of money, but with the condition that you couldn’t tell anyone about the terms, most of you would take the deal and be done with it.

I know this answer can seem glib, and I don’t intend for the rest of my analysis to be so dismissive. But I do think this is an important point folks need to accept. There is nothing inherently wrong with settling out of court. Most lawsuits do end this way. All that’s important is what the terms of the settlement are, and what outcome could have been secured in the alternative. Yes, a negotiated resolution can preclude the dramatic courtroom spectacle, where the bad guy throws a giant hissing tantrum on the stand. Believe me, as someone who has followed this case extensively for nearly six years, you are not wrong for wanting to see such a meltdown. But for the people paying the bills, potential benefits like that have to be fairly anticipated, and weighed against the costs. It would be foolish, for instance, for TG to continue pressing the case, if Billy could simply decide not to give anyone the satisfaction they seek.

Now, given that the terms of this settlement are not fully disclosed, one might point out that it’s not typical for plaintiffs to settle for a loss. The person who initiated the lawsuit can simply dismiss their own claim, as Billy himself did in his lawsuit against Jeremy Young and J.C. Harrist of Donkey Kong Forum. He doesn’t need to enter a formal settlement agreement to do that, and indeed a settlement would include a “with prejudice” clause (meaning, he would be giving up the right to reopen the same case again). It is possible for a plaintiff to settle at a loss under confidentiality, if the public appearance of a win or stalemate is more valuable to the plaintiff than whatever they are giving up in the process – and I’m sure that’s happened somewhere. At any rate, Billy shill Triforce was happy to seize on that narrative shortly before the settlement statement in this case was published:

However, while Triforce may know full well that he’s a liar, other onlookers coming to the same conclusion are overlooking one key element to this case:

That’s right, TG was countersuing Billy Mitchell for fraud! We haven’t discussed the actual contents of that countersuit in a long while, and we’ll get to that in a moment. Just so we’re clear, since both Billy’s lawsuit and TG’s countersuit involve many of the same topics and witnesses and pieces of evidence, the court allowed both cases to be heard concurrently, rather than requiring TG to open a wholly separate claim, which would have required its own processes for discovery, depositions, and pre-trial motions and hearings. In other words, all of that stuff was conducted at the same time, and there would eventually be a single trial, all covering both cases. So while Mr. “Never Surrender” is already disinclined for publicity reasons to unilaterally drop out of the race, he can’t do so with that countersuit hanging over him. Neither party was going to lay down their arms while the other side keeps attacking. The case could only end with either a settlement or a trial.

Furthermore, as you may have noticed, Billy’s side really didn’t want this to go to trial. And why would he? If your case was full of easily exposed lies, and you had no witnesses and no substantial evidence, would you want all of this laid out in an embarrassing public spectacle? Billy Mitchell is a bully, and – for your information – the reason bullies talk so much about fights is because they want to avoid them while getting what they want out of people. Meanwhile, firms like Manning & Kass are settlement hawks. They don’t make their money going to trial, they make it by preying on companies with insurance and forcing a quick bargain. I can’t speak to the particulars of TG’s financial structure, but it seems that was never an option for them, possibly because there was no insurance, or maybe because Billy insisted on full reinstatement and TG knew that was non-negotiable. Either way, even though the plaintiff and his attorneys had some conflicting interests, neither were inclined to take this case all the way to trial.

While I don’t always agree with video game history researcher Cat DeSpira, her initial reaction to the settlement news was spot on:

But since the question of why the case would end in a settlement is so easily addressed, let’s reframe it this way: “Why did TG agree to settle now, when they could have reaped so much more by forcing a jury trial? Why didn’t they just stonewall all the way to the end and seek that public vindication?”

We’ll get to what TG would have received for their trouble a bit later. I’ve always maintained that TG’s defense against Billy’s defamation claim was (and still is) as ironclad as any case could possibly be. Of course, a jury is always a major source of RNG, but in this case, the court would have had to go out and actively find the dumbest jury conceivable – I’m talking stupider than an actual box of rocks – for Billy to even have a chance of winning.

However, this should not be misunderstood as an endorsement of the fairytale notion that simply showing up to court with the truth on your side guarantees a favorable result. The fact that Billy’s tapes were fraudulent is part of it, but it’s only one piece of that equation.

For starters, a jury of lay people weren’t going to care that much about MAME evidence and screen transitions. They would listen, to the volunteer techs laying out the case on one side, and to Billy’s paid “expert” on the other. But the jury would be far more persuaded by Billy’s proclivity for telling bald-faced lies about non-technical matters. He says he didn’t help Carlos’ testing? It sure looks like he did. Billy said he didn’t receive any of the money from the sale of TG? Except, his own friend said Billy did, and that Billy asked him to keep it a secret. Sure, Billy will always have another story, but it usually doesn’t take long for people who are forced to listen and compelled to weigh the evidence to see how much of a liar he is.

Also, one reason Billy’s able to schmooze so many in gaming circles is because those people care so much about things like world records on Donkey Kong and perfect scores on Pac-Man. But this main power of his is meaningless against ordinary people. A jury wasn’t going to care about his video game prowess, no more than you as a juror would be particularly impressed that some guy is the world’s 34th ranked billiards player, or the lead chair for a prominent orchestra you’ve never heard of. And have you ever really observed Billy’s overall demeanor? His veneer of confidence is far more shallow than it first appears. Imagine him being forced to sit quietly as several witnesses (including “traitors” like Steve Kleisath and David Race) contradict all his lies and recount his misdeeds, all in his presence. Billy would have sat there, disgruntled, physically incapable of portraying himself as a sympathetic figure.

I think we all agree that Billy had precisely zero chance of winning his defamation lawsuit against TG. But I think we should understand why he had no chance. And it’s at this point that I have to begin delving into some technical legal nuance – subtlety which people attend years of law school to understand. As a disclaimer, I have not attended law school, but I have researched and covered legal cases before. Please don’t feel as though I’m trying to position myself as an authority, or that I’m trying to talk down to you. It’s just expected of me that I honestly explain the dynamics at play.

When a case like this is heard, after all the evidence is presented, the jury is given instructions, which they may or may not correctly follow. In this case, an infraction like defamation consists of certain elements that the plaintiff has to establish. For defamation in California, these include:

• Making a false statement;
• Providing that statement to a third party;
• Doing so while either knowing the statement was false, or with reckless disregard for the truth;
• Damaging the plaintiff’s reputation in doing so.

Additionally, since Billy is a limited sphere public figure, he has to not only establish that TG did all these things, but that they also acted with “actual malice” – basically, that they undertook these actions specifically to hurt his reputation. Of course, each of these would have been a monumental hurdle. TG’s dispute conclusion was true, and even if somehow by the grace of Zeus himself it turned out that it was somehow false, TG certainly believed it to be true. This is where an uninformed jury’s disregard for competitive videogaming would play to TG’s advantage: Not one person on that jury would walk away thinking TG should have done more than they did to investigate the validity of these Donkey Kong scores from 15 years ago.

Mind you, this is even taking into consideration the evidence threshold involved in this case, which could be said to have worked in Billy’s favor. As long as a jury is properly following their instructions, a plaintiff’s or prosecutor’s case has to clear a certain bar in order to secure a favorable verdict. If it were a criminal trial, the standard would be “beyond a reasonable doubt”, meaning that Billy’s side would have to establish their case… well, beyond a reasonable doubt. But in this civil matter, the standard is “preponderance of the evidence”. Basically, a jury would only have to find that TG was more than 50% likely to have committed the accused infraction. And there was still no chance Billy’s case would have met even that low bar.

With all of that said, this is not to say there would not have been some unpredictability at trial. You can’t always prepare for whatever surprises the opposition has in store. Knowing Billy’s modus operandi, surely he had some “Wow, we totes just discovered this at the last minute” bombshell planned – new testimony or a new story, which Team Truth would not have been able to adequately refute in the limited time allotted. (There’s a chance the fake plaques were originally intended to fill this role.) Granted, these things are supposed to be disclosed in advance, and a judge can deny their inclusion at a late hour – but such a ruling can be appealed after the fact.

There are also other day-of-trial ambushes lawyers like to play. One example, called a “motion in limine”, is where parties are forbidden from broaching certain topics, or even using certain words considered “prejudicial”. This is where Judge Chang could exert her influence on the proceeding yet again, by possibly agreeing to forbid TG’s witnesses from using variations of certain “prejudicial” words. Imagine trying to explain to randos off the street why TG had to remove all of Billy’s scores (including Pac-Man, Burgertime, etc.), and not just the Donkey Kong scores that were not properly represented. Now, try doing so without using any variation of the word “cheat” – because, remember, Twin Galaxies’ dispute conclusion never used that word. I guarantee, some of you reading this think I’m being overly exaggerative or imaginative, but I once, with my own eyes and ears, witnessed just such a “forbidden word” maneuver be successfully employed, in the middle of a trial. (As in, the judge decided halfway through the trial “You can no longer use this word”.) In the end, these unpredictable tricks were not going to win Billy his defamation claim, but as we’ll see, they could have affected the overall trial outcome in other ways.

You also have to look at why a jury can be so undependable. For starters, there would be no informed gamers among that jury. This isn’t simply my commentary on gaming’s statistical representation among a cross section of the total jury-viable population of the Los Angeles area. Court processes are in place to screen out any prospective jurors who have prior knowledge, not only of the particular case, but of the wider subject-matter involved. If a case involves, I don’t know, let’s say a yachting mishap, they don’t want someone on the jury with extensive experience in yachting, who is relying on that personal expertise and not on the curated information being presented to them. (We could debate the ethics of such a legal system at another time, but that is the system we’re dealing with.) There’s a whole process called “voir dire” (pronounced “vuar deer”) where the attorneys get to ask prospective jurors all kinds of questions. Billy’s side would certainly strike-for-cause anyone who said they’d heard of Billy Mitchell, or had seen King of Kong, or who admitted they’ve seen a Karl Jobst video.

The trial process itself is also heavily regulated. Unlike the court of public opinion, you can’t just be like “Look at how ridiculous this guy is, standing on a paint can to make himself look taller”. Many of Billy’s most blatant lies become inadmissible, simply because they don’t relate to the alleged facts of either the defamation suit or the countersuit.

And this is where things start to get dicey. Sure, TG would win its defense case, and gaming media headlines may or may not properly reflect that victory (more on that later). But that doesn’t mean those jurors, now free to speak to the media, would see it the same way we do – especially not if they were spared the full brunt of the Billy Mitchell lie parade. Remember, we’re talking about little old church ladies, weekend fishermen, single moms, and old retired men eager to spout their uninformed two cents. And you cannot control the things they would say after the fact:

I didn’t think Mr. Hall was being malicious, but I just can’t imagine anyone would go to all the effort they’re claiming just to say they were good at a video game.

I still don’t know what the deal with those tapes are, but there’s probably some explanation for whatever they’re seeing. He probably didn’t mean to cheat or anything.

I mean, really, who cares? My son uses some cheat code on one of his games. Why does anyone care if this guy cheated or not? Don’t these people have better things to worry about?

I don’t know… I didn’t think Mitchell’s side proved anything, but it sure seems weird to me they would remove all of his record scores if they only thought these Dankey Kang ones might have been fake. Seems like they really did just have it out for this guy.

The technical stuff was pretty complicated, so I wasn’t sure about that. But I couldn’t help but notice that the people really accusing Mr. Mitchell of cheating were all other Donkey Kong players. Maybe he was just too good for them to beat? Just because someone hits a home run off you doesn’t mean he’s using a corked bat.

It sounded like they wanted people to think he cheated, but I waited the entire trial to hear them explain how he could possibly make these entire tapes back in 2005 if they were fake. And they never did explain it. Maybe they don’t have an answer?

Billy Mitchell seems like a good guy. Maybe he can, I don’t know, just redo the scores today, and prove he was legitimate that way?

You may go pick up your keyboard from wherever you threw it, now. Sure, the jury comments may have been more astute than this. They may have come out of deliberations announcing to the world that Billy Mitchell is the biggest lying sack of shit they’ve ever seen, and that he definitely cheated. But you don’t know. If Twin Galaxies had fought this to trial, they would be spending lots of money to buy an almost guaranteed acquittal on the defamation claim itself. But there’s no guarantee even that would be a wholly satisfying outcome, or would not have given Billy some angle from which he could declare vindication.

But there’s yet another reason why there was no legal benefit to proceeding, one which has to do with the specifics of what the “finder of fact” is being asked to determine. In a murder trial, the jury is asked to decide a singular question, such as “Did O.J. Simpson murder Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman?” Setting aside a “hung jury” (where no consensus can be reached), the jury can be given two options: “Guilty” or “Not Guilty”. In the case of “Guilty”, since the standard was “beyond a reasonable doubt”, it can be safely reported as legally-established fact that O.J. Simpson did, in fact, murder those people. However, in the event of “not guilty”, that could mean anything from “Definitely no” all the way to “It sure as hell seems like he did, and I wouldn’t trust him for a second, but the prosecution didn’t sufficiently prove that he did”. (Or, in the actual O.J. case, it could even mean “Yeah, sure he killed them, but fuck the police, I hate them more.”)

We’ll get to media messaging and public perception a bit later on. But in strictly jurisprudential terms, in the defamation case against TG, the verdict would not be considered legal confirmation that Billy Mitchell cheated. For starters, there’s nothing this jury of mechanics and dry cleaners could meaningfully add to the conversation. None of them are qualified to be the final say, and none of them will somehow discover the thing all the experts missed. But more to the point, Twin Galaxies themselves never said Billy Mitchell “cheated” – they said his submission tapes could not have been produced using “an original unmodified Donkey Kong Arcade PCB”. Legally speaking, under the “preponderance of the evidence” standard, a verdict of not guilty in Billy’s defamation suit would simply mean “Twin Galaxies’ statement was probably true, but even if it wasn’t, there was probably no malice behind the statement, and even if there was, Billy probably didn’t suffer sufficient harm from it”. The jury wouldn’t even have to decide on the record which of those three alternatives they thought was most likely. The same legal nuance which would shield TG from liability is the same nuance that would render any verdict from the jury legally meaningless.

Nothing short of an outright confession of guilt from Billy himself would achieve a legally-binding conclusion that he cheated – and we know Billy’s never gonna do that. Of course, if the jury had somehow found in Billy’s favor, he would have been shouting from the mountaintops about how that was the final word, and how he’s been vindicated. But if a jury found against him, I wouldn’t be here telling you that it proved anything we didn’t already know before. Aside from appeals, all this would have done was bring Billy’s court battle to an effective close. And hey, look at that – this settlement achieved that anyway, and months sooner.

I know, all these tedious legal details aren’t particularly fun or satisfying. It’s easy for those of us on the outside to say “Just fight it anyway,” but as always, it’s different for the person who has to follow through on making it happen. The point here isn’t exactly that it’s Jace’s money to spend (although it is). Rather, if he is going to foot the bill, he’d be foolish not to take these factors into consideration. What would he really be getting for the investment? You shouldn’t blow all your money on one giant party just because it would be bitchin’ cool. Also, it would be immoral of Mr. Tash to take Jace’s money without being clear about what exactly Jace would be paying for. In the end, it seems they decided (correctly, in my opinion) that, in strictly legal terms, there was nothing of consequence left to be achieved.

BUT WHY SETTLE?

We are not at all done discussing the advantages of settling, both from TG’s perspective and in general. But I also understand that, when people ask why TG chose to settle, they’re not necessarily asking about these legal minutiae, or what the tactical pros and cons are. They’re asking whyyy would TG settle, with this guy of all people?

I’ve seen some pretty wild theories thrown around, including that Billy’s side had some unfortunate bit of personal information on Jace Hall, which they used to effectively blackmail him. In fact, our old pal Triforce made allusions to this very notion back in 2020:

I have got so much… I’m testifying in court. I’m flying to America to testify against Jace. It’s a wrap for him. I’ve got so much garbage on… He’s going to prison for fraud, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Y’all think this is about Billy Mitchell and… and Donkey Kong records? Man, listen, the… the… What I got? What I have?

Despite Triforce’s braggadocio, it doesn’t seem as if his prediction of incarceration is coming to pass, lmao. And of course, once again, this is Triforce we’re talking about. He and the truth are allergic to each other. Triforce asserting something actually makes it less likely to be true than if he had said nothing at all.

Even so, I’ve weighed this possibility. Unfortunately, we may not know the contents of Jace’s deposition for a long time, and will probably never have access to the actual written settlement (which in this hypothetical would surely spell out “You are not allowed to discuss X”). But I can point out some observable circumstances that contradict this narrative. First, if this was the impetus for a settlement, I highly doubt it would have taken this long to be brokered. Second, on a similar note, if Manning & Kass did actually have something on Jace which would bring the proceedings to a screeching halt in their favor, I’d have to think they’d have wanted to conduct Jace’s deposition much sooner than late 2023. Third, knowing Billy, if he did have such an ace up his sleeve, he would have gotten much more out of the deal than “None of your scores are reinstated and you still aren’t unbanned”.

However, I think the answer to the question “Why would TG settle” is a lot more basic. Twin Galaxies never wanted this fight. They just ran a dispute system, and wished to clean illegitimate scores from the leaderboard to satisfy their competitive community. Jeremy Young opened the dispute, and put TG in the position of having to rule one way or another – and TG did not rule against Billy, until the MAME evidence was published and confirmed as irrefutable. And following that dispute, Jace Hall has made very few public statements on Billy, whereas Billy and his cohorts never stopped talking about mean old Jace.

Compare this to Karl Jobst. I wouldn’t say Karl chose to pick a courtroom fight with Billy – and indeed, Karl had at one point announced his intention to no longer discuss Billy Mitchell at all unless Billy sued him (which Billy did). But Karl did choose to investigate and report on Billy’s lawsuits. Speaking as a journalist, you do have to be prepared for these outcomes when you make the choice to involve yourself in someone’s business. Twin Galaxies did not ask for anything of the sort. They just want to run a fun, legitimate scoreboard, and maybe one day not operate at a loss.

In personal conversations, with both gamer and normie friends, I’ve described this legal battle as a very stupid game of chicken, where the first person to realize the entire fight is over video game scores loses. And Billy Mitchell has always counted on himself being more fanatical, and more intransigent, in order to always get his way. But being the idiot that Billy is, he put TG in the position where they couldn’t give him what he was demanding – not without closing up shop altogether. TG could not reinstate his scores, or retract their conclusion. Twin Galaxies probably wanted to settle from the start, but didn’t really have anything to offer to satisfy Billy. “We’ll let you participate in TG forums again? We’ll let you have your Zaxxon score back?”

Beyond simply settling the court case, Jace Hall was probably open to some kind of reconciliation with Billy, on certain terms. Remember that he ran a “clean slate” program when he first bought TG in 2014, unbanning everyone up to and including deranged maniac Rudy Ferretti (before he did the thing, of course). I’d say there’s a chance Billy could have gotten his official Pac-Man recognition back in exchange for the simple words “I’m sorry I cheated at Donkey Kong”, which also would have saved Billy his own expenses and hardships these past few years. But as magnanimous as Mr. Hall may be, he certainly is not weak-willed. This four-year legal battle, culminating in a settlement drawn mostly on his own terms, proves that.

I believe TG would have accepted this final outcome when they were first served with the case in 2020. “Sure, we’ll put up an archive database that includes your scores along with Todd’s, and we’ll take down the dispute thread, if that’s all it takes to make this go away.” By my math, that means they outlasted Billy, not the other way around. Thus, the question isn’t “Why did TG choose to settle?”, but rather “Why did Billy choose to settle?” And I’ll tell you why: Billy Mitchell settled because his entire case depended on fishing for anything he could find to discredit Twin Galaxies, or Jace Hall, or Jeremy Young, or Carlos Pineiro, or any other individuals he could personally assail in the hopes of discrediting the otherwise-impervious evidence against him. In the end, Billy had to admit that this fishing expedition came up empty.

I know, there’s yet another level to the “Why would TG settle?” question – i.e., “Why would TG allow Billy to get away with what he’s done?” As I’ve already alluded to, one portion of that answer is “Because it’s not TG’s job to police asshats like Billy Mitchell”. But there is much more to that topic, and I promise, we will circle back around to it further down this page.

WHAT ABOUT THE BENJAMINS?

Getting back to the legal stuff, there wasn’t going to be any strict legal vindication for TG, just a paper certificate saying “We guess TG probably did nothing wrong”. But surely, since the case had come this far anyway, Jace and Tash should have taken it the rest of the way, if for no other reason, then for the massive payday that would be awaiting them if they won… right?

First of all, let’s be clear, despite how far the case had come, the trial was still months away (and that’s even if Billy’s side wouldn’t have managed to get it delayed again). The discovery and deposition process had mostly run its course, but those remaining months still would have included a massive amount of trial preparation. Either Tash would be working for free for those months, or Jace would have been footing a hefty bill, while the suckers at Manning & Kass were stuck in their contingency case. In other words, it wasn’t simply a freeroll to keep fighting. If we’re talking the money side of the equation, there had to be a significant payday at the end to justify those costs.

One of these potential paydays that’s been discussed is the idea that TG would recoup attorney fees in the event they defeat Billy’s defamation claim. Note that we’re talking U.S. court rules, which lack any sort of “loser pays” clause as is baked into other countries’ court systems. (Australia has such a system, which is why Billy’s misguided defamation lawsuit against Karl Jobst will prove so self-destructive.) All of this is to say, after a victory, TG would have to specifically file to be awarded such fees, and the motion would have to be granted by the judge.

I will admit, as a journalist who covers legal cases, rather than an actual lawyer, this topic starts to get a bit beyond my personal experience – although I believe most individuals asserting their confidence in such an outcome are also commenting beyond their means. As I suggested in “Part 1”, I’ve found that even many experienced lawyers have a tendency to assert expectations which are later found to be dubious and unfounded, so I’ve learned to rely on explanations and examples, and not merely on confident authority alone. Regardless of my own lack of specialization, I will address these points to the best of my ability, as I do wish to be thorough, but I wanted to be clear on the terms under which I speak.

It would be intellectually dishonest of me to go out and cherry-pick examples from other cases of when a party was or was not able to recoup such fees. However, I do wish to highlight one example from earlier in this very case, with this very same judge, when such fees were not awarded. For longtimers following this case, this harkens back to my “May Day Update” written in 2022. Twin Galaxies had filed an anti-SLAPP motion to terminate Billy’s case under anti-SLAPP law, which is designed to weed out frivolous lawsuits whose only goal is to silence legitimate free speech. In the end, Billy’s case was allowed to proceed based on a ruling that he had presented a “prima facie” case for defamation.

What does “prima facie” mean? I’m glad you asked! The Latin phrase translates to “on the face of it”. In plain English, it means Billy had at least shown an attempt to establish each of the elements of defamation. In other words, his filings weren’t just babbling on about nonsense and unnecessary paperwork. The purpose of anti-SLAPP laws is to swiftly weed out meritless lawsuits that fail to meet even this low bar. But prior Judge Alacorn found that Billy was at the very least pretending to be making a serious case. Granted, Billy did this by misrepresenting testimony and by lying through his teeth, as was later demonstrated, but the court was not allowed to weigh the merit of evidence at that stage. That’s what a jury trial is for.

So Twin Galaxies lost its anti-SLAPP motion. And then they appealed that ruling, and after a year of waiting, lost their appeal as well. Manning & Kass followed suit by asking the court to award them attorneys fees for their time spent battling this losing appeal. You would think this would be a slam dunk, right? M&K won both the initial ruling and the appeal. How could they possibly not deserve to be paid for the time they spent battling TG’s “meritless” opposition?

Except, that’s not what happened. Both parties’ requests for attorney fees were denied. Now, this could be chalked up to multiple factors. Maybe Judge Chang found Manning & Kass’ request of a quarter of a million dollars too excessive. Maybe she was like “Bro, the law required that we allow the case to proceed toward trial, but that doesn’t mean any of your bullshit has merit”. Or, probably more likely, she didn’t want to come down hard on either side, as we’ve seen in her other rulings. Regardless, it was effectively decided that the appeal had merit, even though it lost, and thus sanctions were not warranted.

Without a loser-pays system in place, the court allows for conclusions that say “This side wins, but that doesn’t mean the other side had no business bringing this matter to court in the first place”. To use a sports analogy, just because a team loses the Super Bowl doesn’t mean they had no chance of winning, or that they didn’t deserve to be there over the other thirty teams.

And here’s where I have to break some bad news to everyone: To be awarded legal fees, TG would have to show that Billy’s case did not have any minimal merit. However, legally speaking, the court already decided Billy’s case did have minimal merit. They did so when Alacorn ruled against TG’s anti-SLAPP motion. Lemme tell you, there is nothing courts like more than a precedent. “I don’t have to decide this question; it’s already been ruled on.” Granted, in this case, one could argue there was some ground for revisiting the court’s “prima facie” ruling, given that later depositions proved that elements of Billy’s initially presented case were fraudulent. But that possibility would be a huge risk for TG to invest in, given that TG had already filed termination motions based on these same misrepresentations, and Judge Chang seemed decidedly unmoved by TG’s concerns.

I’ve heard people say that they can’t imagine TG not being awarded attorney fees at the conclusion of the case. But what I think they mean is, they can’t imagine the U.S. justice system being so broken as to allow Billy to abuse the court and then walk away like nothing happened. For those people, I have some terrible news.

That leaves us with the “cross-complaint”, a.k.a. the countersuit. As “general damages”, Twin Galaxies requested $3,333,360 (the equivalent of a perfect score of Pac-Man), and as “special damages”, TG asked for $3,160,200 (the sum total of Billy’s three known cheated Donkey Kong scores). As discussed in “Part 1”, the figures they chose are supposed to represent actual confirmable monetary losses, and thus there were arguments over whether or not the use of such vanity totals is disqualifying. One could say that Jace screwed up by admitting at deposition that the stated countersuit figures were, as Billy’s lawyer quoted him, to “send a message” (as if anyone knows how well they would handle under bright deposition lights until they try), or that it was a mistake for TG to use such corny figures in the first place. However, I’m going to set that topic aside entirely, and look at the cross-complaint itself, which I encourage you all to do again as well.

https://perfectpacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Legal-Billy-vs-TG-2021-02-04-TG-Cross-complaint.pdf

One could write a lengthy analysis of the countersuit alone, but I’ll try to be brief. The counterclaim alleged seven causes of action, relating to the following specific assertions:

• For years, both Walter Day and Billy Mitchell used fraudulent claims to artificially inflate the value of Twin Galaxies prior to its sale;
• When Jace Hall bought Twin Galaxies, both Walter Day and Billy Mitchell misrepresented the scoreboard as accurate when they knew Billy’s scores were bogus;
• Walter and Billy undertook extra effort to conceal evidence of the fraudulence of these scores, as well as other nefarious activities;
• And later, in 2019, Walter and Billy submitted false evidence to Guinness World Records, inducing them to terminate their working relationship with TG.

As reported previously, Walter Day was dropped as a co-defendant not long ago. While no reason was publicly given for this choice (nor should we expect one), it’s possible TG decided it wasn’t worth their time and resources to go after someone known to live by very modest means. After all, no matter how badly you were wronged, there’s little point in suing someone who can’t pay. There’s also a possibility that a jury could sympathize with this seemingly sweet old man, being haled into California court in his waning years, in a way they would never identify with the bitter mullet clown in the cheap suit.

Thus, the remaining countersuit was against Billy alone. And where this may have gotten a bit tricky is where Billy’s involvement is implied. Attached as “Exhibit A” to that cross-complaint was the original purchase agreement, signed by Jace Hall and Walter Day. But nowhere in that agreement does Billy Mitchell’s name appear, nor is his signature on the document. Billy was involved in facilitating the sale behind the scenes, and the complaint alleges that he along with Walter used TG’s funds as their own personal piggy bank. And any reasonable person observing the facts understands Billy’s involvement in promoting the scoreboard owned by his close friend and business partner, which he did while using TG’s credibility to defraud the public through his fake high scores and bogus honorifics. However, legally speaking, it’s a complicated matter to prove Billy’s direct liability, when Billy can ultimately hide behind Walter Day as a shield. (And keep in mind, that would have been true whether Walter Day was released as a co-defendant or not.)

And so, here’s where we must confront a harsh realization: The countersuit may not have been that serious of an effort in the first place. Before I proceed, I should be clear that I speak only for myself, based on publicly available facts. But if you go through the actual text, it reads like a laundry list of grievances from everybody who’s had to deal with Billy Mitchell’s and Walter Day’s con-artistry over the years. The two of them suppressed recognition of high scores of competing players, such as Bill Bastable and Steve Wiebe. They fabricated Billy’s “Player of the Century” title, then lied and told everyone it came from Namco. (This was before our series “The Video Game Fraud of the Century” laid out that evidence.) They suppressed Tim Sczerby’s 2000 Donkey Kong score during the filming of King of Kong. They promised to give TG volunteers stock in the company, and then never delivered. They “associated with convicted felons and pedophiles”. (Yes, those words are in the document.) They promised to satisfy TG’s debts to people like Cat DeSpira and Patrick Scott Patterson, and then never did. They sold the company to Pete Bouvier and to Jourdan Adler under false pretenses. Et cetera, et cetera. All the bad stuff you’ve heard over the years.

And here’s where we get to a bit more legal nuance folks need to understand. You can kiiiiinda just say whatever you want in a legal complaint. At the time this was filed, Billy was bashing TG mercilessly, both in his own legal filings, and in public media – not to mention privately, to those he wished to isolate from Jace Hall. This countersuit was TG’s opportunity to go back on the offensive. Also, with regard to defamation, there are exemptions for statements made in litigation and associated testimony. (Some of you may recall, this was why Apollo Legend had to withdraw his threat to sue Billy Mitchell over statements Billy made in another lawsuit.) Billy had been abusing this loophole to his advantage. Regardless of the legal merits, the countersuit was TG’s big opportunity to crack back.

Of course, people who bought in to the idea that Twin Galaxies would successfully countersue Billy Mitchell into the ground would be within their right to feel disappointed now, or to say they feel misled. But keep in mind, even if the following was indeed the case, TG couldn’t just come out and say outright “We don’t mean any of this bullshit, we’re just filing this strategically to put pressure on Billy so he drops his lawsuit, and to counter all the lies he’s saying about us”. For legal purposes, the countersuit was not retaliation for Billy’s lawsuit, nor were there any unstated motives involved. As far as the court was concerned, Twin Galaxies simply had a valid legal claim, and were pursuing that claim within their rights. I covered the countersuit as genuine, so I suppose you can look to me and my coverage, but I certainly don’t think I was alone in reading the filing and thinking “Oh man, shit’s about to go down!” Many of us wanted the countersuit to be a sincere effort, and so that desire may have clouded our perception of it. That’s fine, but if that is what happened, at some point we need to accept it.

It could also be that TG did hope to prevail in the counterclaim, but didn’t quite have the evidence it needed at the time of filing. And so, they loaded it with unsubstantiated allegations – claims they believed to be true, which would merit the damages they sought, but for which proof was hopefully forthcoming. Like fisherman Billy, maybe they optimistically anticipated all the juicy deets they’d discover along the way, but had to abandon their quest when it bore insufficient fruit. The fact that they so readily dropped Walter as a co-defendant without any apparent concessions speaks to that possibility.

Whether the effort was sincere or not, had the case gone to trial, Twin Galaxies would have continued pursuing the countersuit to the extent they could. While I was always consistent that Billy had no chance of winning his defamation claim, I also maintained that the countersuit was less certain. There was at least a chance the jury of hotel janitors and baristas would have said “All of this video game stuff is stupid, and all of you lose.” Or TG could have received the classic one-dollar judgment that says “Sure, you win, here’s your prize lol.” And even if you set that possibility aside, TG’s sincerity during settlement negotiations would have factored into what judgment they would have ultimately received. The court could decide that TG sabotaged these negotiations by refusing reasonable offers, and thus could decide they aren’t entitled to the entire dollar figure they asked for.

But let’s take this analysis even one step further, and assume that TG would have won a significant judgment on the countersuit at trial. Indeed, you could say the chances of success would have been bolstered by being heard at the same time as Billy’s defamation claim; in other words, the jury would have had to sit and listen to a bunch of Billy lies anyway, they already would have come to resent Billy for taking them away from their jobs and families to hear his dogshit defamation case, and thus would have been inclined to rule against him across the board, regardless of their specific jury instructions or whether the particular legal blocks fit the available holes.

Billy Mitchell would have done everything in his power to avoid paying out an actual judgment to TG in this case. This isn’t like where you owe the government money, and they haunt you in your nightmares and garnish your income until you’ve paid. Harkening back to O.J. Simpson again, if you’ve never seen the massive 8-hour ESPN documentary on that case, I highly recommend it. In the final chapter, Fred Goldman said the following about the $33,000,000 judgment his family received in their civil lawsuit against Simpson:

But what people don’t realize about a civil trial is that a judgment is a piece of paper, and that is what you get. Then, it becomes the creditor’s responsibility to figure out a way to collect on it.

There would be so many ways for someone with Billy Mitchell’s resources to get out of paying a judgment like this. Without getting into undue detail on his personal life, public records show he already undertook efforts to transfer assets to his wife’s name. This could allow him to declare bankruptcy to terminate his debt without that adversely affecting him or his business. He could also appeal the judgment, and in doing so could attempt to push the consequences of his actions off into the future, as he always does. Or even if he absolutely had to pay, if the court reversed his asset transfers and everything else, he could still just take out another fraudulent loan in his elderly father’s name. (Oops! Did I say that out loud?)

On the other hand, Billy may indeed have agreed to pay TG as part of their confidential settlement. No doubt he would never want anyone to know about this, hence the confidentiality, but it is possible. And this would be another reason why resolving the case through a settlement is a benefit to TG. If they secured a judgment, it would have been an entirely new endeavor to track Billy down and collect, whereas failing to satisfy the terms of a settlement constitutes breach of contract, which would be a very easy case to litigate (and to publicize).

I’m guessing that folks may have a hard time accepting this relative inability to collect on Billy Mitchell. But I’ve researched the circumstances behind this case thoroughly – enough to discover, for example, how consistently he gets out of paying for his many, many traffic tickets in various Florida counties. (Look it up for yourself, if you wish.) Sure, Twin Galaxies could have sold the debt to an agency for a discount, and then the work of actually collecting would have been someone else’s problem. But I’m not sure people are really concerned with TG’s ability to collect revenue, rather than their desire to see Billy being forced to pay, in a more figurative sense (which is a topic I’ll address a bit later).

Either way, regardless of how else everyone feels about the appearance and the messaging of the real life outcome (and we’re still going to get into all of that), I think people need to accept that from TG’s perspective, there was no secured pot of gold at the end of this litigation rainbow. If there was, Jace and Tash would have pursued it. They’re obviously neither stupid nor scared. And it’s not like they don’t have access to resources to go all the way, if there was a valuable prize for doing so. Again, for the moment we’re just talking about strictly monetary considerations, but the reality is, this case was going to be a bottomless drain of time and money, for likely no material reward for anyone. Given that fact, TG chose to end this when they could, under terms they felt were acceptable.

HAPPILY EVER AFTER

That should be the end of the tedious legal bullshit. I know, some of you are thinking “If the community wanted so badly to see Billy lose at trial, why didn’t Jace fundraise and let that community foot the bill for him?” To answer that, we’re going to discuss the other “costs” involved, and we’ll look at some alternative outcomes. After all, any resolution can only be as good or bad as it is relative to the other options you had on the table. But before that, it’s necessary to take a critical eye toward fairy tale endings, which of course means talking Hollywood. (I mean actual Hollywood, in California, not “Rickey’s Restaurant” Hollywood in the Miami burbs.)

The purpose of this exercise is not to lecture you on what you already know – that Hollywood endings are not realistic. You know that, I know that. Even your dog knows that, and he’s so dumb he licks his own butthole. Rather, I wish to examine what about Hollywood endings makes them unrealistic. You see, I’m one of these people who appreciates the craft of things. I like dissecting why certain storytelling tropes became the way they are. It’s not just about the fact that the good guys always win in the end; it’s more about the way they win.

To that end, I want to discuss a few examples:

First up is the military courtroom classic A Few Good Men. The plot begins when someone dies at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, except in this case people actually care because the person who died was a U.S. marine and not an inmate. JAG attorneys Tom Cruise and Demi Moore look into the matter and begin to suspect the Marine’s death was the result of a “Code Red” – in other words, his fellow Marines were directed to punish him extrajudicially for perceived insubordination. Also, their investigation draws the ire of Colonel Jack Nicholson, commander of the Guantanamo base, which could have dire consequences for Tom’s and Demi’s careers.

All of this sets up an iconic courtroom scene at the end, wherein Cruise makes the bold move to call Nicholson to the witness stand. Tommy Boy questions Colonel Joker about inconsistencies in his testimony, then gets shouty, and again asks Jack if he ordered the “Code Red”. The military judge tells Nicholson he doesn’t have to answer the question, but Jack says “Fuck it, I’ll pick this moment to go completely off the rails.” Nicholson’s character elects to give an angry, unhinged soliloquy about military loyalty, with a dash of “You can’t handle the truth”, and a sprinkle of “You’re God damn right I [ordered the Code Red]”. Nicholson is practically arrested directly from the witness stand, while a once defiant Kevin Bacon (opposing JAG attorney) is left sitting there, deflated, like “Fuck bro, how am I supposed to help you now?” On the way out, we get one more entertaining outburst from the bad guy – something about eye-gouging and/or urination and/or upsetting the wrong marine.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great movie, and a great scene. But surely you see what’s wrong here, don’t you? The ending only works because the bad guy decided to give up and admit to everything! The scene is portrayed as though justice is served through a shrewd and calculated risk on the part of Cruise’s heroic character, who found the perfect way to prod the true answer out of a villain who, curiously, commits heinous acts while wanting deep down to speak his personal truth about those acts. An actual person like the Colonel would have kept his answers terse and unrevealing; maybe justice would still be served in the end, but it wouldn’t have been so dramatically satisfying.

I’m sure everyone reading this would love to see a similar scene, where Billy Mitchell melts down on the witness stand, where he asserts his belief that he’s the best Donkey Kong player in the world and that this somehow justifies cheating to claim that recognition, where he angrily declares he faked the Pac-Man plaques to justify the title he thinks he deserves, where he admits he helped Carlos with his testing and calls him a traitor for coming to the wrong conclusion, etc. But I think we can all agree that none of that was ever going to happen.

That’s an easy example, but magical movie endings aren’t just about bad guys who spill the entire plot upon receiving the least bit of provocation. Sometimes, screenwriters are asked to resolve weird juggling acts wherein an audience wants two contradictory outcomes, which the filmmaker is then expected to deliver seamlessly. Think back on how many times you’ve seen a superhero movie where the baddie dies specifically through their own inadvertent means. Maybe their big plan backfired, or their weapon got out of their control, or they otherwise impaled themselves with their own finely-sharpened arrogance. This is because audiences want to see the bad guy perish. It brings finality. They don’t want to see Thanos still hanging around at the end, still being a dick to everyone. That’s not satisfying! But most audiences also don’t want to see the hero (or at least traditional heroes like Superman, Spider-Man, or Batman) just straight up kill the bad guy, because that could mean the hero is a murderer. And then the movie becomes a moral conundrum that forces you to think and to weigh ethical considerations, and not a fun romp where good wins and evil loses. (This restriction seems to have been loosened a bit in recent years, but you still see it.) Hence, the juggling act. That’s where you get “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you.” It’s where you see savvy, resourceful villains follow through on elaborate plots, only to at the very end put themselves in immediate peril with no backup plan for escape. It’s the writer’s job to create an implausible scenario that satisfies the audience’s conflicting demands. This is all fine, but it’s important to remember that these scenarios are contrived and unlikely.

This “bad guy must die, but good guy can’t kill him” dance isn’t the only strange scenario screenwriters find themselves in. At this point, I’d like to point to an example of a much more specific type of juggling act, exemplified by my favorite movie trilogy of all time:

When Bobs Zemeckis and Gale went to make a sequel of Back to the Future, they had to decide on some sort of character arc for Marty McFly. After what I’m sure was a long and exhaustive search, they settled on “Marty flips out whenever someone calls him chicken, and this ruins his life in the future somehow”. This arc culminates in the moment late in Part III where, after hours of failing to understand what it means to not back down from bullies and allowing himself to be goaded into dangerous encounters, Marty finally realizes he’s under no obligation to risk his life in an actual gunfight with an irredeemable asshat who’s also way more practiced as a gunslinger, and certainly not to satisfy the desires of bystanders who want to see them duke it out. Or, as Marty presciently puts it:

He’s an asshole! I don’t care what Tannen says! And I don’t care what anybody else says, either.

But again, audiences don’t want to see Marty duck out, even though that’s the life lesson he’s supposed to be learning. They also want to see “Mad Dog” Tannen pay, to really get his comeuppance. (This was especially true of the test audiences who saw the later-deleted scene where Tannen murders Marshall Strickland in cold blood.) So instead, a convoluted scenario is devised where Marty first learns his lesson, and decides not to fight Tannen, but then is forced to confront Tannen against his will anyway. And then of course, plot armor saves the day, as Tannen tries to shoot Marty in a narrow portion of his torso and not his head or limbs. Again, I love the movie, but this is probably the most ridiculous example I can think of where writers were expected to deliver such wildly contradictory outcomes. In reality, nobody would naturally believe Event A would lead to Event B. And yet, once again, the audience is given everything they want, and everyone goes home happy – in cinema, at least.

“Okay, okay, we get it. Fiction is fiction. But we’re not talking about a movie here! Billy Mitchell is an awful person, who has done awful things, and Jace shouldn’t be letting him off the hook for everything he’s done.”

Setting aside the assumption that Jace Hall has the “power” to stop Billy Mitchell, there is a point to be made with this journey through celluloid storytelling, beyond simply “reality bites”. And to that end, I’m going to invoke one more cinematic comparison, one which may be a little too on-the-nose:

I’ll admit, to this day, I still haven’t seen the movie Pixels. I’m generally aware of the premise, of course. For research purposes, I bought a DVD shortly after this Donkey Kong dispute first happened, but I’ve been busy these past six years, and I haven’t sat down and actually watched it yet. I’ve heard people say Peter Dinklage’s character “Eddie Fireblaster” is a spot-on portrayal of Billy Mitchell, and obviously any perceived similarity is deliberate. The one thing I did know about the character was that, in the film, he’s also discovered to be a cheater, and that this advances Adam Sandler’s character arc somehow.

(As an aside, to those asking why Billy did publicity for this movie lampooning him, while suing Cartoon Network for doing the same, the answer is simple: Pixels paid him, while CN did not. As I’ve seen in other contexts, Billy Mitchell despises people making money off him, however incidentally, without giving him a cut. Think about that when you browse the new TG merch store, lol.)

About a year ago, I was flipping channels on TV, when I noticed Pixels was on, about halfway or so through. I ended up watching one scene – just this scene – with Peter Dinklage and some kid out on a balcony:

And I laughed and turned it off, since despite the expectations I’d gleaned from everyone, that was the most un-Billy-Mitchell-like thing I had ever seen. This isn’t an insult to Dinklage, of course, who is an exceptional actor. The problem was the writing. Basically, this kid, whoever he was, discovered Eddie’s sunglasses, which have some fictional Pac-Man cheat code discreetly engraved where only the wearer can see it. So this kid confronts Eddie about his discovery. And what does Mr. Fireblaster do? Does he tell the kid those are someone else’s glasses? Does he yank them out of the kid’s hands? Does he say that code was only for practice? Does he say the engraving is actually the recipe for his secret hot wing sauce? No, of course not! He just gives the whole game away!! He’s like “Well yeah, of course I cheated! And I did it at that event back in the ’80s, too! Cuz that’s what I’ve done my whole life, which is why I’m the villain, and you should hate me and root for the other guy.” Even when Hollywood is literally trying to portray actual Billy Mitchell, they still can’t do it right.

The audience wants finality, and they don’t care how unrealistic it is. This is why Jack Nicholson had to offer up his incriminating tirade. It’s why Michael J Fox had to kick Tom Wilson’s ass. And – so I assume – that’s why Dinklage had to say “Yes, I’m a cheater, you don’t have to keep wondering whether I’m the bad guy.” Part of finality is having clearly defined heroes, and clearly defined villains. The movie antagonist is not actually an independent agent, ready to burst through the pages of the screenplay when things aren’t going their way. They are prisoners of the writers and their goals. And – most importantly – they will relent when and how the writers want them to, whereas real people have agendas all their own.

BLEAKER TIMELINES

So how do these Hollywood hypotheticals help us understand this settlement with Billy Mitchell?

Again, the point is not to say “Nothing’s perfect, so settle for what you can get”. But it is to say “The thing you think you want will not deliver the outcome you want”.

I’m not going to speak to my own motivations at this time, but I’ve discussed the case with many, many people in the community. I believe what follows is a fair list of the specific results many of those people were hoping for in the Twin Galaxies / Billy Mitchell legal battle:

• For Billy to remain banned from TG and for his scores to remain disqualified;
• For him to be effectively barred from suing someone else for saying he cheated;
• For him to be publicly humiliated;
• For him to pay materially for the hardship he has put everyone through;
• For him to fade into obscurity.

Obviously, the first is a given. I’ve already addressed the idea that a TG victory at trial would legally bar Billy Mitchell from suing someone else for claiming he cheated, and later we’ll go over what that means in practical terms. Also, I don’t know if you all noticed, but Billy has been publicly humiliated for this folly of his, many many times over. How much of his “embarrassing” evidence, which he intended to keep secret, has been put on display? How many times has the public seen him tell bald-faced lies under oath, either in print or in his filmed deposition? How many videos has Karl Jobst done on him? Sure, Billy would have been humiliated again in open court, and I guess the people who would have traveled to Los Angeles to be present may have enjoyed watching that, but it’s not like the community at large who would have heard about this second-hand is missing out in that regard. In fact, what actually happened was way more effective at this end than an actual trial would have been. Billy Mitchell put himself through all of this embarrassment and shame and misery… and still walked away without getting what he wanted.

That leaves the other two: They want to see Billy Mitchell pay monetarily for what he’s done (which, if you haven’t noticed, goes way beyond cheating at a video game), and they want him to fuck off forever. You’ll note that I didn’t simply say “Lose his case”; I think people can agree that an outcome where Billy gets an unfavorable verdict but walks away without having to pay out any damages would not have satisfied anyone. It had to be a definitive, material loss.

And this brings us to why I took that long sidebar discussing happy Hollywood endings, examining how writers work to seamlessly deliver contradictory conclusions. Billy Mitchell was never going to take a massive public loss and do so with finality. Hollywood writers could deliver both things for you, but living, breathing narcissists acting of their own accord do not. If you were hoping for an outcome that delivered both of those things, I hate to be the one to say it, but you were wishing for the impossible.

In this case, we don’t even have to speculate about what would happen if Billy Mitchell took a decisive defeat to the chin. We’ve seen it already. When TG began investigating Jeremy Young’s dispute claim, Billy must have gotten the sense early on that he wasn’t going to easily bullshit his way out of that one. So he called upon all his friends, drew bystanders like Carlos Pineiro into the mix, and flew across the country to present his case. He was clearly invested in the outcome, and he took the clearest “L” he could have possibly taken:

Granted, some outlets didn’t really know what they were talking about…

But at least the general sentiment being conveyed was accurate. As an observer, that moment felt great. So many people had worked to expose this fraud, and they enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing good triumph over evil.

But do you remember what happened next?

Billy’s favorite thing is to declare victory, regardless of the circumstances. But it’s not like he could have done so with a straight face after the humiliation of the dispute verdict. So instead of declaring victory, he effectively declared war on his critics. He told a bunch of bald-faced lies about the evidence and the process, while rallying his supporters to his side. He made it a point to “redo” his contested scores, and to publicize them in the most obnoxious way possible. Oh, and he started suing everyone. He sued Jeremy Young for publishing the initial MAME evidence, and J.C. Harrist for owning the website it was published on. He sued Apollo Legend for covering the story. He sued Twin Galaxies in Florida and in California for “defaming” him by removing his scores. And later on, when David Race and Karl Jobst offended him, he sued them too. (To be clear, I’m certainly not assigning blame to anyone involved in publishing and advancing the dispute evidence. They did the right thing. The dispute may have been the catalyst, but Billy Mitchell is still responsible for his own vile actions.)

Now to be fair, we have also seen Billy Mitchell take a lawsuit loss without the same tenor of psychotic rage and retribution. His lawsuit against Cartoon Network over the Garrett Bobby Ferguson parody was tossed out of court pre-trial. Billy has a bogus story he likes to tell, where he paints the loss as a quiet victory. That’ll have to be a story for another time, but in short, he likes to suggest CN settled with him out of court, when in reality his case was dismissed “with prejudice”. Notably though, like other taboo topics (Roy Shildt, Bill Bastable), Billy only discusses the Cartoon Network suit when an interviewer asks.

Billy is also cruising for a new courtroom defeat against Karl Jobst in Australia. Many folks noticed that Billy’s phony victory statement following the TG settlement referred to “unfinished business elsewhere”. Billy will try every dirty trick in the book to avoid a loss there, but I don’t foresee him being successful. It will be interesting to see how that plays out, both in terms of Billy’s ability to avoid a judgment, and in how he’ll respond in the media. I’m admittedly reluctant to say it will be a template for how a TG trial aftermath would have unfolded, for a few reasons. The core issue in that case relates not to Billy’s precious Donkey Kong scores, but to statements regarding his settlement with Apollo Legend. While Billy obviously loathes the idea of losing any court case, and to Karl of all people, I could see Billy’s ego being less invested, since the topic doesn’t strike at the core of his public persona as a supposedly world class gamer. Also, despite the pageantry of his initial video threat, Billy has made far fewer statements about that case than he has about having done his bogus scores “the right way”. I would say Billy may attempt to memory-hole the Australia case altogether – an option he never would have had with Twin Galaxies and the Donkey Kong score dispute. But that of course will be complicated by the fact that Karl’s publicity game is sharper than Billy’s, and Karl will never let Billy hear the end of it.

In the Twin Galaxies matter, based on Billy’s observable behavior, I think we can infer some reasonable alternative outcomes. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, Billy took a giant, fat “L” at trial in Los Angeles. As I outlined earlier, it’s dubious whether any monetary judgment will stick, and it’s unlikely to factor into Billy’s public response anyway. He’s savvy enough with media to know, it’s an uphill battle to combat the initially negative news cycle, which is why he did not issue a statement on April 12, 2018 (the day of the original dispute verdict). So people would have felt as though they got what they wanted for a few days.

But Billy would not have let a defeat like that sit for very long. As he always does when he’s not getting the kind of attention he wants, he would have rallied his usual industry friends together for another publicity campaign. It would have been called either “Road to Redemption Part 3”, or some original name to hide the fact that he keeps having to seek “Redemption” for things. It probably would have been at Southern-Fried Gaming Expo again, the same favorable venue he did his 2018 and 2020 announcements at.

Having listened to so many Billy interviews and presentations, I could just about write the script for how it would go, too:

When we went into this, I mean we had so much evidence. We had a couple dozen witnesses, all willing to testify they saw it happen. We had the technicians who set up the games and the recording. We had equipment that was certified by Nintendo themselves. We had experts lined up, pointing out all the flaws in all their assumptions about MAME and arcade. And you know what the other side had? A bunch of crybabies, who are willing to look you in the eye and say “That didn’t happen… It couldn’t have happened… I wasn’t there, so I don’t believe it.”

But here’s what you have to understand, about our… legal system… What these witnesses say, and what they saw… none of it matters… if they’re not willing to travel to Los Angeles… and testify, in person. And this crybaby mob, it just got so intense… I had people, friends I’ve known for forty years, tell me “I just can’t handle this anymore”. These anti-social, misanthropic… Look at me, I know a big word… These toxic, dedicated losers… They’d be calling people in the middle of the night. They’d be calling their families. They’d be calling their employers. They left negative reviews on a business owned by one guy’s wife. I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff, and even I was shocked at how little decency these people had. There were death threats. I have some of them printed out, right here. I could show you. Four years, they did this. I’m not sure they even took a holiday off.

And then came… The YouTube videos. Some people will believe anything they hear, as long as it’s in a video, and the person sounds like they know what they’re talking about. Once again, they just post your phone number, like it’s nothing. Wink, wink. “You know what to do.” Oh, and that… deposition? [chuckle] It was pretty good, if you actually watch it. I’ve had people tell me, that’s the best they’ve ever seen someone handle a lawyer like that. At the end, he didn’t even know what to do. But these YouTube videos, they take out little moments where, maybe you didn’t answer a question fast enough, or maybe your wording wasn’t precise. “Oh look! That’s a lie! I can tell, he lied!… [eyeroll]… But you’ll notice… the other guy… he had a deposition, too… You haven’t seen it, have you?… That’s because he wanted to keep his [air quotes] “confidential”. Hmmm… I wonder why…

But everyone you knew, all your witnesses, they’re all getting these calls and emails, at all hours of the day and night. “Admit this! Admit that! Admit you lied!” They couldn’t even answer their phones anymore. And so, one by one, you’d have people say to you “I can’t handle this anymore. I want out.” And all I could do was shrug my shoulders and say “I understand.” I’d want out, too, if I were them, if I didn’t know how to handle these people.

And so you show up with what you have. Your experts versus theirs. Our main expert? He’s been an electrical engineering professor at USC for, what, thirty years? He’s in all these prestigious organizations, works in game design, works on virtual reality programs. We would be here for an hour, just to listen to all of his credentials. He gave us the most detailed, most thorough, most technical analysis on this situation anyone had seen. I mean, this guy knew. He knew exactly why the… girder finger… things… appear the way they do… The other guys? Their big [air quotes] “expert”, who’s completely sure there’s no way it’s anything but MAME? He’s like nineteen. He thinks he knows everything. I mean… Listen, we’ve all been there, right? He’s just a kid. I don’t blame him. But the others, the adults in the room, so to speak… They should know better.

But they had, like a dozen of these toxic… I should watch my language, there are kids here… These toxic… people… And they’re in their own little club, with their own little echo chamber with each other. “Oh, it couldn’t be this! It has to be that! Look, we found another girder finger!” Mind you, we found girder fingers on our own arcade machine, as well as on the machines used at the Kong Off… “Oh, but that’s not the right girder finger!” They’re just making it up as they go. There is no penetrating… that level of idiocy. None. You could spend the rest of your life arguing with them, and you would never get through. Saint Peter himself could come down and say “Here’s the explanation for everything, can you finally admit you were wrong?”, and they still wouldn’t believe it. Some of these… people… had money on the line… You might be shocked, at how willing some people are to lie to strangers, for money… I’m not shocked. I’ve seen it.

But I’ll tell you this. They think they’ve won. They think Billy Mitchell… is going to go away… They couldn’t be more wrong. Oh, believe me… By the time all of this is over… they’re going to wish they had given up… when they had the chance.

Having listened to as many Billy Mitchell speeches as I have, my guess is, he would avoid addressing the trial outcome directly, if for no other reason, then to avoid admitting that he lost anything, even temporarily. He would also avoid assigning blame to the judge or jury, although doing so would mean he couldn’t slip in a “One juror privately told me such and such” remark. He would also avoid lines like “They said all these lies about me,” or “They wouldn’t let me introduce my evidence”, because he knows that invites questions like “What exactly did they say?” and “What was this evidence you wanted to present?” He knows he’s catering to suckers, and that he doesn’t need to show anything to do so, when the mere inference will achieve his goals.

From there, Billy would arrange some big new gaming stunt he could promote. Maybe he has some other antic up his sleeve, such as the bonus hidden dot on Pac-Man’s “Reunion” machine. My guess is, he would go for “World’s first million points on Ms. Pac-Man”, since he has already declared his intention to go for that record. For those who don’t know, once perfect play is mastered, the world record on Ms. Pac is completely RNG-dependent. You have to luck out into getting the maximum number of kill screens, and more 5,000-point bananas than your competitors. Imagine a situation where Billy starts streaming from his friend’s arcade one day, and after five or so days, comes away with what appears to be a legitimate historic score. Of course, his critics (yours truly among them) would scrutinize the footage, and discover that each of his runs enjoyed astronomical odds on each of these RNG criteria. Was he playing on a modified EPROM? Was the final run pre-recorded? Who knows? Billy’s a buffoon, but he certainly knows people who are capable of such feats. And after the run, anyone who visits that arcade will find an ordinary, standard-operation Ms. Pac-Man machine in place of whatever Billy used.

Now, some might ask “What’s to stop him from doing all of this now?” But you have to understand, he’s not being put on the spot. As long as he can claim a victory, then there’s nothing he feels compelled to compensate for. It’s like when someone shows up the schoolyard bully, it feels great, until a knucklehead like me comes along and taunts the bad guy. “Oh, you gonna let him get away with that? You gonna let him do that to you?” (Just kidding, I know better… usually.)

Meanwhile, as for the legal battle itself, Billy would appeal any adverse judgment to the fullest extent he could. He would get another mortgage, gamble his retirement, jeopardize his family’s future (as he has already done), whatever he has to to continue the fight. That’s what he means when he says “Never surrender”. He’s going to keep rolling those dice as many times as he can. Even if there was no hope of success, as long as he kept battling it, he could always tell people the fight isn’t over. But in his mind, success is always a possibility. He can still win the game of chicken, as long as he refuses to blink first.

I am not a clinical psychologist, but I truly do believe Billy Mitchell is a psychopath. He is not wired like the rest of us. Normal people don’t lie the way he lies. At least with Todd Rogers, Todd just lazily tells lies and hopes you don’t notice. Billy throws other innocent people in the way of his deceits. He knowingly wastes other people’s time, manipulating them into coming to his defense. You may have noticed, when he tells a lie, he gets visibly angrier the more brazen that lie is. He’s shown no remorse for his actions. He focuses exclusively on the gratification of himself and his own ego. And he never, ever, ever gives up the game.

I realize I’m getting into some psychoanalysis here. But I’ve had to deal with narcissists and abusive people in my life. You start to see commonalities. They’re always going to have another story, another lie. It doesn’t matter how preposterous their fiction has become. People like Billy Mitchell will never give you what you want (such as an admission of guilt), because the fact that you continue seeking it from them is what gives them power over you.

I know everyone wanted to see Billy Mitchell lose to a jury verdict, and they wanted finality to also come from that. But I’m here to break it to you that one would not have led to the other. You were wanting a combination of things you were never going to have. Billy could have let his other cases go. He could have claimed figurative victories, or chalked those up to circumstances beyond his control. This was the one he wasn’t going to give up. This was the one that struck at the heart of who he presents himself to be. This was his hill.

Meanwhile, every day this went on was another loss for Twin Galaxies. Karl can at least milk his case, and Billy’s few public comments on it, for more monetized content. This entire affair has been a public relations disaster for TG, via continued association with controversy and cheated scores. And thanks to Billy, that wasn’t going to stop with a verdict. For Jace Hall, this case has no doubt been an endless pit of time and money – resources which I’m sure Jace would have preferred investing in his community. The new TG merchandise store is just one example. It debuted the same hour as the settlement announcement, complete with “not arcade” mugs and t-shirts, along with impressive recreations of legacy graphics. You can’t tell me that wasn’t ready for rollout for some time, awaiting the day they no longer had to worry about a jury believing Billy’s tales of TG milking controversy for money.

If you’ve been paying attention, as I have, you can see that from Billy’s perspective, this had become personal. At his 2018 SFGE panel, Billy referred to Jace as “Jace-in-the-Box”, in the same way he refuses to name others he has blacklisted. One of the last questions Tash asked Billy in his deposition (at 6:17:50) was “Do you understand that it was Jeremy Young that raised the dispute, and not Twin Galaxies?” Billy said he didn’t agree, pointing at Jace Hall sitting off-camera and adding “The guy behind the stick is in charge”. From Billy’s perspective, these cheating revelations had thrown his entire public life into upheaval, and obviously he couldn’t accept that his own actions are to blame. I also believe Billy’s manhood felt threatened by a taller, more secure man, who’s a better video gamer, and who didn’t need Billy’s validation nearly as badly as Billy needs everyone else’s. Either way, Billy Mitchell was never going to leave Jace Hall, or Twin Galaxies, alone.

At some point, Jace had to have realized he was never going to win this contest through conventional means. No sane person will ever be as persistent as Billy, so you can never have the advantage there. And like Marty McFly, you can’t just let him goad you into fighting his fight, no matter what the rubberneckers may want to see. To truly defeat Billy Mitchell, you have to be smarter than him.

So the question becomes, how exactly do you stave off these outcomes? How do you compel Billy Mitchell to fade into obscurity? How do you make Billy Mitchell accept defeat?

THE BAD WORD

And that brings us back around to that ugly word…

“Reinstate”…

Why, oh why, did TG’s statement have to include that, of all words? It’s not even accurate! Billy’s scores weren’t “reinstated” to the actual leaderboard like he wanted. Even the archive scoreboard that bears his name pre-existed this settlement. It’s as if the only reason that word is there is so Billy can go around claiming victory despite the loss.

At first, I just took its appearance at face value and assumed it was an effort to grease the wheels. We’re still not done discussing why a settlement is beneficial in this case, but setting that aside, if you are going to settle, even if the guy across the table from you is an uncompromising asshole, and even if you truly do want this guy to go fuck off a cliff, you have to offer at least something he wants if you expect him to sign off on it. Ideally that would simply be confidentiality – “Fine, I won’t tell everyone how badly you lost” – but sometimes you want something else, and so you have to offer something in return. Who knows, maybe this was done in exchange for making Zyda’s “analysis” public, so that Billy couldn’t go around claiming he had secret, exonerating evidence? It’s not pretty, but sometimes these things aren’t.

I also considered that Jace Hall’s primary concern was the actual leaderboard itself. And thus, Jace would have been willing to walk away with some bullshit statement forced into his mouth which Billy could use to claim an empty victory, as long as Jace’s two non-negotiables – that Billy is not unbanned and his scores are not restored to the leaderboard – are not violated. And sure, the statement and the outcome would leave people angry at Jace, at least for a while. But Jace would suffer the slings and arrows, as he has many times, and a year or two from now, all that would matter is that Billy failed to force his lies upon the TG community.

However, someone very savvy pointed out there’s a lot more to this particular word. In fact – and I know this may be the hardest sell of all, but I have come to believe it – its inclusion in the negotiated statement might actually be a stroke of genius on the part of Jace Hall.

I know. I feel you looking at me, with that raised eyebrow of skepticism. But I really do mean it.

As we’ve discussed, and as any reasonable person can see, Billy Mitchell will try to spin any outcome he can as a positive.

When he fails to duplicate his contested Donkey Kong scores?

I took those scores everyone was worrying about, and I redid them all, exactly on the head.

When he screws up a perfect score in Tennessee?

And that is a perfect game.

When he takes ten days to do a perfect score in Chicago?

Only losers criticize you for how long it takes you to achieve greatness.

Obviously, I’m paraphrasing a bit, but you get the idea. You could probably imagine how Billy would be inclined to spin any settlement announcement. If both sides walked away, without any archive scoreboard stuff:

Well, I’m not allowed to discuss specifics, but I’ll just say this. We asked for… things… and I am very satisfied with the outcome.

Or maybe a settlement with no action and no announcement whatsoever:

As a public figure… the threshold to winning a defamation lawsuit was just too high. We’d have to prove not only that they… defamed me… but that they specifically did it to harm me, and that they had malicious intent. And as I’m sure any lawyer will tell you, intent is the hardest thing in the world to prove… Anyone who looks at the totality of what was done knows that what they said was wrong… The fact that we took it as far as we did, defeating each of their motions to dismiss… We got sanctions against their attorney… One of their witnesses issued a retraction… Another witness of theirs is now being investigated for perjury… Believe me, the legal system is not kind to public figures who file for defamation, but all of this shows what a vindication this was… And if I had to guess, that’s probably why the other side threw in the towel when they did.

What, did you think Billy wouldn’t sprinkle in some blatant lies?

Better yet, how about this? Literally, the exact same outcome we got, with the legacy scoreboard and all that, but the only difference is, the statement doesn’t include the word “reinstate”:

Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but I think the… other guy… I think he really put himself in a bind. As I’m sure you know, in a… legal battle like this… you don’t just lay all your cards on the table all at once. So over and over, we’d bring out something we’d been holding up our sleeves. And each time, the other guy… he would go “Ohhhhh… No, we didn’t consider that.” You could see it in his face. One time, he said exactly this: “We didn’t think that was a possibility.” And I get it, it can be hard to admit when you’re wrong. But this guy was really in a pickle because, he had assured all these people that they had this figured out, that they had covered all their bases. I mean, these people were gonna be livid! “You told us this guy cheated! We trusted you!” He couldn’t bring himself to admit he had gotten this so… completely wrong… for years. I mean, how could you? And so… Our side had been looking for a settlement since when this all started, but the other guy… after all our evidence began to emerge, the other guy finally seemed to become amenable. And I think that’s where the idea for this legacy scoreboard came into play. It’s where they honor all the world records that stood when… when the new guy bought Twin Galaxies. It’s like a time capsule. And since he didn’t want to look everyone in the eyes and tell them “Hey, this thing we’ve been telling you all for years, we got it completely wrong”… I think this was his way of saying that he regrets what happened… without saying it.

Of course, people who are informed about the case would know this narrative is bogus. But you can’t prove it. Jace could come out and say “No lmao, we stand by our original conclusion,” but doing so wouldn’t exactly refute Billy’s narrative, especially not among the casuals Billy would be trying to appeal to. Plus, this angle would force Jace to keep playing Billy’s game and responding to him, which Jace has never shown an interest in doing. More to the point, I’m sure Jace had to take all of this into consideration. It’s not just about what TG does or doesn’t get from a settlement – it’s also about how Billy will use the outcome to continue lying to the community and disparaging Jace’s work.

So how do you even defeat this? How do you trap someone who will find some way to declare victory no matter what you do?

And this is what’s going to blow your mind:

What if you could dictate what Billy’s narrative would be?

And what if you could set him up to take the dumbest narrative possible?

Even if you successfully resist on the particular language of the statement, Billy would just craft his “victory” around whatever you consent to. But he’s not very bright; if you offer him the word “reinstate”, he’s just going to go around telling everyone he was “reinstated”. It’s the easiest, laziest narrative possible. After all, the statement says “reinstate”. That must mean he was “reinstated”, right?

Except it’s also the easiest narrative in the world to refute. There isn’t even any argument to be had. It is objectively falsifiable. Just look at the scoreboard. He’s not on it! It’s a simple enough concept, people were able to fully articulate it within the bounds of Twitter’s character limit:

Billy’s “victory” tweet got slapped with a big fat community note, shortly before he re-locked his account in shame:

Oh, and the idiot fans who just took Billy’s declaration at his word? They all look like fools for doing so, don’t they?

Now some may argue that, if this theory holds, then Billy didn’t really “surrender” per se, he just fell for some stupid trick or something. I’m not sure whether these faux alpha types who rally around personalities like Billy would consider it worse to be gullible as opposed to weak, but let’s assume the distinction matters. There is no way in this universe that Billy Mitchell did not know the difference between the real high score leaderboard, and some alternative listing. This guy, of all people, knows the difference. He never would have agreed to have his scores listed on some special, separate page, titled “Donkey Kong scores which look like MAME but which the player says was arcade, and which are probably bogus”. Billy likely had to sit and mull over the offer for a while. “Is this the fake win I can run with?” Meanwhile, his clueless lawyers, who don’t know the difference between real and archive scoreboards, and who Billy the pathological liar may not have been getting along with, were in his ear going “WTF you want, dude? It says they’ll ‘reinstate’ the scores! Fuck, you want sprinkles, too?” Where the sales job comes in is, Billy thought he could take this failure, which he knew in his heart was a capitulation, and repackage and sell it to the world as a win, while Jace – so I’m guessing – knew this was the correct flavor of failure to sell Billy on.

Billy Mitchell got played so hard, harder even than I realized when I posted my immediate reaction declaring Billy Mitchell had surrendered. I’m sure Billy eventually realized all this, and that he got outmaneuvered into accepting nothing of real substance from his big settlement. Despite his cool public persona, privately he must be seething that he surrendered his entire claim against TG and Jace-in-the-Box for a “victory lap” everyone with half a brain could see right through. (Not to mention the fact TG is now selling “not arcade” mugs without giving him a cut.) But the best part, the real chef’s kiss to it all, is that Billy can’t even really go after Jace for any of this now, because doing so would be a public admission of how badly he got taken for a ride. He just has to sit and eat his crunchy shit sandwich and pretend it tastes like sweet marmalade.

Look, I cannot tell you that this was what Jace Hall had in mind when he agreed to include the word “reinstate” in regards to the archive scoreboard. And even if it was a deliberate ploy, there’s no way Jace could have known for sure whether it would work out they way he’d have wanted. Historically, Billy’s been very adept at dictating media narratives, but with folks like Karl Jobst and MoistCr1TiKaL now in the mix, Billy’s monopoly over his own portrayal has waned considerably. There is an unmistakable air of doomerism among the dedicated Twin Galaxies circle (and we’ll discuss that later), but if replies to Jobst’s latest video are any indication, his community understands what a defeat it was for Billy Mitchell to walk away without reinstatement. Reddit also had a good laugh, once folks realized Billy’s scores weren’t actually being restored. If Jace was banking on Billy being unable to control the post-settlement story, at least when it comes to gamers in general, I would say Jace seems to have been more right than wrong.

SURRENDERING THE NARRATIVE

“But wait a second, ersatz! Billy got all these media outlets to repeat his story about being ‘reinstated’, most of which never bothered to issue a correction.”

That’s a great point! And wouldn’t you know it, that’s what we’re discussing next. It’s almost as if I plan this.

It is true that the media headlines following this settlement were… let’s just say, not as uniformly critical of Billy as they were in the aftermath of the April 2018 dispute verdict. But beyond the terms of the settlement itself, and the use of that ugly word “reinstate”, there are two key reasons for this disparity. First, back in 2018, when news broke that Twin Galaxies had stripped Billy Mitchell of his scores and banned him from future submissions, there was no competing narrative, nor was there an immediate public statement from Billy to counter TG’s conclusion. Media outlets were happily reporting on the only news they had. A few days later, when Billy did prepare a brief video from the halls of Midwest Gaming Classic, those headline-writers were only too happy to change their tunes.

Here was how Tech Times reported the story, on April 16th:

The AV Club also focused on Billy’s claims of proof:

Boing Boing wanted to make sure folks saw Billy’s own statement video:

If you checked NPR that day, this is what you would have seen:

Both the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times ran with a wire story, carrying the same message:

On April 17th, Ars Technica was happy to follow suit:

And from TechSpot:

And USgamer.net:

None of these headlines are technically inaccurate, of course. For instance, “refute” can mean “to deny the truth or correctness” of a claim. But people read it and think of its other meaning: “To prove (something) to be false or incorrect”. Given how exhaustive the investigation already was at that point, each of these headlines gave Billy far more deference than he ever deserved. And remember, nothing material about the case had changed in the few days between the dispute verdict and Billy’s MWGC video. All Billy had to do was assure these outlets that there will be an explanation for everything, and that was all they needed to carry his water for him.

The other factor, if I may be blunt, is that Billy’s unhinged litigiousness has been made apparent. Sure, his suit against Cartoon Network had been laughed out of court years prior, but nobody knew the insanely vindictive lengths he’s willing to go to to save his public ego. Random outlets have reported receiving legal threats over coverage critical of Billy. And like it or not, this does affect how media choose to handle him. Even some casual commentators, who were happy to criticize Billy in the early days, began backing away from stories which may draw his ire, while cowardly choosing to give him positive publicity with stories he may find favorable.

Fast-forwarding to 2024, even if Billy Mitchell had gotten utterly destroyed in court this year, you would have seen major gaming media publish ridiculous headlines like these:

Billy Mitchell gets his day in court, vows to keep fighting

King of Donkey Kong defiant after jury renders verdict

High score trial ends with Billy Mitchell claiming vindication

Donkey Kong jurors refute claims that Billy Mitchell “cheated”

King of Kong star declares victory after four-year legal battle

Some of you may think these are too outlandish, that there’s no way gaming media outlets would miss the mark that badly. (And if you do think that, you probably don’t follow politics.) But I ask you to consider something. In Billy’s announcement, he declared unambiguously: “Twin Galaxies has reinstated all of the videogame world records that I achieved in my career, effective immediately.” Did any of these outlets say to themselves, “I should check the Donkey Kong leaderboard, just to confirm his name is on it, before I hit send”? It’s one thing for you, a consumer of news media, to read reporting and not assume you have to fact check it (although that may be a habit you should reconsider). But these are reporters of news, purported journalists, who simply heard Billy Mitchell OF ALL PEOPLE declare something, and chose to blindly repeat what he said as fact. (Heck, one outlet even revised an initially reasonable headline and made it worse.) And don’t tell me it’s TG’s fault for allowing the word “reinstate” in the announcement. The words “as part of the official historical database” were hyperlinked to the archive scoreboard, which explains exactly what its function is. This should have been all the more reason to check the current leaderboard, or to seek clarification from TG before publishing headlines. I fail to see why anyone would be so sure these same outlets would give greater consideration before carrying whatever post-trial narrative Billy feeds them.

And this is where we need to confront an uncomfortable truth: Most gaming media outlets are not on your side. You are not their customers. Their advertisers are their customers, and your eyeballs are the product they sell. Behind the scenes, where the sausage gets made, some of these outlets are no more professional or diligent or reliable than the random forumgoers you mock and downvote, except they benefit from sparkly headlines and official bylines. Sometimes they’ll get the story right, and sometimes they won’t. But they aren’t going to tell your story, and they aren’t going to save you from people like Billy Mitchell.

(Pssst… This settlement also exposes which outlets simply repeat whatever bullshit Billy tells them, and which actually investigate and know what they’re talking about. But we can call that an incidental benefit.)

I know, it can be a difficult fight. Because you want these outlets to tell the truth, as you see it. This is why independent investigators like Karl Jobst are so important, because they aren’t frightened by bullies, and they will use their platforms to tell the truth, to the best of their ability to discern it. (Much as I would like to think of myself in the same terms, my platform is miniscule comparatively, although at least you are reading this, and I do appreciate that.)

We also shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Billy does things like hire public relations firms to push his stories to the media, giving him at least that advantage over volunteers like myself. But there’s another reason why, historically, Billy has been good at media relations – one which I believe many good people should take to heart. Billy Mitchell is willing to look people in the eyes and assert a narrative. That narrative may be full of lies, or otherwise misrepresentative, but Billy is willing to assert it all the same. Even worse, sometimes Billy’s most ardent critics assist him by repeating the same narrative he wishes to push. If Billy is out there asserting “I won”, and half the TG userbase are also declaring “Billy won”, what other impression are mildly-engaged media outlets supposed to walk away with?

Karl Jobst understands this. That’s why he’s also willing to assert a narrative. Granted, his is a more truthful one, but he doesn’t mince words about it. And thus you get videos with titles like “Billy Mitchell Gets DESTROYED By Judge”, and “Disgraced Gamer Billy Mitchell Accused of Extortion”, and “Conman Billy Mitchell Caught Faking Evidence”. And when it was confirmed that Billy didn’t get his precious scores back, within a couple hours, Karl’s channel featured the headline “Billy Mitchell Lost His Lawsuit”.

I wish to be clear. I don’t have a problem with people grousing in private that this was not the outcome they wanted. I do think defeatism is… well, defeatist… but that sort of deliberation can be a healthy part of honest extrospection. What I don’t understand is why people would so readily accept and repeat the negative narrative while lamenting that the negative narrative is what gains traction. If you’re expending your energy focusing on what you think Billy Mitchell gained out of the deal, of course others will follow suit.

I’m not asking people to lie, either to themselves or to others. It’s fair and responsible to acknowledge bad news when it happens, as I myself have done. But when people aren’t willing to assert that Billy Mitchell lost, when he clearly did lose, meaning he threw in the towel without satisfying any of the demands he entered into this litigation with, then I don’t understand how that could become anyone else’s fault. Why would Jace Hall be obliged to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars carrying a fruitless exercise to completion, if you’re not willing to merely go on an Internet forum and say the words “Billy Mitchell lost”, especially when those words happens to be true?

As if I needed to hammer this point home any more, please consider that any failure of Billy’s vocal critics to assert this simple and objective truth in fact validates Jace’s conclusion that prolonging this fight any further was not worth it. Unlike Billy Mitchell, who constantly seeks external validation, Jace Hall did not need to seek affirmation, either from the gaming public or from an uninformed jury. If a person in the community was not swayed by now, they are simply choosing not to pay attention to the evidence.

I’m sure some will say it was Twin Galaxies themselves who are guilty of failing to assert the correct narrative in this conclusion, as if they hadn’t done so a million times previously. Feel free to read back through Tash’s court filings to see what I mean by that. Twin Galaxies can’t do everything. If you don’t understand that they were the ones being sued, and therefore they aren’t at liberty to say whatever they want the way you or I can, then I’m not sure I can help you.

The good news is, you are still free to remind people any time you want that Billy Mitchell cheated. The evidence against him hasn’t changed. (Heck, even if TG had buckled and reinstated Billy, the actual evidence would still have remained the same.) And thanks to Billy’s choice to go all in on his “I was reinstated” angle, any time anyone asserts that narrative, it will be easily corrected. Sure, there will always be dedicated suckers…

And there will also always be trolls who, if you hadn’t noticed, don’t really believe Billy is innocent, but rather see this situation as an opportunity to antagonize Karl, or Moist, or gamers who “care too much”. But there’s nothing you can do for them.

Some people will recall hearing somewhere that Billy was “reinstated” or “vindicated”, but half of them have already forgotten where they got their half-baked news from in the first place. Lies have to be sustained, and over time, Billy’s will not be. In the end, the TG settlement gave the community the three tools it needed to combat misinformation: They refused an official reinstatement, they made Billy’s “secret evidence” public, and they set Billy up to take the wrong narrative. They did their job. If we care that much, we can do ours.

THE HUMAN ELEMENT

(Content warning: We will be discussing self-harm in a bit.)

We’ve thoroughly covered what both TG and Billy did and did not get out of the settlement. But there’s another, more personal aspect to why Twin Galaxies was right to put an end to this ordeal when they had a reasonable opportunity to do so. And this is where we have to discuss a few more uncomfortable truths.

Let’s be clear about one thing: Billy Mitchell is a dangerous person. At this point, lying for decades about video game scores is far and away the least of his crimes. He has lied about and defamed so many individuals, including those who trusted him and attempted to help him. He tries to destroy innocent people’s lives with baseless lawsuits, which have no apparent path to victory except to harass people until they give up or die. All the while, Billy has shown no sincere regard for the consequences of his actions, or for any consideration beyond the satisfaction of his own ego. As I said before, I truly believe he’s a psychopath. His reprehensible conduct bears that out.

I have spoken to people who want Billy Mitchell to pay – and I mean, seriously pay – for the harm he’s done to others and to the gaming community. And the human toll in an ordeal like this is indeed a real thing. Billy Mitchell has put a lot of folks through a lot of hell, and I don’t wish to diminish or make light of that.

However – and I mean to say this as delicately as possible – it’s important to remember that when people call for blood, sometimes it’s not the “bad guy” who ends up bleeding.

This was Benjamin Smith, who originally went by the username “Frogburt”, before taking up his more well-known handle, “Apollo Legend”. Apollo’s YouTube channel hit it big, after he made popular speedrun commentary videos, which later brought him to cover the Todd Rogers and Billy Mitchell scandals. In early 2020, Apollo was the target of one of Billy’s defamation lawsuits. After initial defiance, Apollo announced in August via a negotiated statement that he had settled out of court with Billy Mitchell, giving Billy possession of each of the videos he had made about Billy. In December of that year, Apollo committed suicide.

Of course, when the settlement was announced, most of us had no idea how much Apollo was likely struggling. In retrospect, I think a big part of what fueled my own negative reaction to the news of Apollo Legend’s settlement was how unexpected it was. One week, it was “I will not give him a single penny, I will not delete a single video,” and seemingly the next week, he was throwing in the towel. (Sure, prior to the announcement, members of “Team Billy” were discreetly bragging about Apollo settling, but I wasn’t putting much faith in what some Billy clowns were saying, until I saw it confirmed.) Some even chose to interpret Apollo’s negotiated statement to read as though he had learned of new evidence legitimizing Billy’s scores, though obviously that was not the case. Later on, I’ve gotten the impression that others in the inner circle of “Team Truth” knew about Apollo’s intention to settle prior to the public announcement, and were forbidden from sharing that information.

I’d only had a few text and email conversations with Apollo. To be clear, I don’t feel responsible for what he did next, nor do I believe anyone else is responsible in any way either. But with the benefit of hindsight, I do wish I had gauged his emotional state more earnestly. At the time, I figured he’s an adult, he knows what he’s doing, and he can make his own choices without me butting in. But the truth was, he was just a kid, who wasn’t ready for what he was getting into. I think it’s safe to say, Apollo’s later videos on Billy were ill-advised (given his own mental state), and only hurt his situation.

And Apollo wasn’t the only person on Billy Mitchell’s lawsuit list to have left us too soon.

Jeff “J.C.” Harrist, founder of Donkey Kong Forum, passed away in early 2022. Shortly before this, Billy had moved to dismiss his lawsuit against Harrist and Jeremy Young. Harrist had spent most of the last two years of his life with Billy’s frivolous lawsuit hanging over him. And even when Billy withdrew that case, Billy included a threat of re-opening the matter “in another jurisdiction such as Alaska” (which Billy knew to be Harrist’s home state). No matter what Billy may say of this now, his intention to harass and intimidate J.C. was clear.

If you’ve been reading the publicly available court documents, then you’re already aware of this. But what was not publicized following J.C.’s passing was his cause of death. J.C. Harrist chose to end his own life. If you include Jace Hall as the designated representative of Twin Galaxies, Billy has named six individuals (Jace, Jeremy, J.C., Apollo, Karl, and David) as lawsuit defendants. In the relatively short time since all this started, a full third of those defendants have since gone on to take their own lives.

As a personal rule, I don’t ascribe blame for suicide except in cases where the intention to compel is unambiguous. J.C. had spent a year struggling with a serious bout of long-COVID, which was likely what brought about his decision. But while Billy may not be “responsible” per se, that doesn’t mean he should be allowed to walk away as if he was doing nothing to elicit such an outcome. Thanks to that shithead, J.C. spent the last year of his life with this lawsuit hanging over his head. And if Billy felt about J.C. the same way he felt about Apollo, we would be within our right to assume Billy was pleased with J.C.’s death, given the elation Billy expressed to others after he first heard rumors of Apollo’s untimely end:

At this point, I want to be crystal clear that I’m not aware of anyone else embroiled in these ongoing cases who is struggling in this fashion. But that is the problem, isn’t it? You never do know what people’s struggles are until it’s too late.

With that said, when I speak of the human toll involved, that toll need not necessarily involve strict matters of life-and-death. It can be life-altering stress. It can be important life decisions that can’t be made until this ordeal is over. It can be dealing with a spouse, or with friends or family, asking you if this stupid video game stuff is really worth it. It can be setting aside time away from your job to testify in October, and then having to set aside time again when the trial is delayed until January, and then again when it’s delayed again until April. It can be living with the fear that you’ll be the one to say something so stupid on the witness stand that you cost someone else a million dollars. For folks like David Race and Karl Jobst, who are still dealing with Billy Mitchell lawsuits, it can be about wondering how the next lawyer bills will be paid.

I promise, there is a point to be made, specifically with regard to how the trial would have played out. But before we get there, I do ask you to please consider this matter sincerely. For many of you, this TG case has been about embarrassing exposés, funny videos by Karl Jobst, a written update once every two months, and silly paint can shenanigans along the way. (That’s not to say folks didn’t donate much appreciated money to the legal funds for Karl and for David, but Jace Hall never asked for that assistance in this TG case.) For some of us though, this case has been about long nights, with lots and lots of reading and writing and screencapping. It was about phone calls and DMs in the middle of the night from people asking for assistance. It was seeing your caller ID, or hearing your phone blow up, and going “Oh fuck, what happened now?” It was a spreadsheet listing over 9,000 webpages and over 3,000 YouTube videos – a spreadsheet which you keep open and ready at all times because you never know when you’ll need it. It was about making sure to save Twitch streams before they disappear. It was about endless research notes, and having to organize those notes, and then having to further organize that organization. It was about having to budget time just to catch up on emails. At times, it was about stressing over what shitty maneuver would come next. It was about sinking fair money into this nonsense, money which you could be spending on nice things instead. (I do not even want to know how much Jace Hall spent defending TG from this insanity, but I am certain it was more than enough.) Again, these things aren’t life and death, but they do matter. For some of us, this case was an unpaid second job. It was doing tedious work while others were having fun. Obviously I can only speak for myself, but while I would do it all again without hesitation, I for one am relieved this part of the Billy Mitchell ordeal is over.

It would be one thing if I was tugging at your heartsrtings in this way to get you to accept a Billy Mitchell victory with grace. But he didn’t win! Our community’s defense was successful! The mission was accomplished, and everyone who contributed to that should feel proud. Sure, Billy Mitchell didn’t get flung from the courthouse steps into a well-placed truck full of horse manure, but you know, we were never going to get everything we wished for. I do want to be fair: I genuinely do not consider people’s desires to see an epic, royal courtroom bodyslam of Billy Mitchell to be in any way selfish or callow. As someone who has worked on this case for nearly six years, I understand that desire completely. But just because you, of your own personal accord, may think someone deserves an ass-kicking the likes of which are seldom seen in civil society, that does not mean such an act would be wise for anyone to carry out. I’ve said elsewhere that any entertainment that people may derive from “Billy Mitchell the villain” is not worth what people have had to go through, and while this is not what I meant by that, I do think the principle still applies. Nobody is required to suffer just because spectators want to see a cataclysm.

Lest you think the argument I’m making is simply “Things are terrible, and anything could happen, so you never know”, it’s important to understand how this trial, involving these parties, would have magnified these struggles for everyone involved.

As I said in “Part 1”, the failure of Judge Wendy Chang to intervene on this meritless lawsuit of lies put everyone in a bind. Tash was forced to simplify his pleadings, in what I assume was an attempt to break through the judge’s limited attention span. (I should be clear that that’s just my personal guess.) But I think it’s easy to miss how the judge’s actions also put Billy’s own attorneys in a difficult situation. Surely, this deep into the process, having listened to their own client rattle off lie after demonstrable lie in live deposition, they knew their case was sunk. Any attempt to outright bail on Billy would have been a huge embarrassment to the firm, and could maybe have even run afoul of any contingency agreement they had with Billy. So instead, their work got sloppy, at times not even bothering to challenge TG’s assertions at all. They literally didn’t offer the court a counter-narrative for Billy’s fake plaques, instead sweepingly dismissing TG’s expert forensic analysis as a “conspiracy theory”. I began to think they wanted a way out as well, one which they could chalk up to a typical and statistically expected courtroom loss and not a total public humiliation. This theory was bolstered further when Ms. Ross attached the entirety of one of my write-ups to one of her filings. Why on Earth would they want the judge reading my detailed accounting of Billy’s lies and my arguments as to why the court needed to intervene to terminate Billy’s case?

I’m not going to mince words on this: Billy’s lawyers – James Gibbons, Anthony Ellrod, Kristina Ross, all of them – are also terrible people, just like their client. They chose to represent an established liar, who was already buried under a mountain of evidence. They chose to take on a case whose only avenue to victory was to pressure and harass a bunch of innocent hobbyists with legal threats and mounting expenses. They sought to force a bunch of lies on a fun community. And they did this all so they could try and extract money, with no regard to the harm they do to people.

You could say that TG had these lowlifes backed into a corner, and in a sense you’d be correct. But backing wolves into a corner only makes them more dangerous. If they’re unwilling to humiliate themselves with a white flag, and if they’re unable to clue the judge into the fact that they quietly want the case terminated, then their only option is to attack. And since they can’t attack the evidence, or the merits of the case, the only thing they could do was attack the people.

We already got a sense of this with their attempts to disqualify Tash, and to refer him to the state Bar for disciplinary action. They don’t give a crap about Tash “instructing” witnesses, or badgering Jerry Byrum to hand over the fake plaques. I have no doubt that Manning & Kass do far worse than that all the time. But attacking Tash’s career in this manner had become their way out. (To be clear, it would be unethical for Tash to push for a settlement to save his own hide, but that doesn’t stop Jace from factoring it into his own decision.)

And Tash was far from the only one in their sights. They could have gone after Carlos Pineiro for perjury, on the basis that he signed not one but two misguided statements which he chose to recant. I would say Billy’s lawsuit against David Race was strictly retaliation for David’s choice to assist TG with favorable evidence and testimony. There was also that matter of an unidentified witness who Team Billy was allegedly attempting to extort. Between January and the trial, a lot of people were going to be put through hell – all so TG could secure a “verdict” which, as I’ve described, ultimately would not satisfy people anyway. And while I would not consider this stress to be Jace Hall’s fault, nor his responsibility, that doesn’t mean he would not have felt some personal ethical liability for allowing it to continue.

Oh, and remember, when I say “between January and the trial”, that doesn’t necessarily mean “until April”. The trial had already been delayed several times, so we have no reason to believe it couldn’t be pushed all the way to the COVID-extended civil lawsuit deadline in October. And even then, that’s not necessarily the end of it. I spoke earlier as though a trial must end in a verdict one way or the other, but there are… other outcomes. God forbid, we go through all this horseshit, just for it to result in a motherfucking mistrial. Oh, they don’t show those in the movies either, do they? Yeah, if something goes wrong, like if the jury is exposed to something they weren’t supposed to see or hear, the judge can call off the trial halfway through, and we would get to do it allllll over again, at a different time, with a different jury. Do you think Billy would want to “accidentally” be the reason that happens? And while Billy couldn’t appeal the verdict strictly because he didn’t like it, he could appeal any important rulings which he could argue improperly influenced the procedure, and in extreme cases, could secure a retrial that way. People joke about this case never ending, but this shit could have actually gone on forever.

Between written declarations, known depositions (such as that of Steve Wiebe), and those who intended to travel to Los Angeles to testify, I believe about twenty individuals were called upon in Twin Galaxies’ defense. (And that’s not even counting folks, like myself, conducting research behind the scenes.) In some cases, the testimony was only for purposes of advancing a motion, but for matters pertaining to the actual evidence being presented to the jury, their testimony is not admissible at trial unless they appear and make themselves available for cross-examination. Would their lives have withstood the opposition’s scrutiny? I can’t account for each of these people’s personal struggles, nor would I want to try. I will readily admit, I could very well be overreacting and exaggerating this point. Perhaps everyone still involved is fine, and everything would have gone well. But I can say I’m glad we’ll never have to find out.

I do wish to be clear, I do not speak for everyone in this regard. I’ve discussed this with one person who has suffered considerably, who despite his scars, still wished this case to go to trial. I’ve also heard from another who was disappointed with the outcome, but who at the same time expressed relief that he would no longer have to testify or be cross-examined on the witness stand. And I have also spoken to people who are privately delighted both with the fact that Billy did not get what he wanted, and that the ordeal is effectively over. Everyone involved will have to speak for themselves. But I do sincerely believe that any disappointment being expressed is rooted in a misguided belief that a jury verdict would bring a satisfying finality that this outcome does not.

Does Billy deserve to pay for the harm he’s put everyone through? I’m reluctant to answer, simply because it is a loaded question, and because we are talking about a crazed litigant who will reframe anything you say in the most misrepresentative way he can. But for the sake of discussion, I will say “Yes, Billy’s conduct has been reprehensible, he has done untold harm to many innocent people, and there should be consequences for such actions.” Obviously, I would not say the fact that Billy can now walk away is a “good” part of the settlement. But I would attribute the fact that Billy is able to get away with this awful behavior as failings of the system itself. This establishment protects far worse people than Billy Mitchell every day. These monsters never get what they truly deserve. A court victory may have insulated some folks’ fantasies of a “justice” system which is impervious to lawfare, which knows to punish the true offenders, and which still rewards truth and honestly. But I must regretfully admit that Jace Hall would not be correcting any fundamental injustices of this system by continuing to pursue this case to the bitter end. Many empathetic people would have felt obliged to make continued sacrifices in Jace’s defense. Given the personal trajectory the battle would take, he chose to relieve everyone of those obligations, before it went too far.

WILL THIS EVER ACTUALLY END?

And that brings us to our final point of concern: What’s to stop Billy Mitchell from starting all of this up again? (Setting aside of course that any settlement prohibits Billy from resurrecting this exact defamation claim against TG.)

I do think people are focusing too much on the last month or so, where things abruptly went from pre-trail preparation all the way to settlement in what felt like days – although, perhaps not so abruptly for the parties to the case and their attorneys. Even if you’re inclined to debate the merits of the settlement itself, there should be no doubt that this lawsuit, when taken in its entirety, has been an epic, overwhelming clusterfuck of a disaster for Billy Mitchell. The Guinness “reinstatement” he bragged about was exposed as a sham, his deposition full of blatant lies was published for the world to see, he’s become and endless punching bag among self-respecting gamers everywhere, and the MAME evidence he didn’t want anyone to see has become crystalized in everyone’s consciousness. Oh, and that whole “Player of the Century” thing that was always accepted as fact got investigated and debunked as well. People talk about the “Streisand Effect”, but this would be like if Babs tried to suppress a single photo, and as a result had her whole life and career exposed as a lie. It’s not even on the same level. There just are not words to express how badly all of this blew up in Billy Mitchell’s face. (And, again, you can thank Jace Hall and the Mighty Mister Tash for that.)

We should be clear about one thing: You can sue anyone for anything. Billy has not yet been declared a “vexatious litigant”, and thus even the most humiliating defeat in the history of jurisprudence would not have strictly prevented him from suing others, such as myself, for speaking out against his lies and his conduct. And as we discussed earlier, a TG triumph over the defamation claim would not have equated to legal confirmation that Billy cheated. The fact that TG’s case ended in a settlement changes nothing in this regard.

However, this is where we should take a page from Ms. Wendy Koopa and “get real”. No self-respecting lawyer is going to take up one of Billy Mitchell’s SLAPP suits again, and absolutely not on contingency. If Manning & Kass could go back in time, I guarantee they would have taken a pass on this one. Their overall business model may allow them to take a bath on the occasional ill-advised case, and of course the firm will be fine in the end, but this was a public relations humiliation beyond what they typically account for. And they’re still getting splash damage from their involvement with Professor Pervert. Nobody’s going to look at what they went through, for minimal apparent compensation, and say “Yeah, I want a piece of that action”.

Meanwhile, as much as Billy wants to portray otherwise, he knows he quit on the TG case. All these court battles have brought him nothing but headaches. And whatever remaining spirit he and his son may still have for lawsuits (self-represented or otherwise) is going to be quashed big time when they lose to Karl. I do maintain that the Mitchells would have continued pursuing the TG case to the bitter end, appeals and all, but there’s a big difference between refusing to surrender an existing fight, and starting a new one you know you won’t want to walk away from. They may still sling some empty legal threats at journalists who say things they don’t like. But once his current cases play out, I’m tellin’ ya, that dude is done with this game.

And that brings us to our first step toward moving on. Throughout coverage of this case, you would occasionally hear this tired refrain from casual cynics: “He would go away if only you’d stop talking about him.” The problem of course is, you can’t stop talking about Billy Mitchell when he’s suing people and trying to destroy their lives. You have to cover that news, and you have to rally to the defense of his victims; otherwise, you isolate the bully with his targets. Even setting that aside, I’m not sure this “Stop talking about him and he’ll go away” approach will actually prove as effective as those naysayers think, but once there are no longer lawsuits to deal with, it will at least be a possibility.

However, I think what people really mean when they say they want this to “end” is, they want to stop seeing Billy Mitchell at conventions, or in documentaries, or in their news feeds. They want this proven fraud to stop taking the limelight away from honest gamers and competitors, whose accomplishments are far more noteworthy than even Billy’s cheated ones. What people want is for this guy to stop taking up everyone else’s oxygen.

Before I continue, I should point out once again that a trial defeat would not have meaningfully changed this dynamic. As I argued earlier, unlike the Todd Rogerses of the world who are inclined to largely slink away, I think you’d be seeing and hearing a lot more from Billy Mitchell following such a defeat. He would have something to prove. And Billy’s charm would still sway those who see only dollar signs, and who don’t really care what an awful person he is. The same event organizers and the same filmmakers would still gravitate toward the “controversy”. Billy’s friendly podcasters wouldn’t care what some jury in Los Angeles decided. Thus, regardless of how the lawsuit ended, any campaign to change this dynamic can only be successful if it aims to make these connections with Billy untenable, or unprofitable.

What it would take to fully excise Billy Mitchell from the gaming community is for a critical mass of that community to come together and make that a singular demand. You would need important figures to say “I’m not involving myself in any project that includes him in any way”. You would need tournament participants to say, as a group, “We’re all walking out en masse if that guy is allowed to attend”. You would need people to not only assert narratives in words, but in actions. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether any of this is feasible. Surely such a thing could be achieved if, say, event organizers were insisting on granting access to an unrepentant child predator. However, I would say that the danger Billy represents has not risen to that level, and thus his presence does not elicit the same outrage.

I’m not saying any of these measures are necessary. I’m just one person with a keyboard, who doesn’t always get his way with things. When I attended PRGE in October, there among the exhibitors were booths for Heritage Auctions and for Wata Games. I’d love for them to fuck off as well. Jirard Khalil is back doing videos for his remaining fans, acting as if nothing ever happened. Billy’s litigation days may be nearing an end, but people cut from his cloth don’t feel shame, and they don’t go away just because you want them to.

I know, I’m such a downer today. How about we talk about something more positive?

THE FUTURE OF TWIN GALAXIES

For most of my drafts, this piece was titled “How Billy Mitchell lost the dumbest lawsuit in gaming history”. But then I realized, while it is true that Billy lost, the real ramifications for this story are not that this has-been cheater failed in his pathetic attempt to force a scoreboard to recognize his brazen lies. The real story is that Twin Galaxies defeated that attempt. More to the point, putting that focus where it belongs is an important first step toward helping the community heal from this entire fiasco.

Harkening back to our four relevant groups from today’s introduction, I sincerely do believe this settlement was a good outcome for each of them. I take it as a given that this was beneficial to Jace and Tash, since they were the ones who signed off on it. Jace has also successfully warned off anyone else of similar narcissistic tendencies. The gaming community at large may not have gotten the courtroom spectacle they’d hoped for, but they did get a big Billy embarrassment to replace it. Any attempts by Billy to flaunt his phony “victory” will always be easily rebuked, he won’t escape his connection to Zyda the creeper, and it just so happens that humiliating courtroom defeat people anticipated is still awaiting Billy in Australia. The ordeal for most of those personally involved is also over, with the satisfaction of knowing that the eternally discredited Billy Mitchell will never get what he actually wanted. That work also has practical ramifications, since no future cheater is going to look at this case as any sort of encouraging inspiration.

However, I would say the group that comes out the best is the actively participating TG userbase – perhaps ironically, since the most vocal negativity seems to be coming from them. Say what you want about the messaging, or the fact that Billy Mitchell wasn’t “taken down” or whatever, but the basic facts should be clear: TG was sued by a cheater, TG didn’t want to reinstate the cheater’s scores, and now the lawsuit is gone, and the scores are not reinstated. Nobody at TG is going to have to compete against Billy’s proven bullshit on the leaderboards. And the money and effort which until now has been wasted fighting this crackpot can instead be spent on things the community will enjoy.

Even more bizarrely, some individuals who I know to be critical of Billy were out claiming this settlement somehow taints the Twin Galaxies leaderboard, when the scoreboard was literally the one thing throughout this whole ordeal that remained unassailed. Is this just the classic “trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”? I don’t mean to be rude, but given that Billy is effectively unable to express his frustration at Jace Hall and TG for getting played like a piano, I’m sure he would love for others to do the smearing for him.

I have to be real with you all: Any other gaming scorekeeper would have thrown in the towel on this legal battle a long time ago. No disrespect to Speedrun.com, but I struggle to imagine a world where either the site owners or a moderation team would have put themselves through a fraction of the cost, the risk, or the personal hell that Jace Hall did to resist this lunatic’s demands. And that goes for Barcade, and any others as well. Sure, you could point out that Billy also sued Donkey Kong Forum, and that they didn’t give in. But DKF didn’t get Billy’s full court press. Billy never acquired an actual attorney for that case – possibly because he couldn’t demonstrate there was any money to be had. For whatever reason, Billy never felt as personally threatened by Jeremy Young and J.C. Harrist as he did by Jace Hall. (And the DKF site almost didn’t survive anyway, but that’s a story for another day.)

Of course, any of these sites would have been put in the same bind that TG was – If they try to satisfy this unhinged nutjob’s demands and make him go away, they lose their credibility, which is foundational to their business model. (Guinness didn’t hesitate for a second, because peddling their “world records” for cash is their business model.) Yes, each of these hobbyist meccas would have had their own loyal userbases, willing to contribute money, and insistent that the curators of their online spaces “do the right thing”. But sadly, even heroes often decide the “right thing” is not personally worth it. In fact – more of this candor I warned you about in “Part 1” – I would argue that a failure of the userbase to recognize and appreciate the value of that struggle, even if it were only partially successful, disincentivizes these adjudicators from strenuously resisting cheaters in the first place.

I am well aware that Jace Hall often has appearance issues. The Dragster dispute in 2017-18 was seen as a huge debacle, even though TG ultimately got it right. They were correct to insist on hardware tests and not strictly emulation and code analysis before removing a legacy “achievement” of that stature. (If you’re still skeptical on this point, I ask you to peruse the Stella change logs for a bit.) And despite gamers’ impatience, looking back now, I think it’s safe to say it really didn’t matter that it took a few months to wrangle Ben Heck into doing said analysis. The real reason that dispute spiraled out into such a big fiasco lied in Jace’s messaging. Omnigamer’s argument covered 99.9% of what needed to be established. Jace should have focused on that 99.9%: “This is amazing work, thank you so much for your contributions Mr. Koziel, we aren’t willing to make a conclusion at this time without verified hardware tests, but we have begun looking into how these tests can be effectively conducted.” Instead, Jace made it a point to focus on the 0.1% possibility that some unforeseen Atari 2600 hardware quirk could have allowed a Dragster time of 5.51 seconds. This resulted in pages and pages of arguments between Jace and Omnigamer, where Omnigamer came across as diligent and rational, while Jace seemed more interested in grasping at whatever straws he could find. “What if your math is wrong? What if there’s a secret prototype of Dragster nobody’s ever seen? What if cosmic rays hit the console at just the right time? What if? What if? What if?” (Obviously, these are paraphrases.) By taking this tack, Jace Hall unwittingly cast himself as the antagonist to an already distrusting speedrun community. He could have looked like a champ, and instead he looked ridiculous. But ultimately, Jace never really cared about that perception. He only cared about doing what he believed was right.

And Jace Hall did get the Dragster dispute right in the end, as he did the Donkey Kong dispute a couple months later. At some point, the new Twin Galaxies had to decide whether they would continue catering to the established “old guard”, as Walter Day’s Twin Galaxies had done for so long, or whether they would promote fair competition between veteran and newcomer alike.

In writing this piece, I managed to track down some thoughts I expressed on Reddit back on the exact day the MAME evidence against Billy was originally published:

Well, I have now seen where the road went, and I can say I’m highly impressed. Todd and Billy weren’t the last significant cheaters to be ousted. Rodrigo Lopes was a highly prolific submitter, and very active participant in the TG community, but once it had become clear he was concealing evidence pertaining to credible accusations of cheating, his stature didn’t stop him from getting iced as well. I do still believe the evidence threshold for removing disputed scores at TG remains too high, but given the lawsuits, one can’t say Twin Galaxies was unreasonable for using absolute certainty as the standard.

Through it all, up to and including this settlement, Jace Hall didn’t care that he’d get roasted. It didn’t bother him that people would initially flip the fuck out, before they realized Billy’s “reinstatement” wasn’t real. He didn’t get angry at the people calling him bad names, and he doesn’t seem to resent them for doing so. (He certainly didn’t care about all the rude things I had said about him in the past, lol.) While Billy loves telling people he “always has a plan”, Jace actually is willing to sacrifice short-term appearances for long-term gains. Jace certainly has his flaws; I believe he often loses sight of the fact that people are not strictly rational creatures, and thus cannot be understood in that context alone. But he has persevered, correctly refusing to listen to the cynics who wanted to see him and Twin Galaxies fail. Like with Billy, I’m not sure Jace Hall is wired like the rest of us, but in this case, I mean it in a good way. As someone whose opinion has fully turned around, the competitive community could not ask for a better steward than Jace Hall, and arguably does not deserve one.

As for more proactive contributions to competitive gaming, Twin Galaxies’ future is bright. I don’t know if you all noticed, but the TGSAP adjudication system is awesome. While the moderation system at SRC has served them well, there have unfortunately been occasions where moderators were themselves a source of the problem, or in extreme cases where moderation teams become cliques which refuse to hold their own accountable. With TGSAP, the evidence for standing scores is public and permanent for all to see. The scoreboard’s integrity is still only as solid as the community’s interest in the truth, but at least the broader community has the ability to intervene. (Personally, I believe the next move is to shitcan legacy scores and proceed with TGSAP-only leaderboards, but hey, that’s just me.) Also, Twin Galaxies has begun branching out beyond strictly high score and speedrun leaderboards. Have you seen the TG bounty page? I’m not a speedrunner or high score gamer, but I love unconventional gaming challenges – which is probably why I started issuing a few of those bounty challenges myself.

Furthermore, if I may say, Twin Galaxies would now seem to have an ironic endorsement, from the most unlikeliest of sources:

Jace Hall was willing to dumpster the “great” Billy Mitchell, seemingly without any hesitation. Jace gave precisely zero fucks about this guy. Billy, on the other hand, needed Twin Galaxies. Billy could have called this nonsense off after he secured his Guinness reinstatement in early 2020. “TG is a joke, just like all the loser haters. My scores are recognized by the only world record adjudicator that matters.” And if TG didn’t matter now, Billy would not be lying to the press and acting as though TG currently recognizes his scores when they do not. Billy Mitchell may have spent the last few years saying one thing, but his actions demonstrate that the recognition of Jace Hall’s Twin Galaxies is the most valuable thing going in competitive gaming.

I think it’s fair to say Billy and Twin Galaxies had different crowds in mind, when anticipating how their settlement would play out. These days, Billy likes to focus on casual, less dedicated fans, who just know him as the guy from the movie. TG, on the other hand, caters to dedicated gamers, true enthusiasts, who actually care about things like high score and speedrun competitions, and who know their craft very well. Sure, a trial win would have been a bigger publicity boon for TG, at least in the short term. But I’m not sure that would have been the thing to break through some gamers’ long-inherited perception of TG as “That silly outdated place that has a bunch of old bogus scores nobody can prove”. A mixture of time, the truth, and new blood will do that. Those who are paying attention will see that this was the dawn of a new day at the Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Okay, I know this was a very long one. Between parts one and two, we reviewed newly revealed deposition testimony, and all the known terms of the settlement. We discussed Mikey Zee and his torpidity. We invoked a lot of legal nuance, and the almighty dollar. We explored some Hollywood endings, and alternative histories. We – or at least, some of us – learned to embrace the word “reinstate”. We asserted some truths. We came to terms with the fact that plaintiffs in California can totally lie their way through anti-SLAPP without any consequences (or at least, none from Judge Wendy Chang). We previewed the future, for good and for better. And while I’m sure not everyone will agree with me that this settlement was a good overall outcome, I hope folks can now at least give that position serious consideration.

When I first involved myself, I did so with the thought that the Todd Rogers and Billy Mitchell disputes would be interesting stories to write about. The thing I always feared most, starting with the original dispute itself, was an ambiguous resolution. Imagine if “Team Billy” had concocted some way of producing MAME transitions on an arcade machine, but in a way which any reasonable person could see would not have applied to the supposedly verified and padlocked machines Billy played on. And imagine if Jace, per his exceedingly high standard for dispute evidence, felt compelled to acknowledge that Billy’s scores were thus technically possible, the way a 100-hour Centipede marathon is technically possible, and thus the scores would remain on the leaderboard, even if the community knew they were fake. I was always thankful that, at least per my personal assessment, Jace realized very quickly what was going on.

I will readily admit that this wasn’t the type of climactic battle-to-the-finish that makes for a good story. And I do think that is part of what people following the saga truly wanted – a good story. But it was never designed to be a story in the first place. It was a series of real events, starting with DMs, moving to a shoutbox, then to a forum, and then global gaming media, and finally the courthouse. It was a series of lies, each bigger and more preposterous than the last, to form a narrative fueled by a narcissist who valued phony gratification above all else. Billy Mitchell clearly lives by the old adage, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”. But in cases like this, I think people would be wise to take the inverse at heart: Never let a good story get in the way of the truth.

I’m not blind to the pessimism many have expressed about this settlement. I try to be honest with myself, first and foremost – a policy which has compelled me to reevaluate my position on this very question more than once. “Is it possible I just have this all wrong? Did Billy really win out, and I’m just refusing to see it?” But when I go back and run through the facts again, I come to the same conclusion every time. TG disposed of this case without compromising their non-negotiables, while Billy Mitchell walked away without satisfying a single demand of his. Billy would have declared victory any way he could, and would have continued pursuing Jace and TG until he could do so. Billy Mitchell has been utterly exposed and humiliated throughout the course of this process. And Twin Galaxies is now free of this proven cheater, once and for all. And any individuals or media outlets who still don’t understand that Billy Mitchell is a serial liar and proven cheater are not worth your time.

We should not lose sight of the fact that the Billy Mitchell saga is not over. His retaliatory lawsuits against David Race and Karl Jobst are still ongoing, and we need to support their defenses as much as we did TG’s. I pledge to continue offering updates on those cases when news is available. But in the meantime – and I know this is going to rock your feeble world – we’re now free to talk about other things!! Did you know that the phenomenal Justin Elliott achieved the Donkey Kong Forum pinnacle “Rank S” in December? Probably not, because I haven’t been able to write about it! I decided these last three Billy Mitchell updates took precedent. (Four, if you count the web layout and intro I did for Tanner’s rebuttal to Zyda, and five if you count these two parts as separate updates.) Right now, as I wrap up three weeks dedicated to writing this coda, the idea of actually playing video games feels like ecstasy in comparison.

Lastly, if this outcome still leaves you with a bad taste, I ask – nay, I plead – that you positively channel those feelings into constructive pursuits. Allow this to inspire and motivate you to tackle the injustices of the world. Educate yourself. Get organized. Stay informed on world events. Embrace empathy for those less fortunate. Know who your true enemies are. Challenge the lies and distractions of the ruling class. Work to oppose the system that allows the most awful among us to wield the most power. Billy Mitchell isn’t a murderer. He’s not cutting off people’s hands. He isn’t planting explosives in journalists’ cars. He isn’t executing union organizers. He isn’t starting wars. He isn’t dropping bombs on children. He isn’t starving a nation. He isn’t killing the planet. He’s just a community fuckface, who hopefully can now begin fading into the obscurity he deserves.

I’d like to express my sincere, most heartfelt appreciation to everyone who helped contribute to this victory. There are too many of you to count or name, though I’m sure one day I will try. This would not have been possible without you. And as always, thank you all for reading.