The ultimate badge: Part 1

by ersatz_cats

Late last year, one person achieved a series of gaming marks which, collectively, culminated in what supergamer Andrew Barrow called “One of the greatest Classic Arcade Gaming feats, period.” It wasn’t quite a high score run, and not a speedrun either, but rather a unique challenge all its own. While this achievement had been a stated theoretical goal, tantalizingly offered as an aspirational pinnacle the likes of which may or may not ever be realized, one person set out to do the nigh-impossible, giving the community an 18-hour performance which was nothing short of astonishing.

However, in order to fully tell this story, we have to roll the calendars back, all the way to the beginning of Donkey Kong Forum – the online home of competitive DK:

Specifically, we’ll be doing a deep dive on those little badges you see throughout the site, under every user’s remarks. Participation badges are not an uncommon sight in the perhaps-expiring era of pre-Discord public forums, and gaming sites easily lend themselves to competitive milestones worth tracking. But today, rather than limiting ourselves to the few achievement badges necessary to tell our contemporary tale of gaming wizardry, we’re going to pause and explore every DKF badge – their origin stories (or what we know of them), their histories, and their raisons d’être. (That’s French for “Why the fuck is this thing here?”)

Why are we talking about all these badges? Hey, why not? We don’t need no stinkin’ reasons!

If you want to read about this crazy gaming achievement I referred to, you’re in luck, because there will be a “Part 2”. But today, it’s all the badges, all the time.

Fair warning: I am a massive nerd, and today’s installment will be a bit on the nerdier side. And yes, there will be lots of parenthetical asides today. If that’s not your cup of tea, feel free to wait for “Part 2”, whenever I get off my ass and write it. Of course, any attempt to tell the history of DKF is incomplete without the contributions of its late founder, JC Harrist (may he rest in peace), but we’ll make do with what we have. With that said, a tremendous “Thank you” goes to Jeremy Young, both on account of his work to keep DKF alive, and because most of this write-up wouldn’t have been possible without him. Honestly, it would be easier to point out each thing I managed to find on my own, rather than point out all the times Jeremy answered questions and offered background information, so it’s safer to assume any new-to-you information was courtesy of him (though of course opinions and commentary are always my own).

With that out of the way, let’s talk about some odoriferous badges!

ALL ABOUT THE BADGE-A-MINS

The Donkey Kong Forum website was first introduced to the world by founder JC Harrist with a post in January 2013. This was, of course, under the original dot-com domain. But that, along with the overall origins of DKF, will have to be stories for another time. Our badge adventure begins on an unassuming spring day, three months later, when one-time MAME world record holder Ross Benzinger (who went by usernames dwwnp and VON) casually floated the idea of achievement badges for this burgeoning online nexus of competitive Donkey Kong:

Of course, as happens in all matters of Internet research, the active page displays the finished product coexisting with the initial inception. Similarly, that thread today shows Jeremy Young’s current role of “Administrator”, as opposed to his “Global Moderator” title of the dot-com days. But as you see, Jer was up for the idea.

Ross, having a sense of humor about the whole thing, made an immediate reference to the parody line “We don’t need no stinking badges!” For those who are unaware, “Stinking badges” is an old pre-Internet meme, tracing back to the 1927 novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and 1948 film of the same name. It’s actually a misquote, kind of like “Luke, I am your father”, in that the most popular variation repeated over the years does not appear in the original source material. (The actual 1948 line, as linked by Ross, was “We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges.”) For what it’s worth, DKF stalwart Sock Master included the original film line in his site signature, thereby clogging up Google search results for the word “badge” on Donkey Kong Forum, which I’m sure was his nefarious intention all along:

At any rate, the idea of site badges gained traction. JC coded up his first sample, using an existing mod as a template, and showed it to the world the following month:

From there, folks started brainstorming ideas for proposed badges. Of course, people had some funny ideas of worthy achievements to include:

The actual badge images had to be relatively small. (When I show them here, I’ll be heavily zooming in on them for visibility.) They were also uploaded with sequential numbers. At this point, the specifics of badge number 1 have been lost to time. (As I’ll explain in a moment, there is reason to believe it was for the overall DK world record holder.) The earliest surviving icon was for badge number 2, which lasted all the way through the site’s tenure, signifying its importance in the community.

That badge – with built-in transparency effect – was for Twitch streamers:

SWEET SIXTEEN

A few months later, on September 13th, Dave McCrary posted a helpful lineup of all sixteen existing badges at that time:

Two things to note about the above display, as seen via Internet Archive. For one, you may have noticed that I said Dave posted sixteen icons, and yet only fifteen are shown. We’ll discuss this a bit later. But more pressingly, if you visit that same page as it exists today, a completely different set of badges is displayed instead:

As I assumed, and as Jeremy confirmed, this discontinuity was the result of the change over to the new dot-net domain in 2022:

Yeah, it was how things were re-uploaded. All the badges are just 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc. and some were missing when the site came back up. I didn’t put too much thought into preserving the original file names, I think (and unfortunately). I think my thought process was, “well, 4.jpg… That’s missing from the backup and what even was it? Oh well, now it’s this new badge.” I didn’t really consider something like Dave’s post and how things won’t match now.

Obviously restoring the site was the priority. And the actual badge lineups under each post are properly updated and function correctly. Us archivists and historians just have to keep in mind that current displays of posts like McCrary’s, which include old badges as in-line images, are not reflective of how they used to appear. However, as Dave said, the badges (as seen on Wayback Machine) were in numerical order. Furthermore, Jeremy supplied me with site metadata, both confirming this order, and providing upload dates for all badges on the old dot-com site.

Setting aside our missing badge #1, the first nine badges, including the Twitch streamer icon, were all uploaded on May 11th, about two weeks after Benzinger first suggested the idea:

As you see, some icons were narrower than others. The ones based directly on pixelated game graphics scale better from the smaller size. After the Twitch icon, the next-most important badge to establish was for original Donkey Kong’s infamous Level 22 – in other words, “Who here has reached the kill-screen?”

Amusingly, JC’s next priority was a badge for the WR holder for the Pauline hack, where you play as Pauline and have to rescue Mario. Unfortunately, we can’t ask JC directly about this anymore. This may have had something to do with the fact that JC himself was the Pauline WR holder at the time. Hey listen, when you own the site, you can do what you want.

The next two badges went to players who won special online events. First up was the 2013 “March Madness No-Hammer Tournament”, won by Jonathan McKinnell a.k.a. “Fast Eddie”. The “Wildcard Rematch” badge refers to a series of early online events, which were later renamed to “Wildcard Qualifier”. The complete story of the events themselves will have to wait for another day, but there does seem to be some inconsistent implementation. The first three events were won by Ross Benzinger and Dean Saglio, who still sport the badge today. Phil Tudose also had the badge prior to the dot-net changeover, presumably on the basis of winning the officially renamed “Wildcard Qualifier” #2, but for some reason lost to time, it doesn’t seem Jeff Willms ever got the badge for winning “Wildcard Qualifier” #3.

I asked Jeremy about this discrepancy, and understandably, he could only speculate as to why Tudose got the “Wildcard Rematch” badge and Willms did not:

You have to remember that badges were something we wanted, but originally it was never like a super-serious…WE MUST HAVE BADGES TO SHOW HOW AWESOME WE ARE…sort of thing. We all love getting fake internet points, and even the most serious badge hunter knew it was all in good fun. That being said, there’s a good chance (and this is just a guess) that Tudose said “hey, Ross and Dean got that badge, I want it too!” and JC said “lol ok.” Willms’ presence on DKF was always scant and I imagine he gave exactly 0 fucks about badges, and so there was never any pressure to award it to him and JC probably didn’t care enough to double-check that he “needed” it.

While Willms did not get any iconography-related recognition for Wildcard Qualifier #3, he did get something much cooler: A unique badge for winning Kong Off II (and later, another badge for winning Kong Off 3). Willms’ PB of 1,107,600 also earned him the next two achievement badges, honoring scores over 1 million and 1.1 million on original DK. It could be said that, along with the kill-screen badge, 1 mil and 1.1 mil are the two most heavily sought badges on the site. As of my writing this, 52 people have achieved one million on original DK, 22 of whom have also passed the 1.1 million mark. (The actual number of awarded badges are fewer, since not all of those players have retained DKF accounts.) Worth noting, while a kill-screen is usually a precursor to a one million point score, that’s not always the case; in 2015, future WR holder John McCurdy earned his million point badge before having ever hit the kill-screen.

Getting back to 2013, the original nine (or ten) stood for about a day. After a good night’s sleep, JC got back to badge-crafting:

And here’s where we circle back, both to the missing badge #1, and to that MAME badge we glossed over. Above you see badge #13, uploaded on May 12th. This bad boy would be bestowed upon the arcade world record holder (who in 2013 was Hank Chien). However, it seems odd that this most pinnacular of DK achievements would fall so far down the list, and even stranger that it would come after badge #7, for the DK MAME world record holder. My personal theory is that badge #1 was originally intended for the overall WR holder (perhaps using this same image), with the MAME WR badge being added as secondary. Then, after pondering the situation a bit, JC realized this could become silly if the top MAME score overtook the top arcade score, which would award that holder two badges while the top arcade score would be shut out. And so, per my theory, not 24 hours after implementing the first few badges, JC scrapped badge #1, and split MAME and arcade into their own badges, with no appearance of badge #1 ever being archived in that short window.

In late May and into early June, JC kept hard at work on his still fledgling site. An “F” badge for any Donkey Kong Junior kill-screener. An icon of Stanley the Bugman for the Donkey Kong 3 world record holder. Another for the WR on Jeff Kulczycki’s “D2K: Jumpman Returns” romhack. Another event badge for the winner of the first Kong Off, Hank Chien. And lastly, a special award to the holder of the best score on original Donkey Kong’s opening level, 1-1.

But here’s where we reach another minor mystery. That missing spot belongs to badge #16. For those following the numbers, badges 1, 9, and 10 are lost with no trace. But unlike those, I can prove there did exist a badge #16 at one point. If you bring up McCrary’s display of “fifteen” badges again, and use your browser tools to view the page source, you’ll see a reference to an absent “16-mini.png” included among the HTML:

img src=”https://web.archive.org/web/20190414034955im_/http://donkeykongforum.com/awards/16-mini.png”

It was never archived, and so the Wayback Machine doesn’t even bother attempting to display it – hence why only fifteen of the first sixteen were shown. For yet more confirmation, on that same September page, Saglio posted a text-only listing of all 16 then-current badges, each of which has been accounted for, except for one:

DKJR WR Holder

Additionally, not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but the metadata provided by Jeremy shows a list which is numerically ordered, except for a badge #26 curiously being between badge numbers 15 and 17:

As was indicated with our missing badge #1, and as we’ll see yet again later, the system which is used to implement badges does not seem to reassign previously used numbers, even if that badge is deleted later. At any rate, the evidence clearly establishes the existence of a similar switcheroo, where a single DK Junior badge was later split into arcade and MAME variants. (Lest you think you’re going to poke around the Wayback Machine until you find a forum page showing the original badge #16, the location where that actual image file would be located was never archived.)

FAB FIVE

The badge hype cooled off for a few months, until that September, when the original thread was resuscitated with new suggestions. Katie Young tossed in the idea of a badge for the top score on Brazil Kong:

This icon, which ultimately went unused, was inspired by the aforementioned badge for the Pauline hack, which JC admitted “was done as kind of a joke”. But of course, Saglio had to come in and ruin everyone’s fun, by suggesting that game-specific badges should probably be limited to the five main games DKF focuses on tracking:

The only one of those five not yet represented was Crazy Kong. On September 16th, JC set to correcting that:

On the left was badge #20, for any CK kill-screener. Hey, some argue that this is “the only L=22 badge that counts”. Also included were badges 22 and 23 for the Crazy Kong arcade and MAME records. (As a technical note, a preview JC showed of badges 20 and 22 fell victim to the same site changeover that altered McCrary’s lineup of sixteen.)

Crazy Kong was technically an authorized Nintendo release in Japan, and thus the distinction between arcade and MAME makes sense. But it also makes sense that D2K (whose badge we saw earlier) would receive no such delineation, since it was a romhack from circa 2006, and thus MAME was its primary platform. (In other words, any “D2K” cabinets in the wild are custom-made affairs.)

Sticking with our numerical order, here’s where we arrive at the arcade/MAME split of DK Junior badges:

That left Donkey Kong 3, which has proven to be something of a quagmire, and whose badge has yet to be duplicated between platforms. (More on that later.) But on the same day JC split the Junior badge into separate recognitions for arcade and MAME, the site introduced the first multi-game badge:

This badge, bearing the ugly mugs of our three main protagonists, is called the “Trifecta” (although some have also referred to it as the “triad”, or perhaps frustratingly, “the Trifuckta”). It’s awarded to any player who could display a proficiency at each of the three official mainline DK arcade games – specifically, for anyone who could score one million on Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, and Donkey Kong 3. (For DK3, difficulty 3 is required, as folks agreed difficulty 1 was too easy.) This concept, of awards recognizing skill across multiple games, will become an important part of our story in “Part 2”, but for now, we’ll just call it a portent of things to come.

In addition to cross-game recognition, awards for play variations were also being explored. While no-hammer DK already got recognition in the form of the 2013 “March Madness No-Hammer Tournament”, our next badge went to the player who held the overall no-hammer DK record:

The September flurry continued on with a couple social icons, one for “Most Time Online” (currently held by legendary scorekeeper stella_blue), and another for simply “Blogger”:

At first, I suspected “Most Time Online” may have been a gag, but I reached out to stella_blue, who confirmed that it is actually based on an objective and publicly viewable metric. And while stella_blue is rarely on DKF these days, it will be some time before his mark is overtaken:

It should be noted that does not include accounts which have since lapsed into “Guest” status due to inactivity. Perhaps George Riley “homerwannabee” may want a similar trophy for “Most Topics Started”, but since I’m sure folks are not interested in that becoming a competition, Riley may have to settle for a quick nod here:

As for the Blogger badge, this seemed to be satisfied by making a personal blog style post in the DKF forums. Peculiarly, I came across a lyric post by TheSunshineFund which began with the following note:

Need to keep the sub forum badge alive.

So what was the deal? Did this have to do with the Blogger badge? Did that badge come with an expiration date? How would this expiration have been handled? Are there any other references to folks maintaining DK blogs to keep their Blogger status current? I had to know the answer! I put on my fanciest investigator’s hat, hoping to get to the bottom of this super-serious archeological mystery.

And so I shot a message over to TheSunshineFund, who basically said “Oh, I was just horsing around, lmao”. Fair play, hahahaha.

In my curiosity, I did check to see who the first recipient of the Blogger badge was, expecting it to be Chris Psaros, author of the excellently resourceful Donkey Kong Blog, which chronicled many of that era’s online and live DK competitions. But what I did not expect was for ChrisP to have received that badge even before DKF badges were a thing:

As we’ll see, there are other indications that “Date Received” recognition for various achievement badges was made retroactive. I guess, when the Blogger badge was added, it was backdated to the first time someone was found to have discussed Donkey Kong in a bloglike format?

So that pretty much covers everything, right? You’ve got all your kill-screens, your arcade and MAME WRs, and even some no-hammer and Pauline silliness. I mean, what more is left to achieve in the realm of Donkey Kong, really?

Ah, yes. The “impossible” DK barrier just keeps getting less and less impossible. In the late evening of October 3, 2013, the legendary Dean Saglio became the first to break the 1.2 million barrier, achieving a score of 1,206,800 using MAME, live on Twitch. Dave McCrary was the first to remark, in the morning hours of October 4th:

Definitely think a new badge is in order.

Within 24 hours, that 1.2m badge was uploaded. It can be easy to take this milestone for granted today, with the current WR standing at 1,272,700. Perhaps one day the stars will align and we’ll see the unlikeliest of games surpassing the currently “impossible” 1.3 million. But for now, this 1.2 mark – achieved by the following players on the following dates (minus one player whose DKF account has lapsed) – represents the pinnacle of the game:

For what it’s worth, while any 1.2 million recognition has always been held to the highest scrutiny, other badges do not always share a one-for-one correlation with the official High Score List. As mentioned, some longtimers have allowed their accounts to lapse, resulting in HSL entries with no corresponding badge recognition. But also badge criteria was always seen as less strict than the official leaderboard, which maintains a high proof standard. As one example, in 2017, Kong Off founder Richie Knucklez achieved his own kill-screen, but could only offer a cell phone video of the end of his game. While this allayed any doubts as to whether he had actually achieved a kill-screen, and was enough to have him entered on the historical DK kill-screen timeline, this was not seen as sufficient evidence for inclusion on the High Score List, alongside everyone else’s score verified with a complete proof package. But don’t worry – even with looser rules for badges, a photo of someone else’s “L=22” still isn’t going to cut it.

EVENTS, EVENTS, EVENTS

The 1.2 milestone ended the flurry of new badge activity occurring within the first five months of the program. Over the next couple years, most of the new badges were created to honor the winners of new tournaments, such as Kong Off 3 in late 2013, and the first “DK Online Open” in early 2014:

One big exception was badge #36. Jon McKinnell, winner of the previously discussed “March Madness No-Hammer Tournament” from 2013, continued perfecting his no-hammer craft. And on April 20th, 2014, he achieved the first no-hammer kill-screen in history. Like with the 1.2 million barrier, the creation of a no-hammer kill-screen badge was immediately suggested and implemented:

Skipping ahead in our numbers slightly, badge #38 (on the right) was for – you guessed it – another online event. This was the “2014 No Hammer Tournament” in April and May of that year, which was won by – you guessed it, again – Jon McKinnell. I guess hitting a big, historic milestone as part of the event will get you there.

The no-hammer kill-screen has since also been achieved by JP Buergers and Jeff Wolfe. However, at the time these icons were added, “Fast Eddie” McKinnell made a remark about enjoying a “NH badge monopoly”. (It took me too long to figure out he was not referring to New Hampshire, lol.)

Picking up that badge #37 we skipped, 2014 and 2015 featured a series of DK Online Opens, whose winners were each given unique badges. This string of awards culminated in a badge for the winner of Kong Off 4 in August 2015, which went to Hank Chien, again:

As stated, the specifics of these events will have to be a topic for another day. For what it’s worth, almost every badge in the whole collection were saved as png files, except for the KO4 badge, which for some reason was a non-animated gif. I have no idea why.

Speaking of outstanding milestones achieved as part of an event, that Kong Off 4 saw the first time any player had ever scored one million points on their first life, as achieved by Robbie Lakeman during the qualifying round. This is probably why yet another new milestone badge – “1st Man Million” – was created the same day as the KO4 badge:

It didn’t take long for that mark to be usurped, though. After all, this was the heyday of the Robbie Lakeman / Wes Copeland DK rivalry. A month after KO4, Copeland became the first player to score 1.1 million on his first life. Once again, JC had to badge the man up.

In 2016 DK Remix was added to the featured circle of games, with a badge (seen on the left) honoring anyone achieving a kill-screen there. And while Donkey Kong 3 does not feature a proper “kill-screen”, in 2017 a badge (seen on the right) was added to recognize the few elite players of that game who had already managed to reach board 160, where a series of stages called the “repetitive blue screen” begins. (Although I still say the stage looks more purple than blue.) Meanwhile, there was another Kong Off in between, this time won by Lakeman.

In 2018, some stuff happened.

While it wasn’t exactly a secret, Jeremy was happy to confirm that this exclusive “Snek” badge was a joking reference to remarks made by shock jock and professional dumbass East Side Dave.

Later in 2018, these weird looking badges were added:

So what the heck are these things about? Eh, they’re probably not important. We might get to them in “Part 2”, if there’s time.

Inevitably, the popularity of the badges invited meta discussion over the years. All the way back in 2014, news of Allen Staal’s first DK kill-screen was met with chants of “Badge hype”. In 2015, current record holder John McCurdy asked about “the free kill-screen badge I received” two years before his actual first kill-screen. Meanwhile, badge congratulations would become a standard thing after relevant achievements (including when a player earns their first badge). Chris Gleed even made a super-serious and non-revocable pledge to get a very uncomfortable badge tattoo if he ever crosses one million. Meanwhile, a few people casually attempted to track who led the DKF community with the most badges…

The final new badge of the JC Harrist era was added in May 2019, honoring the WR holder on DK Junior Remix:

MIGRATION

That brings us to Donkey Kong Forum’s 2022 changeover from the old dot-com domain to their current dot-net home, the details of which will be a story for another time. (Again, rest in peace, J.C.)

As we discussed earlier, getting the site operational again was the priority. Badges were restored and properly reassigned, but the numbers are completely shuffled, with the only meaningful casualty being in-line image displays like McCrary’s. However, Jeremy also used the opportunity to thin out the collection a bit, with only the following existing icons returning:

Gone were the days of Pauline silliness. For the most part, these were your core achievements – kill-screens, world records, million point markers, etc. Most notably, almost all the event badges were retired. This is understandable, as many of these event winners have sadly allowed their DKF accounts to lapse. For example, the only Kong Off winner who still maintains an active account at Donkey Kong Forum is Jeff Wolfe, winner of Kong Off 7 in 2019. And so, if a KO6 badge had been added, that would be six badges that would sit unused into perpetuity. (Also, following various controversies, some degree of focus has drifted away from the “Kong Off” brand altogether and toward “Kong Klash”, which never got unique badges. But that will have to be – “Say the line, Bart” – a story for another time.) The obvious exception here is the old “Wildcard Rematch” badge from 2013, which still stands, awarded to the two winners of those specifically-named tournaments – Benzinger and Saglio. Otherwise, the new collection follows achievements any number of people can collect, or world records likely to belong to active members of the community.

“But ersatz! You missed one! The new badge #51 is the same as the old badge #38, which was for the 2014 No-Hammer Tournament!”

Ohohoho, good eye! However, you may note that I was careful to say the above collection were the returning “icons”, with that choice of word being very specific. One of the old badge icons, titled “No-Hammer WR Holder” (seen on the left below) was retired, with that previously tournament-specific icon now being used in its place:

I will agree, the gold one looks cooler.

Now, you probably noticed a bunch of missing file numbers in the above collection of repeats. Or, if you’re like me, you went through each and every numbered URL sequentially, just to see what you’d find, and then later tried to reconcile why you came up with 66 saved icons when the site only lists 62 badges. For what it’s worth, four of the early numbers are unused duplicate images, possibly from Jeremy testing the waters with badge implementation. But for the most part, the missing numbers are new badges, sprinkled right in along with the old favorites being restored. And as before, the numbers give us an idea of what order these were implemented.

No, you’re not losing your eyesight! Those are grayscale versions of the MAME and arcade DK world record badges. (Yes, the MAME icon is numbered earlier.) These were added to represent former world record holders on those platforms. With the competition for the top spot continuing to rocket into the stratosphere, it seems natural to recognize players who had achieved that pinnacle back in their heydays, before the bar got so ridiculously high. Also, this is congruent with a theme of shying away from a collection one-time accolades (such as for winning a specific tournament) and toward more of a milestone system. Only one person can hold the full-color world record badge at any time, but it’s possible for any number of people to have held the mark. Simply putting your name on that list, even for a few hours, is quite an achievement.

Out of sheer curiosity, I looked to see which accounts held these badges. On the arcade side, with Chien’s and Lakeman’s accounts having gone inactive, the list is short, consisting of only Tim Sczerby, Steve Wiebe, and Wes Copeland. But something on the MAME side piqued my curiosity:

Dean Saglio and Ross Benzinger are accounted for. But I was curious who “879500” was, given they were credited for achieving the top MAME mark all the way back in 1998. At first, I assumed it was a reference to the legendary Ben Jos Walbeehm, but further examination showed it’s actually Canadian supergamer Rick Fothergill, who is also recognized historically as achieving the first verified perfect score on original Pac-Man. It’s always nice to see folks remember who the true legends are.

Going sequentially, Jeremy then implemented a feature you see a lot on the new Donkey Kong Forum:

These represent more than just your standard pixely number goodness. These number badges help recognize how long folks have maintained an active Donkey Kong Forum account. Hey, listen, every award set needs a participation trophy, right? Even if you suck ass at every Donkey Kong game ever made, you can still participate and contribute socially at DKF. (Speaking for myself, being woefully deficient in DK high marks as I am, the “6” is my only current badge – unless Jeremy ever decides to award one for clearing 1-1 without jumping.) At the time of the dot-net changeover, the oldest accounts were nine years old, and so badges 1 through 9 were implemented immediately.

Interestingly, Jeremy shared with me his first stab at year badges, which had to be redone almost immediately when he realized they would not scale to double digits:

But we’ll get to that in a moment. One quick note: The year badges are all automated, and based strictly on the DKF account in question. This, for instance, is why Donkey Kong titan Wes Copeland’s current account (named “wc”) only has the two-year badge, when his original lapsed account (“WCopeland”) was obviously around much longer.

The former WR holder treatment continued, with new badges for previous holders of the top titles on Crazy Kong (arcade and MAME), DK Junior (arcade and MAME), DK3, and D2K, as well as for those who used to hold top marks on original DK’s 1-1 and the no-hammer style. When asked about why there is no arcade/MAME distinction for DK3 today, and the likely reason why it was not implemented originally, Jeremy had this to say:

Probably the main reason there is currently no arcade/MAME distinction in the DK3 WR badge is that there has been virtually no activity on DK3 arcade. The reason back then was probably that Riley had every conceivable iteration of a DK3 world record, and a MAME badge would’ve just been for someone so far back in 2nd that it would be like a participation trophy.

Jeremy referred to George Riley, the undisputed champion of DK3… well, undisputed until relatively recently. DK3 high scores are tracked in eight separate variations, reflecting the four different difficulty settings, and the option to play either “Marathon” style or while limited to five lives per Twin Galaxies Tournament Settings (TGTS). Since there wasn’t a need for sixteen icons for this one game, for badge purposes, each of these leaderboards were considered equivalent, whether achieved on MAME or arcade.

Within the last couple years, Jason Vasiloff has rocketed past Riley’s titanic marks to claim the top spot on each of those eight score track variants. Only as I was wrapping up this presentation did Justin Elliott overtake Jason on “Difficulty 4” TGTS settings, with a score of 956,100. For the moment, this gives Jason and Justin equal claim to the full color Stanley, with the monochrome version also belonging to Riley and Andrew Barrow. (But don’t worry! We’re not done talking about DK3 quite yet.)

Skipping around in the numbers a tiny bit, these four badges plugged a few odd holes, while solidifying the inclusion of two Remix games in the DKF pantheon. As mentioned earlier, JC had added a badge for a DK Remix kill-screen (but not for world record), and one for the WR holder on DK Junior Remix (but not for a KS). Here, Jeremy filled in those gaps, making sure both games recognized past and present record holders, while adding another badge for a DK Junior Remix kill-screen.

In the midst of that volley, we get this goofy looking ape:

The remixes and romhacks are fun, but the main game will always be original Donkey Kong. This badge goes to anyone who holds the high mark for any individual board on that game. While the game is known for having four basic types of boards – barrel, conveyor, elevator, and rivet – the difficulty of each of these ramps up until Level 5, which is effectively repeated all the way to the kill-screen. This means a total of seventeen different individual boards have their own top mark recognized, although admittedly recognizing each of those does result in a redundancy with the 1-1 badge. (Note that the individual board leaderboard bans save states, in the hopes that these individual board marks will result from “real” games and not from anyone spamming attempts on any one board. Also, there is no grayscale “former” version of the individual board badge as of my writing this.)

This one’s a bit silly, but also very important. Labeled “DKF Founder”, it’s a special badge bestowed posthumously to JC Harrist, and only to him. The actual image is of pro angler Jimmy Houston, who was featured in a few of JC’s social media avatars. When the site was restored, Jeremy added this badge in honor of his late friend:

JC loved fishing and there was actually a silly little “competition” where some guys played a fishing game on stream one day. So there was a small moment in time where fishing was the funny thing and then JC made that emote. I think I then repurposed it as a badge to honor JC.

JC isn’t the only person to receive a personalized badge on the restored Donkey Kong Forum. The above Galaga-themed badge is exclusive to John Bart, founder of CAGTournaments.com – the site DKF uses to track online competitions.

While the migration to dot-net brought a revamping of the badges themselves, it also brought an overhaul of the system being used to implement them. Jeremy confirmed that, when he and Wes Copeland set out to rebuild the forum, they couldn’t figure out exactly which system JC had used for badges, so they used “whatever one seemed to work the best”. One side-effect is that, while some aspects of the badge system had been opaque to everyone but site administrators, now any user could see not only what badges existed but also which users hold each badge:

Obviously, this was a huge help in crafting this write-up. If you’re a nerd like me, it’s fun to peruse the list and see what little historical details you can find. Feel free to check it out for yourselves. Just… please be kind to our overworked Jeremy if you spot any incidental oddities here and there. (Trust me, I’ve already pestered him enough.)

TO THE FUTURE

Of course, reconstructing the badge system wasn’t the end of this saga. Yet more icons are always awaiting implementation, starting with a batch you probably saw coming:

It’s been two years since the dot-net changeover, which means two more cake days for the diehards. Plus, in between, a Zero years badge was added, so everyone can properly pick on the newbies. For what it’s worth, the “10” and “0” icons were added as badge numbers 66 and 67, whereas “11” skips all the way ahead to badge number 76. Jeremy speculated this gap of missing numbers may have had something to do with reuploading the single digit year badges.

As for how the years system is being managed, Jeremy was happy to clarify:

The “Years As Member” badge was newly added when the site came back up, and that’s the only one that auto-updates itself based on a member’s anniversary. The upcoming years will still need to be made, but it won’t be until next January that someone hits 12 years.

Of course, this does sort of put Jeremy on the hook for continuing to add a new year icon each time DKF blows out another candle. Who knows, maybe in 100 years, when we’re all commuting to outer space in flying cars, and new discoveries have pushed the DK record to the brink of 1.5 million, Jeremy’s great grandson may decide at that time that having 100 different year badges is excessive. I guess we’ll find out when we get there.

As mentioned, throughout the course of writing this, I did have many questions about badge minutiae for Mister Young. But in his own right, he also took the opportunity to implement a few ideas which were obviously on his mind already. First, as I was wrapping this up, Jeremy added a few “IGBY” badges as a spiritual successor to some of the old event-specific ones:

For those keeping score, these three were implemented as badge numbers 77 through 79. I’ll let Jeremy explain them in his own words:

IGBY was a team tournament where the teams were composed of players from different websites (DKF, MARP, TG, CAGDC, RetroUprising, etc.). It was fun but ended up becoming really unbalanced when MARP decided to play…and when people just decided to make their own teams. So it eventually died off and Yolympics became the main cross-community tournament. But for a few years there was a DKF team and I thought it would be nice to recognize those players.

However, as far as a direct replacement for the various competition winner badges goes, Jeremy recently implemented something far more direct:

This one, titled “Competition Winner”, is exactly what you would expect… or at least, that’s the intention of it. As Jeremy explained:

This is basically the band-aid badge to cover all the Kong Offs, Wildcard Whatevers, and bajillion other tournaments or events. Since having missing KO winner badges would be weird, and I really dread making 1234230948347189 new, unique badges….this is the one we get. For now. I’ve tried to dig through as many old events as I could find or remember but I know I’m missing some (like…ALL the Kong Klashes)

I suppose, since I am aiming to tell the known history of the DKF badges, I should disclose that I did suggest the idea of an all-purpose “Competition Winner” badge to Jeremy in the course of researching this piece. It felt like a neat solution to the question of missing Kong Off winners and such, and it seemed in keeping with the newer philosophy of having fewer unique badges any number of people could collect over time. But I have no idea if anyone had discussed the idea before I proposed it.

Two more quick technical notes: First, the “Wildcard Rematch Champion” badge, held over from JC’s days, is still retained as the only event-specific competition winner badge. Second, despite being sequentially after the IGBY badges, this “Competition Winner” badge was added as badge number 81 (skipping number 80). Jeremy acknowledged he experimented with a different iteration and had to delete it, but the system he’s using still recognized number 80 as being used and refused to reassign it. This gives us more direct confirmation for how badge numbers have gone mysteriously missing over the years.

The final new badge (as of this write-up) is this lovely bloom from DK3:

For those who, like me, aren’t terribly familiar with DK3 game play, you get bonus points for keeping the many bugs away from these flowers, allowing them each to grow. While DK3 may not have arcade and MAME distinction among the badges, and while there may be too many tracks to offer unique icons for each one, this new badge helps smooth over that shortage, by adding recognition for any player who has submitted scores to each of the eight DK3 tracks. (It sounds like the idea was, keeping all the flowers open is like keeping all the tracks populated, which is as good a representation as anything.)

Before we wrap up for today, we’re going to peer into the possible future, by looking at various badge ideas folks have proposed over the years. In that original 2013 thread, Saglio proposed a bunch of awards which would go on to become reality, including for Crazy Kong WR holder and DK3 “blue screener”, as well as arcade/MAME distinctions for various titles, and play style recognitions (such as for 1-1 and no-hammer scores). A proposal from Dean and from Adam_Mon for a D2K kill-screener badge has not been implemented, nor has a 2014 suggestion by Dan Desjardins for 1.1 through 1.4 million badges on DK Junior. In 2015, George Riley proposed a “Top 100” badge for the top 100 scores; however, in addition to being something that could change frequently, it was noted that “Top 100” would functionally be something between the existing kill-screen and one million badges, or at times could be almost equivalent with those. Also in 2015, inspired by Wes Copeland and Robbie Lakeman claiming world records within hours of each other, Andrew Gardikis suggested badges for former world record holders, which were eventually implemented. So too was a 2019 suggestion for a DK Junior Remix kill-screen badge:

Other ideas for badge-worthy achievements and milestones, of varying degrees of sincerity, have included the following:

• Getting halfway to a George Riley DK3 score;
• Getting one’s second kill-screen the most quickly after getting their first;
• Top lifetime money earnings in DK tournaments;
• Doing a four-barrel back jump;
• A “bonehead badge” for anyone who gets iced by Kong’s first barrel during a big game;
• A badge to encourage participation in proposed rotating stewardship of the High Score List;
• An “I beat Joe Kongman” badge;
• A badge to commemorate the 900k race between Brial Allen and Allen Staal;
• A 1.099m badge (following Copeland’s 1,099,500 score in 2014);
• And a badge for reading an entire Tim Sczerby King of Kong rant.

And that brings us to our final question, which is obviously the most important one of all…

Who’s got the most stinkin’ badges?

After all, it is definitely a serious competition, right? It doesn’t seem there has ever been any official tracking of this metric. Indications are the title was once held by Hank Chien, although over the years Jeff Wolfe and Wes Copeland were also noted in forum talk as being prolific badge collectors.

Since I recently had some time to kill, I opened a spreadsheet in my secondary window and got to work, calculating folks’ badge counts, hoping to find our most iconic iconophile. This tally excludes two former giants of the game – Hank Chien and Robbie Lakeman – whose DKF accounts have lapsed. A 2019 archive showed Chien with seven badges before his account lapsed. Another 2019 archive showed Lakeman with fourteen, which matches a November 2020 screenshot I took, albeit with Crazy Kong MAME swapped for DK WR holder:

It should be noted, those tallies were before Jeremy’s post-migration changes, including the addition of IGBY, former WR holder, and years active badges, and the removal of event-specific recognitions. Ultimately, I lack the authority to make a final determination on any inactive player’s hypothetical current tallies.

Among today’s top badge-bearers are Dean Saglio (13), Estel Goffinet (13), John McCurdy (13), Andrew Barrow (15), Jeff Wolfe (15), Phil Tudose (15), J.P. Buergers (15), and Ben Falls (16).

But here’s where things get a little spicy. Until recently, the top spot was actually held by relative newcomer Justin Elliott, who in a few short years has amassed a whopping nineteen DKF badges:

…HOWEVAH… With the recent implementation of icons recognizing participants in three IGBY events from 2014 to 2016, the legendary Wes Copeland has shot back up to claim (or perhaps re-claim) the top spot, with (as of this writing) an overwhelming twenty DKF badges:

I’m sure Jeremy didn’t give this much thought, as he added recognition for DKF’s IGBY participants from yesteryear. But hey, maybe this will lead to more badge fun in the future.

And… That does it! Well, for now. We’ve at least acknowledged each of the badges, and offered a good look at the ones we won’t be discussing again in “Part 2”, where the crescendo of our story will be this monumental gaming feat I keep alluding to. Believe me when I say, this achievement ranks up there with the best of them. (Get it? “Ranks”? Because “stinking badges”? And because… Oh, well, you’ll see.) In the meantime, if you have any DKF badge stories of your own, please share them in the comments below! And as always, thank you for reading.