What follows are the supplemental notes for the “Dot Six” installment of our series The Video Game Fraud of the Century. These are not intended to be read straight through the way the main narrative is. Rather, these notes are made available to answer clarifying questions, to assist with sourcing, to make additional observations, to help satisfy the especially curious, and to assist any other researchers who wish to pick up where our work left off.
[S1] At 22:50 in Exhibit A, as Billy prods Walter Day for a response, he says what sounds to me like “Maurice, I think?” For the record, one of my colleagues heard Billy’s indistinct mumbling as “Maurice Evans”. However, I’m the author of this, which means I win.
“Maurice” at Namco also gets roped into Billy’s story of being asked to test new Pac-Man games, as heard on the Pixels panel at 35:10:
In the years to follow, I’ve had different companies that were developing Pac-Man on phones, going way back… and things like that. And they called me and I thought “Well, okay, why’d you call me?” And they go “Well… Maurice at Namco said to call you. If we could send you a phone, we’d like you to tell us if this Pac-Man game we did on the phone is really authentic.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7L_1tCi53Q
I wonder just how long Namco had poor Maurice working those phones.
[S2] In the years since, Namco USA (including divisions Namco Hometek and Namco Cybertainment) merged with Bandai in North America into Namco Bandai:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060824033917/http://www.namcobandai.com/company/index.html
Years later, the company was rebranded in the U.S. yet again, now becoming “Pac-Man Entertainment”:
[S3] David Bishop’s LinkedIn (as well as various corporate info sites) give his title at Namco Cybertainment in 1999 as “Senior Vice President” (of operations) in 1999. He would later become “Executive Vice President” / “Chief Operating Officer”, before leaving the company in 2017:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dbishopus
https://bizstanding.com/ng/org-prof-profile/30616755-21474867606-2-234-90fe7
[S4] Other resources on the development of Pac-Man World (formerly “Pac-Man: Ghost Zone”) include the following:
https://archive.org/details/NextGeneration32Aug1997/page/n83/mode/2up
https://web.archive.org/web/20000818012235/http://www.zdnet.co.jp/gamespot/news/9909/10/news02.html
Note that on the surface there appears to be some discrepancy between the recollections of Namco Hometek R&D director Jesse Taylor (quoted in today’s installment following the release of Pac-Man World in 1999) and those of Ghost Zone design director Bill Anderson and marketing director Mike Fischer, quoted in the 1997 issue of Next Generation magazine. Specifically, the 1997 interview suggests Anderson and Fischer recalled it being a struggle securing the rights to use Pac-Man in an American-developed game, versus Taylor’s recollection that “the Japanese parent company was very easy to work with”. However, this can be resolved by the fact that Taylor’s words are a direct quote, while the others are paraphrased. The only specific examples given in 1997 were that Namco were very interested in the visual appearance of Pac-Man in what was sure to be his precedent-setting first appearance in 3D. Taylor alludes to that same concern in his own interview. Possibly, the author of the 1997 piece extrapolated these expressed concerns out a bit too far.
[S5] Note the references to the production delays and successive E3 demos. My research colleague wondered if the prior reference to plans of presenting Billy a “gold software” was perhaps an indication of uncertainty as to whether Pac-Man World would be ready by the time of Tokyo Game Show in September.
[S6] In Exhibit A, Billy again makes the claim that his trip to Japan was at the behest of Masaya Nakamura personally (at 23:30):
I was in the offices of Namco, which was probably the absolute coolest… highlight of my illustrious gaming career. Because, I’m there, and I meet Masaya Nakamura, who’s the guy they call the father of Pac-Man. He’s the owner, founder, CEO of Namco. He’s the one that made arrangements for me to go there.
[S7] There’s a story Billy likes to tell about not accepting various appearance offers unless accommodations are extended for his whole family. You can hear one example of this story, wherein Billy negotiates a vacation for his whole family to Niagara falls, at 22:20 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlLQdRwis1Q
Billy also references brokering accommodations for his family to London at 10:10 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fzwTGDJoEE
Of course, 1999 was before he had gained leverage from his appearance in King of Kong which made such demands possible (assuming those stories of his were at all true in the first place). Also, again, it’s not known whether accommodations were ever extended for his family at all in 1999. (Strictly speaking, it’s not even known that Namco provided Billy’s accommodations and that he did not fly out on his own dime, although it’s reasonable to assume Namco did provide for Billy as their guest.) In Exhibit B, starting at about 23:30, Billy recalls discussing it with his wife:
I remember looking at my wife, and I was like “What do I do?” I mean, we had small children. And she said “You have to do what you enjoy in life.” She said it makes the rest of life bearable. And she said “Just bring me back a souvenir.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbvba08fmOQ
[S8] I cannot share the segment from Billy’s August 2020 stream without it falling victim to a copyright strike. However, I can illustrate some of this segment for reference. Billy starts by describing his flight from Fort Lauderdale to Dallas and Dallas to Tokyo, claiming he was able to check an additional bag because he was in first class. Billy then launches into his impersonation of a Japanese accent regarding an overhead health warning given in English at the airport. (Most of this impersonation is unintelligible, and would be pointless to attempt to transcribe at length.) Following this, Billy continues his story, occasionally interacting with his chat. (Note: I have italicized the lines Billy delivers using his caricature of a Japanese accent.)
And it’s my turn to go to the.. the guy at customs. “Oh yeah yeah, passport. Checkin’ passport… Why you here in Japan?” And I says “Why am I there in Japan?” I said, “Well, I’m there to play video games.” “Hmm… Hmm… For business or pleasure?” “Um… I don’t know, depends how you look at it, really.” “You need to answer, business or pleasure.” And I said “Well I… I guess it’s business.” He goes “How long you stay?” And I says “Um… Well,” I said “Um… I think they’re sending me back on… on Monday.” “You think on Monday? So you… you no have, um, ticket yet?” “Yeah yeah, I got a ticket, I got it right here.” “So why you tell me you [no/know] going back?” “Okay, I’m sorry, here’s the ticket.” There’s a little communication problem with the guy.
So he goes through and he looks at all my stuff, okay. And then he says “What’s in here?” And I go “In here?” I go “It’s… gifts.” What it is, is I put four different hot sauces, four different kinds, in a wooden crate, okay, the kind like you put on your counter. You could use it, and put it back in the little four-pack crate holder. I used to have those. I used to sell ’em. I don’t anymore. So, what I bought as… I brought as many as I could fit in these two boxes, just as gifts and giveaways. So he said, “What’s in here?” And I said “Oh, it’s gifts.” He goes “Okay, I see.” I go “You wanna see?” “Yeah, yeah.” So he opens the box… or I open the box, and I pull it out, and he sees the four bottles in a wooden crate, like a display. And he says “Liquor.” I says “Huh?” He says “Liquor.” I says “Liquor?” “Yeah, liquor.” I go “No, no, that’s not liquor.” “No?” Then he goes “You say liquor.” I go “No, I said liquor cuz you said liquor.” He goes “I ask you, liquor?” And I go “Well, that’s not liquor.” “No? What is it?” I said “It’s hot sauce.” “Hot sauce?” “Yeah, hot sauce. You wanna try some?” “No, no… no.” And I says “Okay.” And… yeah, back then there was no sixty milli… milliliter rule. And the hot sauce is, what is it, 147 milliliters.
So we put it back in a box and we stuff it in the box, and I got it in the cart. And I’m pushin’ the cart, and I thought to myself… I can see… There’s hundreds of people, comin’ and goin’. And I could see the one person that’s lookin’ for me. It’s a Japanese girl, and she’s jumpin’ up and down, and she’s goin’ like this. And she’s wavin’ like this. And… me bein’ me, and bein’ the wise guy, I’m pushin’ the cart, and I’m sayin’… I’m gonna pretend like she doesn’t recognize me. Hah. What a joke that is. And I’m gonna see if I can just walk past her, and I’m not gonna give a single indication of anything. Just stone-faced, walk forward, pushin’ the cart. There’s like a… There’s like a long… you know, roped-off area, and they’re on that side, and you go and… But I went to go by her, and when I went to go by her, she didn’t let me walk past. She just reached out with both arms, and grabbed my arm like this. “Mr. Mitchell!” I said “Oh, yeah.” She says “Oh, we have car, waiting for you here.” And I says “Oh, okay. Uh, thank you very much.” I go “How’d you recognize me?” “Oh, please Mr. Mitchell… I know.” He’s very nice.
And so, we go walkin’ over, and I think “I wonder… I wonder what kind of car they got for me here.” All these guys are about, under five foot. And I’m thinkin’ “What kind of car they got for me here?” We get to this car, okay, and we open the trunk, and it does have a big trunk. But I go… Yeah, I was the tallest person in the airport. And I go… “The hell’s goin’ on? We’re gonna put this in the trunk and…” “Oh no, please, let us, Mr. Mitchell.” They put it in the trunk and I go… I go “I wonder where I sit here.” Cuz the guy driving is a little short guy, right? So… I think “Am I gonna have to sit up front?” I sit in the back, and when I sit in the back, they actually had taken the front seat out of the car. So I sat in the back, on the passenger side, and I had full leg extension, because they… “Mitchell-san”, yeah… Man, they really called me that, too. “Mitchell-san.” And… And they had taken the front seat out, so I sat here, and I was able to like, you know, put my legs out, which was good. It was a long ride from the… from the airport. And the lady… man, nicest lady in the world. Mrs. Ishii. I don’t know how to spell it. Mrs. Ishii. So I sit there, and she goes “Mr. Mitchell, so how was your flight?” And I says “Oh, very good… thank you,” everything. “Oh oh, we have… we have very good time. Big time planned for you. Oh, we gonna be very good, Mitchell-san.” “Mitchell-san.” Yeah, good thing I didn’t have to wax her car. So… How tall am I? I’m six-foot-six.
So… I get to the… We’re driving, and she says “I wanted to ask you about something. We have been receiving the emails, from this, uh… gentleman in America. Mister… Walter Day.” [Note: Billy mostly drops the caricature accent for the first half of that line before picking it back up mid-sentence.] And I go “Walter Day, huh? Oh yeah, yeah. Oh, that gentleman?” I think “He’s no gentleman.” So he goes… she goes “Yes, very much, he wants to do these, uh… presentations, and recognition, very very flattering, but uh… we are researching him right now to… make sure all is well. We’re talking to Namco of America.” And I says “Oh, okay.” And I didn’t want to give it away, I just says “Oh yeah, that’s nice.”
So we’re drivin’, we drive, and they go “Mr. Mitchell, is anything else we have that can make your stay more enjoyable?” And I go “No…” you know, I mean, I got a big hotel. Their rooms are like $600 a night, like somethin’ outrageous. It’s got a… It’s got a full buffet, you go downstairs any time, you just eat anything you want. It’s a damn good thing Brian Kuh wasn’t there. Okay. And… the room was so big, two families could’ve stayed in it, and then you wouldn’t even see each other.
And… so… I arrived there, and… Walter left Cedar Rapids the same time I left Fort Lauderdale, okay. Walter got there two days late. I mean, he went up, he missed a connection, he went somewhere else. He got bumped off a flight. He flew up to San Francisco, you know, he had overnight-ed, flew up to San Francisco, he was there, and that flight was canceled… right? And then he flew up to Seattle, and he finally flew over there. And… It’s like Midnight, one in the morning, I hear a knock on the door. And… he had finally arrived there. And… you guys know Walter, he’s… he’s pretty fragile.
So… So now it’s the morning time, and it’s time to go. I’d been at this hotel, it’s my second night. I had went, and I had visited the Pac-Man arcade, where I had to go and play in front of a crowd of people. That was awesome, because… there’s people… First of all, there’s no Americans, no matter what you see on TV. Okay, there’s people everywhere. It was a mob show. It was like some kind of rock concert. They had advertised I was gonna be there. And… And I’m there, and I felt like I was the president, because I’m standin’ there, I’m talkin’, I’m wavin’, I’m bein’ interviewed, and all that. And there’s all these guys in front of me. Like… like secret service guys, like holdin’ the crowd back. The thing is… I don’t know what they’re gonna do. All these guys are like four-foot-ten, okay. They’re holding back a bunch of other guys four-foot-ten. I didn’t need them to protect me. But… anyway… it looked good. And so… At one point, the crowd got like a little, like too rambunctious and hostile. And they grabbed me *whew* and they whisked me off in a back room for a while, ’til they got control of the crowd. But it was really cool, cuz… There was a mob of people, and they were all hardcore, I mean hardcore gamers. And they were all there with their eyes locked on the screen, wanting to… wanting to see me play. And that was really, really super cool.
The arcade was adjacent, or in the same mall as a movie theater. And you have to understand, no matter what anybody tells you, the food in Japan is horrible. I mean, it sucks. Bad. It’s not like Japanese food here. Man, I never ate so much popcorn, cuz I didn’t wanna eat the food.
And… Walter shows up at one o’clock in the morning, you know, and he’s like walkin’ like a zombie. He’s got all of his stuff. So… he got up there, and… he shows up at one in the morning. I wake up, I’m gettin’ ready. Supposed to be down there at 8:30. I get down there at 8:30… the buffet, they’re already there, right? And then… They’re still talkin’ to me about Walter Day, and lookin’ at stuff and… and askin’ me questions about, you know, my… my opinion on it and all that. And… the girl speaks English, the guy doesn’t speak any English, okay… to speak of. So… I said to Walter, I go “Well, let me go down first.” I went down the elevator. And then he went to the like second floor, and then he took the escalator, like… a little bit behind me. Cuz we didn’t want people to know we had someone extra in the room, and they end up chargin’ him money or somethin’ like that.
And so I go down, I’m there, and I get all the food. And I’m eating, and we’re talking. And it’s an extremely orderly society. I mean extremely. “Okay, Mr. Mitchell. We arrived here at the buffet at 8:30. We will leave the buffet and… finish eating by… 8:45. From 8:45 to… 8:55, we will go over the plans and continue to talk about what it is we have planned today so you have a full understanding. Then at 8:55, we will begin to make our way to the car, which will be outside, and at 9:00 we’ll be in the car and be on our way. It’s about a two-hour drive… to the venue.” [Note: The caricature accent gets lighter before dipping out altogether halfway through that sequence.] I’m like “Okay. Okay, sure.”
And… again, she’s continuing to talk to me about Walter Day. The guy sitting across is her boss. Nice guy, too. Funny, his name’s Mr. Ishii too, but they’re not related. It’s like a common name, like Smith or somethin’. So he’s there, and all of a sudden I hear him say, this guy that doesn’t speak any English, he goes… and he sees Walter come down the escalator. He’s got a striped shirt on, lookin’ like Walter. And I hear the guy say… this guy that doesn’t speak English… “That look like Walter Day!” And me and Mrs. Ishii turn around like this, I go “Oh yeah, that’s Walter Day.”
He comes down the elevator, and he’s carryin’ all his bags, and he’s got his bags like this, you know, he can’t hardly carry everything, and he’s… he’s walkin’. And so he goes up there. And the guy, doesn’t speak any English, who’s like the bellhop, and he goes over and tries to help Walter with the bag. And he’s grabbing Walter’s bag, and it’s… like this… and Walter’s “No no no, I got it.” “No, I got it.” “No no, I got it.” “I got it.” “I got it.” And it’s like heave-ho, heave… And Walter’s tryin’ to protect this one bag, okay. Yeah, this is Walter’s medicine story. Suddenly… suddenly… the guy gets the better end of the deal, right? And… the bags separate, and the one bag falls through to the ground, that’s got his medicine bottle in it, that’s a glass bottle. Hits the floor, busts, and the medicine runs all over the floor. And I go… I think… “Yeah, that’s Walter Day.” [Note: On that occasion, Billy uses the caricature accent for his own thoughts.] That’s him. That’s his luck.
But he eventually comes over. I introduce him to everybody. Okay, there’s like one minute to stay on their schedule. And they are orderly. They say hello to Walter. They say goodbye to Walter. Walter says he’s goin’ to the same place as them. He asks for… advice on the best way to get there. They told him to ask the girl at the desk. He’s goin’ the same place we are, but he’s not on the schedule, and because he’s not on the schedule… he doesn’t go with us. Because that would represent disorder. I get in the limo, and I go *whew* off. It was awesome. Stop places. Everywhere. Anyway, Walter goes, and he’s gotta take like Japanese trains and subways. It took him… I got there in two hours. It took him about eight hours to get there, okay. And… poor Walter. What can you say?
Once again, I’m at the hotel, I’m at the new hotel, at the new venue. And I’m sleepin’. And once again, he comes knockin’ on the door, “Hey man.” And so he comes in, and he stays at the hotel… again.
There are a lot of questions raised by this story. So it sounds like Billy changed hotels halfway through his stay? Did the first hotel discover Walter was squatting in Billy’s room? And how did Walter get past the front desk to find Billy’s room in the first place? The story also doesn’t seem congruent with Billy’s claim to CNN that he was “treated like a rock star” as soon as he arrived at the airport, at least not unless he considers a chauffeur he nearly slips by to be rock star treatment.
Billy recounts various details from this story on other occasions. In Perfect Fraudman, at about 18:30, he illustrates how his hosts had his itinerary detailed down to the minute. As for the car with the removed seat, Billy told a similar story at the Louisville Arcade Expo in 2016 (at 25:10):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwVsWyuJIvI
[S9] In his stories, Billy often refers to the name of this arcade as “Pac-Man Studio”. Indeed, there was an English language sign at the location reading “Pac-Man Studio”, as seen in this photo in Nours magazine:
https://www.bandainamcoent.co.jp/corporate/bnours/nours/vol20/pdf/20_18-21.pdf
However, the official name of the arcade chain is “Wonder Park” (or sometimes translated “Wonderpark”). That is the name reflected in both Japanese and English language coverage of the event.
https://www.retromags.com/files/file/4664-tips-tricks-issue-058-december-1999/
[S10] About that Tips & Tricks piece, notice the piece is not headlined “Billy Mitchell honored in Japan”. It’s “American Pac-Man champion honored in Japan”. They had to introduce him because, obviously, nobody knew who he was, no matter what he may say about his own notoriety.
[S11] There’s lots of interesting stuff in that segment from Nours magazine, most of which we’ll get to in our next installment.
[S12] The link to the clean version of the Wonder Park photo showing Billy’s game replay is:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010725013020/http://www.namco.co.jp/home/pac20/billy-visit/01.html
The links to the three missing Wonder Park photos are:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030222184327/http://www.namco.co.jp/home/pac20/billy-visit/03.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20030222185723/http://www.namco.co.jp/home/pac20/billy-visit/04.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20030222185629/http://www.namco.co.jp/home/pac20/billy-visit/05.html
File names for these images are “03billy-all.jpg”, “04billy-prize.jpg”, or “05billy-play.jpg”. “Billy play” could be the image of Billy playing on a red machine seen in Tips & Tricks, while the group photo with the bouquet could be either “Billy all” or “Billy prize”.
[S13] The two glass cases and the Pac-Man clock in the background of Billy’s photo are also visible in two photos from Nours magazine:
https://www.bandainamcoent.co.jp/corporate/bnours/nours/vol20/pdf/20_18-21.pdf
The caption for those photos reads [GT]:
Valuable wit items such as the phantom sword purchased in Europe for the production of “Soul Edge” and the costume worn by Jin Kazama in “Tekken 3” are also on display.
[S14] Here for posterity is that full page run through Google Translate:
[S15] Here’s an extended portion of that Billy quote from the Pixels panel, starting at 30:40:
It’s not getting the perfect score. That was not the most memorable moment. After that, the media explosion that was created, they came from all over the world, and people who flew in just to do interviews to me… I knew the phone was gonna ring from Namco. I knew it. And soon enough, one day it rang. And that was the initial contact. And to make a long story short, eventually again, just as him, the most memorable moment goes back to Masaya Nakamura. He flew me to Japan on a first class ticket. There, at the Tokyo Game Show, I had many world records in addition to Pac-Man, in addition to the perfect game. He… crowned me the video game player of the century at the Tokyo Game Show. And even that’s not the most memorable moment. I was at the Namco headquarters the day before that, and I was in a room, and I’m waiting for him to come in…
Billy continues with a long, stock story of his private meeting with Mr. Nakamura and “his inner circle of developers and marketers”, fielding questions back and forth, before concluding at 34:30:
That meeting there, without a doubt, overshadows even the honor I was given on the Tokyo Game Show.
[S16] Exhibit A contains a lengthy version of the boardroom story, including some silly bit about exchanging business cards with Mr. Iki (at 23:50):
I’m seated in a room with the guy that’s sorta my chauffeur, and everything in Japan is… He warned me… Everything in Japan is very structured, very different. For example, you hand somebody a business card… if I have one… You don’t go “Oh, here.” And you don’t take their business card. You take it, and you take it with both hands, and you look at it, and you read it. And you read the whole card. And then you take it, you put it somewhere with meaning, like in your wallet. It’s none of this stuff. It’s very disrespectful. He warned me.
Billy makes repeated references to Walter Day, sitting beside him at the Exhibit A panel as he speaks, having warned him of Japanese formality. (Note that Walter is never described as being present for the alleged Thursday meeting with Mr. Nakamura’s “inner circle”, which would make sense if his flight was delayed.) Billy continues his story, while helping set up a demonstration on the provided Pac-Man cabinet:
So… I learned that, in an effort to try to do all the right things, and so… suddenly… suddenly, a guy walks in the room who speaks English better than me…
Billy gets distracted by the Pac-Man demonstration before continuing:
So a guy walks in the room, and he says “Mr. Mitchell”, and he takes… a long table, and he takes his business card, and he wings it down the table, and it lands right in front of me.
For what it’s worth, the shape of this table was described as “wasn’t quite a semi-circle” at 5:30 in this segment of Kurt and Corey:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdd3uS-7NOE
Back to Exhibit A, Billy again gets distracted by the demonstration before continuing:
So he wings it across the table, and it lands in front of me. So I says “Oh, thank you,” and I pull out my card, and *whew* I wing it back. And the guy that I’m with, like the chauffeur guy, he gets like this. And later on, he says to me “Mr. Mitchell, I thought you and Mr. Iki gonna start fighting like this.” Because it’s so uncommon or uncustomary.
Billy told a similar story about the exchange of business cards at the Louisville Arcade Expo in 2016, except the “chauffeur” has become a “guy who was working there” (at 9:50):
And the guy who was working there was all scared and he left the room. And he goes “I thought you guys get ready to fight” or something like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5XGZXzkwhg
In light of the evolving versions of Billy’s stories over the years, as well as an apparent inclination to lift other people’s stories and incorporate them into his own autobiographical anecdotes (as we see many times throughout this series), we wondered if various elements of this boardroom story weren’t added upon reading other people’s accounts of similar encounters at Namco headquarters. In particular, my research colleague was struck by certain similarities between the basic structure of this story and this interview of Toru Iwatani printed in 1986:
https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/toru-iwatani-1986-pacman-designer/
The interviewer described waiting in a conference room for Mr. Iwatani to enter, at which point they greeted and exchanged business cards, minus the full theatrics from Billy’s story.
Of course, it’s entirely possible such a small similarity is a coincidence. That said, if you do find other documented encounters at Namco which bear some similarity to Billy’s stories, we’d love to hear about them! Note that these examples need not necessarily predate 1999, as many elements of Billy’s stories seem to have been added some years after his Japan trip, possibly even subsequent to his and Walter’s magazine research visit to the Library of Congress, seen in the film Chasing Ghosts, and discussed in detail at 42:50 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfb_SBUh08o
[S17] Despite Billy’s characterization, let’s be clear that, while Mr. Nakamura was an important figure in executive administration in the video gaming industry, that doesn’t mean kids playing video games would have known who he was or would have been excited to meet him. Kids might have been excited to meet someone like Howard Phillips only for the fact of his personalized appearances in Nintendo Power comic strips, but they wouldn’t have known who his boss was. Or kids of a later generation would have been excited to meet someone like Notch, who directly created the game they play and who has a public social media presence, but neither of those applied to Mr. Nakamura in 1999. Despite Mr. Nakamura’s obvious influence in the industry, your average kid would probably have been more excited to meet their local Ronald McDonald. (Obviously I can’t speak to the general recognizability of Mr. Nakamura among video gaming children growing up in Japan, but neither can Billy.)
[S18] As stated, the number of people comprising of Mr. Nakamura’s “inner circle” changes. In Exhibit A, at 26:20, the description was:
I’m seated there, and suddenly the door opens, and in walks Masaya Nakamura, four of his inner circle of marketers and inner circle of programmers.
In his 2020 interview with Pac-Man Entertainment, it was “eight other guys” (at 49:40):
And Masaya Nakamura walked in, with… eight other guys. It was his inner circle of programmers, his inner circle of marketing people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0feW53grOI
At the Pixels panel, it was “nine people with him” (at 32:00):
He came in the room and there was nine people with him.
And in chatting with the Kurt and Corey Show, it was “probably about ten people” (at 5:20):
I was seated there with him, his inner circle of marketing people and his inner circle of programmers, probably about ten people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdd3uS-7NOE
[S19] Typically, as Billy tells the story, the answer of “We never thought scores like this [were] possible” comes first, followed by “You know far more about Pac-Man than we know.” See for instance, his Q&A with Pac-Man Entertainment, at 50:40:
And it’s translated to him, and the eight others, and they came back and they said “Mr. Mitchell, we have no idea! We never thought scores like this possible!” And I thought “Jeez, I didn’t get an answer?” And so, I asked ’em another question, really the same question a little differently. And it went back and forth, back and forth, and Mr. Iki brought back the answer. They said “Mr. Mitchell, you know far more about Pac-Man than we know! We have no idea!”
But you also catch him giving the answers in the opposite order, as in Exhibit E, at 9:10:
They sat there and they explained to me, it didn’t matter what question I fired at them, they just shrugged their shoulders and said “We have no idea!” They said “You know far more about Pac-Man than we know!” And I’d ask ’em more questions, and they says… “We never thought anybody’d get scores like this were possible!”
[S20] To the point that a professional translator won’t necessarily know video game jargon, even if they’re working in a context where that jargon could be relevant, on the 2015 Pixels panel, the translator for Professor Iwatani struggled with the name of video game character Q*bert (at 12:00):
The Pixel movie is fantastic. Not only is Pac-Man in the movie, but Galaga, Centipede, Donkey Kong, you’ve got… “Q-bart”… what is it… “Q-bert?” Okay, I’m sorry. [laughs] Q*bert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7L_1tCi53Q
[S21] You can hear yet another example of the follow-up question on The Five Count, at 15:50:
So I says “Oh.” And just kind of bein’ stumped, or… or not realizing reality yet, I says “Well…” I says, “About this ‘n that ‘n this ‘n that, when this and the game and that” and I asked another question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlLQdRwis1Q
[S22] With regard to not having more than a single, poorly articulated question to ask Mr. Nakamura’s supposed “inner circle”, I would ask what happened to Billy Mitchell’s “plan”, but in truth, it’s more likely his plan was to fashion a story to convince people he’s an expert on video games when he is not.
[S23] To the topic of Billy’s boardroom story feeling like an unfinished draft, the October 1992 issue of RePlay Magazine gives us a deeper look at what an actual, fully fleshed out tour of Namco headquarters and surrounding facilities would look like:
Of course, it would be entirely understandable if Namco were more interested in putting on a good impression for actual print media than for some individual high score player who was coming over for a single visit. But if that were Billy’s explanation for such a disparity in details between this tour and Billy’s self-serving yarn (the only portion of which we get to hear is the part where Billy gratifies himself over what he claims important people said to him), that might not bode well for Billy’s other story that he and Mr. Nakamura share some sort of special personal connection (as we will discuss in “Dot Seven”).
[S24] Billy also claims to have been such a star attraction at the Namco offices that, when he arrived, they had the perfect score tape he sent them on a loop on their TV (in Exhibit A, at 35:30):
I was fascinated, when I went in the office, they have a… a screen, and they have the perfect game, not sound, the perfect game, constantly playing in a loop, that I sent ’em.
Good thing it was without sound. I’d hate to think what sort of embarrassing dialogue could be on that tape…
[S25] Regarding the supposed questions Billy was fielding from Mr. Nakamura’s “inner circle”, with Pac-Man Entertainment, at 51:20, Billy says he fielded those questions “for the next hour”. In the After 2 Beers podcast, at 61:50, he gives the timespan as “two hours”. And in Autofire Power Hour, at 52:40, it was again given as “two hours”.
[S26] Billy really enjoys delivering that “You think you know” punchline, inserting it into barely justified conversations. At Free Play Florida in 2014, the panel were discussing glitches in games (at around 32:40) when Billy seizes his opportunity to turn the topic to his non sequitur story about stumping the old suits at Namco:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US35ZSUPXv8
[S27] Regarding this alleged heckler line – “You think you know more about the game than the guy who made it” – In his 2020 Q&A with Pac-Man Entertainment, Billy attributed this line to his friends (heard here at 53:00):
I really like… Sometimes my friends are wise guys, and that’s my favorite part. They say “Oh, you think you know everything.” I go “Well…” “Oh, you think you know more about the game that the guy who made it.” I go “Well yeah, he told me I did.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0feW53grOI
However, the story is typically told as though the “wise guys” are genuine hecklers. See, for instance, Exhibit A, at 31:20:
That’s always my wise guy answer back, if somebody has somethin’ to say.
Thus, the listener is generally given the illustration that this is his comeback to strangers, rather than to his sycophantic friends who apparently enjoy giving Billy easy opportunities to dunk on them.
Note also, in light of this heckler story, Billy’s often-repeated claim that he’s never had a negative interaction with anyone in person. In fact, in After 2 Beers, Billy seems to want to have it both ways, at 62:10:
But I… I love it when I… when I meet the wise guys, not that we ever meet any… the guy “Oh, you think you know. You think you know everything…”
[S28] Since someone may bring it up, I did make the following quip back in “Dot Two”:
Are we supposed to believe the game developers didn’t at least once run through the rack advance feature they themselves built into the hardware of their game? Are we supposed to believe “everything” about the game is “baffling” to the people who literally made it, as if an early ’80s computer program is some sort of mystifying riddle box that can only be solved by some overly-confident teenage arcade-goer from Florida?
However, that was strictly in context of the split screen, and Billy’s laughable stories that it had somehow eluded Namco’s attention for several years. While players will surpass programmers in terms of finer knowledge of game play mechanics and other subtle idiosyncrasies, major elements of the game aren’t going to escape the attention of the actual programmers (as opposed to boardroom executives being misidentified as programmers). Even less plausible is that such a significant feature would only be discovered by a computer-semiliterate teenager with an established affinity for bullshittery.
[S29] Of course, like Billy, Walter Day has his own set of stock stories he likes to repeat. Tell me if anything sounds familiar from Walter’s words from Exhibit A, at 35:50:
Here’s an interesting aside, by the way. You know, all the years that Twin Galaxies was interacting with the manufacturers, we would interact with the different crews of the designers of the games. And they would quite often have in-house contests for the designers and the… and the game testers who would be putting up their best scores and best scores and best scores, and they’d be really good. But as soon as the games would hit the streets and the players begin to play it, they would get scores much, much higher. And the designers already… always go “Oh my god, I can’t believe that these scores are possible.” Because despite the fact that they had that intellectual and creative familiarity with the game and the game’s structure, something about a high-level game player is always a superior mindset to them in terms of actually executing the game and getting higher scores, and we’ve seen that again and again and again. The game players will always beat the game designers, again and again and again.
[S30] Eugene Jarvis, designer of Defender, recalled arcade goers very quickly getting better than himself at his own game, in this 2014 interview with Polygon:
“The kids were on that game so quickly,” said Jarvis. “I showed up on the second night and there were people crowded around and mesmerized. They were getting smoked for the first few days but it didn’t take long before they were way better than me.”
In the game Nibbler, due to the way the program stores the variable tracking the player’s spare lives, surpassing 128 lives results in the game believing the player has a negative number of lives. Thus, the next time the player dies, the game is terminated. Joe Ulowetz, programmer for Nibbler, was unconcerned, simply because he never expected players to rack up that many lives:
When I programmed Nibbler, I designed it so that it gave one additional life every four waves. In 8-bit arithmetic, 128 is a negative number. If you got to zero or a negative number of lives, the game would end. Someone getting 128 Nibblers is something we never expected.
https://arcadeblogger.com/2016/07/01/nibbler-the-billion-point-arcade-game/
This phenomenon, of players surpassing game designers, is hardly limited to video games. In 2017, a game-breaking infinite combo was printed in the card game Magic: The Gathering, resulting in a tournament ban for one of the offending cards. Head designer Mark Rosewater explained that the development team can’t do as much playtesting in the several months they are allotted as the entire player base can do in less than an hour:
https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/156790235108/so-according-to-sam-stoddard-rd-actually-did
[S31] The Cedar Rapids Gazette, in 1982, reported Masaya Nakamura’s personal best on Pac-Man as 50,000 (although that could have been in reference to a prototype):
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/550839731/
The caption under the accompanying photo adds that, in front of reporters in Atlantic City, he was only able to score a dissatisfying 3,930:
To the point of Toru Iwatani’s erasure within Namco, the article refers to him only as “an engineer at Namco”:
[S32] Billy tells another variation of the “Namco directs tough questions to me” story in this chat filmed by G4TV in 2009, albeit poorly worded (at 1:10):
If you call and you get the right person on the phone, you ask ’em a real hard, technical question, then… I mean, I’ve had phone calls where I said “I was talkin’ to Namco, and I asked ’em this, and they told me to call you.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys1mUiQu0Ks
In Exhibit A, at 32:20, Billy elaborates a little more:
Different companies produce phones that have Pac-Man on it. And everybody always wants it to be authentic to the arcade. And a couple of times, I’ve been called, “Yeah, I spoke to so-and-so at Namco. Yeah. We’re wondering if we could send you our phone, if you could test it to see, you know, how accurate it is to the original version.” So Namco refers ’em to me. And I have… different things, different patterns I can test… Remember, I said, corners are executed down to 1/60 of a second. So I can test it, I can execute those corners, and see if it’s within 1/60 of a second. So it’s kind of flattering.
As usual, the story seems a bit odd. First, while this is a topic for another time, Billy is known to struggle playing games using anything other than an arcade cabinet joystick and buttons. At the 2007 Pac-Man World Championships, rather than holding the X-Box controller the normal way, Billy played by gripping the little analog stick as if it were a tiny joystick, on his way to an 8th place finish. What Billy describes above is basically running a known arcade pattern, and seeing if the pattern works as intended. But since all turns must be buffered in advance, there’s no way to get reliable results with such a pattern without being skilled at the interface.
Also, while superficial authenticity can be important for cell phone ports, how many cell phone developers really care about being so accurate to the original arcade game that even the old patterns work?
Also, does Namco just give out Billy’s personal phone number to anyone who asks?
Also, it seems like Billy would have picked up a game consultancy credit somewhere along the line for this work? Or maybe the inquiries never got beyond the “You’ll have to buy a vacation for me and my family first” stage.
Interestingly, in a related segment with G4TV (uploaded in 2009), Billy claims to have playtested the Xbox Live Arcade port of Pac-Man, at 4:00:
When they were first putting this out, they sent it to me to test. And I was testin’ it, me and a couple of other guys. And it had a split screen, just like the arcade, but then they removed the split screen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGJGEo9I7B0
Maybe his caveat of “me and a couple of other guys” is his disclaimer? As if he was there to coach other guys who were doing the actual playtesting? Later on, in a 2015 interview with Spud from Hit Start Now, Spud asks Billy if he’s ever played an arcade port on a newer home console, to which Billy flatly answers (at 35:30)
No. As far as consoles, I have a hard time spellin’ it, much less do I get to play it.
https://soundcloud.com/hit-start-now/smack-talk-featuring-billy-mitchell
[S33] For anyone who doesn’t recall the Simpsons reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuETyke2Wk
[S34] To be clear, Toru Iwatani left Namco in 2006, joining the faculty at Tokyo Polytechnic the following year. This was after participating in lectures at different universities starting in 2004.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060713034959/http://www.gamespot.com/news/6153732.html
[S35] There is a question as to whether future-Professor Iwatani would have had the prestige within the company which Billy ascribes to Mr. Nakamura’s “inner circle”. In a 2007 interview with VH1 Game Break, Iwatani spoke of how his work on Pac-Man did not afford him any special benefits within the company ranks at the time:
https://vh1.blogs.com/vh1_games/2007/06/exclusive_pacma.html
However, this is probably a reference to the immediate aftermath of Pac-Man. A tour of Namco’s facilities in Japan documented in the October 1992 issue of RePlay Magazine included this photo of Mr. Iwatani, with a caption indicating, at least by that time, he indeed was promoted within the company and was overseeing several significant Namco projects:
[S36] One may ask why others involved in Billy’s boardroom story have never come forward and said “Wait, I don’t remember any of this.” But remember, nobody other than Masaya Nakamura and “Mr. Iki” are ever named. It’s possible Billy got some sort of tour of the Namco facilities on Thursday, a day off in his documented itinerary. However, if Billy had been “handed off” between two guides during the course of such a tour, then neither would be in a position to say what didn’t happen when they were gone.
As for Mr. Nakamura himself, he and Billy did genuinely interact at the Tokyo Game Show. And Billy’s earlier version of this story is reflective of such an encounter, with his standard quotes being attributed to “after” his appearance there. All the illustrations of meeting someone in a boardroom were added years later, introducing memory issues. Mr. Nakamura has certainly met with hundreds of guests of all types, with the vast majority of these (if we are to be honest) being a less than memorable interaction for him. There’s also the general honesty issue, where someone who is deceitful will appear very confident in their claim, while an honest person would be more likely to tell the truth, that they don’t recall (and probably would not challenge such a story unless they were sure). Also, frankly, it’s really doubtful Mr. Nakamura would care what Billy goes around telling people about their encounter. As a famous person, Mr. Nakamura has certainly had people say much worse about him in some context or another (up to and including the sexual misconduct allegations). Plus, no matter what Billy says, he probably knew it was unlikely he would ever find himself in the same room with Mr. Nakamura again, and if such an encounter did happen, and if his stories about the boardroom meeting did come up in the process, he could improvise as he always does. (See for example the changed delivery of his line in the presence of Professor Iwatani.)
The same arguments apply to Billy’s reference to “Mr. Iki”. Additionally, that reference was not added until 2015, and “Mr. Iki’s” full name is never given in Billy’s stories.
[S37] You can hear Billy refer to Professor Iwatani’s name as “Iatwani” (“Eye-uh-twah-knee”) in Exhibit E, in 2015, at 10:00 and again at 30:20.
He does this again during his late night damage control interview with Triforce in 2017, at 24:40:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9EYBfhJIB8
And again with Pac-Man Entertainment, at 52:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0feW53grOI
The line “I just say Mr. Tori” is from The Kurt and Corey Show, some time around the 2007 release of King of Kong, at 4:10:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdd3uS-7NOE
And in Exhibit A, in 2016, it’s “Toru Wan… Mr. Otwani”, heard at 59:20:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfNvVnG_cZk
In contrast, Billy never got Masaya Nakamura’s name wrong.
[S38] On Autofire Power Hour, at 50:50, Billy describes his first interaction with Mr. Nakamura:
I told him, right off the bat, I said “This is the second time we’ve met,” and he looked at me strangely. Everything through a translator. Nobody in Japan speaks English. Don’t believe the movies. And he… he and I had crossed paths and were in a photo in October of ’83.
And yet, in the 2020 Pac-Man Entertainment interview, Billy offered a different opening remark (at 49:50):
And to think that I was seated there, and it’s the very first thing I said, I said “To think that I’m seated here, in front of you.” I said “There’s not a kid in the world that ever played video games that wouldn’t want to be right here, right now.”
Going back to Billy’s quote from The Five Count, there was an inaudible portion in the middle of it. Here it is again:
The very first thing I said to him, I… I said to him, I said “This is the second time we’ve met.” I said “We met when I was seventeen in New Orleans, for a photograph.” And… I told him I’d get him a copy of that photograph. And I… I said “You might say, it was a seventeen-year journey for me to get back here in front of you again.” […] The first thing I said to him, I said “There isn’t a kid in the world who ever plays video games that wouldn’t want to be in this seat, you know, right here right now.”
http://thefivecount.com/audio-posts/an-evening-with-the-king-kongs-billy-mitchell-steve-wiebe/
He was probably intending to say “which was 1983”. You could even maybe hear it as “which was May 1983” (even though on other occasions, Billy attributes this photograph to October of ’83). But I’ve heard the clip many, many times, and I could almost swear he says “Let’s use MAME, 1983”. At any rate, the year “1983” is the only part which is clearly audible.
One might argue that the subsequent remark, “The first thing I said to him”, could be a reference to this supposed meeting in 1983, and not to the alleged boardroom meeting in Japan. But this wouldn’t stack up well against Billy’s other stories, where he attributes this line to his visit to Japan in 1999.
[S39] The claim that the U.S. National Video Game Team slipped into the 1983 AMOA convention under the guise of being press comes from team member Mark Hoff himself:
http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com/home/games/bouncer_arcade_machine_1983/
Note that Mark Hoff refers to himself in the third person in that link, however the page was authored by him:
https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/bouncer-arcade.153055/page-2#post-2881574
http://www.classicarcadegaming.com/forums/index.php?topic=6575.0
Steve Harris did have written coverage of the event printed in the January 1984 issue of RePlay and the February 1984 issue of Video Games magazine (on page 36):
http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2013/03/bouncer-and-turbo-sub.html
http://www.digitpress.com/library/magazines/video_games/video_games_feb84.pdf
However, no mention in either Harris’ coverage or Hoff’s write-up of a chance encounter with Masaya Nakamura.
[S40] In Exhibit A, Billy tells an extended version of this photograph story, beginning at 26:50:
So, as I was sitting there, I explained, as Walter will remember, because in 1983 I explained to him, I said “This is the second time we’ve met.” Everything goes through an interpreter. I says “In 1983, I was outside the Namco booth with Walter and other players like me, we were takin’ a picture, for RePlay Magazine. We’re takin’ a picture, and as we’re standin’ there for the picture, suddenly the door opens, and it hits me. Guy’s walkin’ out the door, and it’s Masaya Nakamura. “Oh hi hi. Oh here, get in the picture.” So he got in the picture with us, and they snapped the picture. It was in… New Orleans.
Note that Walter Day is never typically referred to as being present for Billy’s boardroom encounter at Namco. Recall that Walter’s flight was delayed, and he was not present at Wonder Park on Wednesday. Billy’s reference to “Walter will remember” could be seen as a claim of him having been present there in the boardroom meeting on Thursday (if it happened on Thursday, or at any time at all), but it could also be seen as a reference to Walter’s recollection of the events of 1983 Billy was about to describe.
From where Billy left off, Walter continued the story (at about 27:30):
Essentially, back during that time, we would bring… we created the U.S. National Video Game Team. It went on the road, and we’d go to the big events, the AOE, the AMOA, if some of you folks remember that. And Cashbox, Vending Times, RePlay, and PlayMeter, regularly would photograph us with the leaders of… from Japan. Masaya Nakamura just happened to be there, for one of our group photographs. But they could never find the photograph again.
Before moving on to the rest of his Japan story, Billy quickly adds:
Yeah, cuz he asked me for it.
As for the ending, Billy gave a similar twist to The Five Count, at 14:50:
I said “We met when I was seventeen in New Orleans, for a photograph.” And… I told him I’d get him a copy of that photograph.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlLQdRwis1Q
Billy gave a different twist to Pac-Man Entertainment in 2020, at 50:10:
I had told him that it was the second time I had met him. I had met him in 1983 in New Orleans, just by chance, on a… at a convention, in a photo. And he was shocked at that, and he… he commanded his staff to find the photo. I don’t know if they ever did.
My research colleague found this characterization amusing:
Not only is Nakamura amazed but he immediately yes, immediately, sends someone off to find it?? Like Namco have all the back issues of Replay magazine in some secret vault somewhere. Nakamura couldn’t wait ‘til later? No, Billy’s presence truly is that magical and special.
This isn’t terribly important, but between this supposed crossing-of-paths between Billy and Mr. Nakamura in October of 1983, and Billy’s visit to Japan in September of 1999, there was a span of just under sixteen years. Perhaps Billy’s just bad at numbers, because in his many retellings, he can’t make up his mind whether that was sixteen years or seventeen years.
In Exhibit A, at 27:50:
I said to him, I said “That was in 1983,” I said “You might say it’s been more than sixteen-year journey for me to have the honor to meet you here again.”
In Exhibit B, at 26:30:
I said to him, I go “You might say it was… seventeen years… journey for me to… earn the right to be back here in front of you.”
On the Pixels panel, at 32:10:
And I explained to him that I had met him once before, seventeen years earlier.
And on the After 2 Beers podcast, at 60:30:
And so I explained it to him, and I said “You might say that it’s… it’s taken sixteen years for me to have the honor to meet you,” and you know, I said all the right things.
Again, it’s hard to make a big deal out of this. The dates themselves don’t shift around, just Billy’s approximation of what that span of time encompasses. Aside from Billy’s insistence that he has a perfect memory, it’s mostly odd for the fact that Billy’s stories are otherwise so rehearsed and predictable. Has Billy just not made up his mind which number to say? Does he just enjoy changing up his story in little ways by tweaking various numbers in each re-telling? It makes me curious if Billy would round this span up to “twenty years” if not for the fact that the game of Pac-Man itself had not been out for twenty years by the time of Billy’s 1999 trip.
[S41] The photo of Walter Day and his U.S. National Video Game Team from the 1983 AMOA convention can be seen in the early March 1984 issue of Play Meter:
http://www.classicarcadegaming.com/forums/index.php?topic=6575.0
(Note the CAG page incorrectly cites the year of the featured AMOA convention as 1984. The photos are from the 1983 convention in New Orleans. The 1984 convention was in Chicago.)
In our attempts to investigate the possible existence of such a photo with Walter Day’s team and Masaya Nakamura as described by Billy, we searched magazine coverage of the 1983 AMOA convention, with a particular focus on RePlay as that was the magazine cited by Billy. The November ’83 issue of RePlay appears to have predated the October ’83 convention (understandably, given printing lead times and the common practice of future-dating publications):
https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/todays-timewarp-1983-amoa-show-via-replay-magazine.277654/
The December ’83 issue, which is not available online, also included no such photo as described. It did, however, include a nod to Walter Day’s presence at the AMOA convention in New Orleans and his desire to relocate his Twin Galaxies arcade to Florida (as seen at the beginning of “Dot Three” supplemental).
Play Meter magazine had three issues in December 1983, the first being an “AMOA Convention Issue” (as stated on the cover). However, this was a preview issue handed out at the event. (Again, most publications are future-dated.) The third December issue contained an “AMOA Wrap-Up Part 1”, which we were able to confirm through a third party contained no such photo. The “AMOA Wrap-Up Part 2”, in the January issue of Play Meter, is available online, and also contains no photos involving either TG or Mr. Nakamura:
The February 1984 issue of Video Games magazine had several pages dedicated to the AMOA in Florida, including a write-up from team member Steve Harris. Harris goes in depth on new laserdisc games, and talks about rumors of a Clint Eastwood appearance, but gives no mention of a supposed chance encounter with the CEO of Namco. However, while the photo as described is also not seen in the magazine’s coverage, one photo on page 38 does include an unidentified figure who bears some resemblance to the often bespectacled Masaya Nakamura (albeit in front of the booth for Japanese game developer Universal Entertainment):
http://www.digitpress.com/library/magazines/video_games/video_games_feb84.pdf
Walter Day himself also makes no mention of this alleged encounter with Masaya Nakamura in his 1998 TG record book, although on page 893 he does refer to the team being photographed with “the presidents of most of the Japanese firms” at the following AMOA convention in 1984:
Walter Day does say he returned to “Iowa” to attend the convention in Chicago (which is nowhere near New Orleans either way). But this is clearly a reference to the 1984 event, which in the chronological narrative in Walter’s book falls between the 1984 relocation of the scoreboard and the second Coronation Day in Los Angeles in January 1985. Maybe Walter thought Jerry Momoda was the president of Nintendo?
In all this talk of Walter Day and company allegedly encountering industry executives at these conventions, it should be kept in mind that AMOA was an industry event, which meant primarily interactions between manufacturers and distributors. The focus was not really on arcade operators, which Walter Day was around that time, and most certainly not on players and high score chasers.
[S42] On Obsolete Gamer Show, at 57:00, Billy describes his TGS stage appearance as happening “the next day” after this boardroom meeting:
I was at his offices, and I hadn’t met him yet. And I’m finally sitting in his office, where I meet him and his inner circle of marketing and programmers. And I said to him, I says “There’s not a kid that ever, ever played video games who wouldn’t want to be in the exact seat that I’m sitting in right now.” And I had a couple of questions that I didn’t get answers to, and suddenly I realized the conversation was completely turned around. They were asking me questions fascinated by every answer I could give them. And so, put all of that into the mind of somebody who had experienced what I had, and then the next day I’m on stage in Tokyo, where he hands me, you know, the video game player of the century award.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfb_SBUh08o
Similarly, on Kurt and Corey, Billy describes his TGS stage appearance as “the next day”, at 5:00:
Without a doubt, the highlight, or the defining actual moment of my… illustrious fun, was when they flew me to Japan, to the Tokyo Game Show, where on stage I was crowned the video game player of the century. And what happened was, I obviously got there a few days ahead of time. When I went into the offices of Namco, and I sat in front of Masaya Nakamura…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdd3uS-7NOE
As noted in today’s installment, Billy describes the boardroom meeting as happening on Thursday at the Pixels panel, at 31:20:
He crowned me the video game player of the century, at the Tokyo Game Show. And even that’s not the most memorable moment. I was at the Namco headquarters, the day before that, and I was in a room, and I’m waiting for him to come in…
And in his 2020 Q&A with Pac-Man Entertainment, Billy told the story of his Wonder Park appearance on Wednesday, subsequently describing the boardroom encounter and his meeting of Mr. Iki as to suggest these happened on Thursday (at 49:10):
After that experience, being in the Namco corporate offices, I was in a room… I had just met a gentleman by the name of Mr. Iki, who was a terrific guy, and a personal assistant to Masaya Nakamura. He spoke English better than me. He explained that they were coming in, and they were gonna be seated to talk to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0feW53grOI
But again, on both Back in Time and Mark and Me, Billy cites this meeting as taking place after his stage appearance, including with the “There’s not a single kid in the world” line he would later attribute to this alleged earlier meeting.
We know Billy met with Mr. Nakamura on site at TGS on Friday. One could maybe argue that there was some kind of additional meeting with Mr. Nakamura the day before as well, because apparently the CEO of Namco isn’t particularly busy and can just hang out and chat every day. But it’s hard to reconcile Billy attributing the same elements of his story to both this before-TGS meeting and the later meeting backstage at TGS. Even worse, on Mark and Me, Billy specifically says the “afterwards” meeting was in “the executive offices” (which would rule out being onsite at the TGS convention center). Can this guy just make up his mind?
There’s a related story Billy tells about Mr. Nakamura crediting him with a revival of interest in classic arcade gaming, which Billy similarly attributes to both his meeting prior to TGS and during his stage appearance at TGS. But we’ll get into more detail on that in “Dot Eight”.
[S43] There are many corporate information sites, as well as gaming sites, which list Shunji Iki (sometimes as “A. Shunji Iki”) as a director of Namco in the U.S. or of Namco UK.
https://companycheck.co.uk/director/902370694/SHUNJI-IKI/summary
https://suite.endole.co.uk/insight/people/2370694-shunji-iki
https://ypage.uk/companies/543179/namco-uk-limited/
https://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/namco_operations.html
Note that many of these listings give Shunji’s nationality as “Japanese”. However, Shunji also lists his own nationality as “American”, such as in PDFs available on this site:
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02660506/filing-history?page=5
Note also that some of these listings give Shunji’s date of birth as being in October 1939. This helps establish the corporate executive Shunji Iki as being the same youth Shunji Iki from the Japanese internment documents linked below.
[S44] The 1990 nod to Shunji Iki being an “advisor to the president” can be seen in the December 1990 issue of RePlay on pages 106 and 110:
The following photo caption for a separate interview of Mr. Nakamura, conducted in 1992, can be seen in the April 1992 issue:
RePlay’s Marcus Webb with JAMMA Chairman Masaya Nakamura and Special Assistant Shunji Iki (who handled the translating) during this interview conducted at ACME ’92.
And in May 1991, another shot of Mr. Iki hanging out with Masaya Nakamura at that year’s American Coin Machine Exposition:
Note that, since Mr. Iki appears to be a mainstay among the Namco brass in Japan around convention time over the years, one cannot read too much into the timing of his appearance at TGS relative to the release of Namco USA’s new Pac-Man game. But on the other hand, there don’t seem to be any references to any other Americans or American executives among the Namco delegation at Tokyo Game Show besides Mr. Iki, either in Billy’s stories or in other documentation. (That’s not counting Billy and Walter of course, who were not directly affiliated with Namco.)
[S45] Even in the era of “Mr. Iki” (meaning, after Mr. Iki had been retconned to be the translator conveying the answers from Mr. Nakamura’s “inner circle”), Billy will still occasionally let slip a “she”. Here he is, on After 2 Beers, in 2019, at 60:20:
Everything goes through a translator. Don’t believe the movies. Nobody in Japan speaks English. The clerk at the hotel desk, that’s it. And she says, uh… So I explained it to ’em, and I said “You might say that it’s… it’s taken sixteen years for me to have the honor to meet you…”
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3PQuOk4cblJAD8UsyWRaum
[S46] You can hear a similar remark from Billy in Exhibit B, albeit without a reference to the 2015 Pixels panel specifically (at 25:30):
That has to be… what is the right word… pinnacle moment in my illustrious gaming good fortune. And I think that… I never told that story, cuz it was so, so personal, until… one day, they told the story, and then I felt it was okay, you know, to tell it.
[S47] As noted, sometimes Billy refers to the thing he did not repeat until the Pixels panel as the “story” (which would be the whole boardroom story) or the “statement” (which would seem to be either “You know far more about Pac-Man”, or his broken English variation on “We never thought scores like this were possible”). It’s hard to think that the use of two different characterizations, which are distinct enough in meaning, is just an accident. One might wonder if Billy is trying to tap into some kind of semantic half-truth, where some statement along the lines of either given example was told at the Pixels panel, allowing Billy to paint an illustration as though the whole boardroom story was told at that panel (in the same fashion that interviewers are fed misleading stories, as seen throughout this series). At any rate, either “statement” was told many times over the years prior to the Pixels panel, rendering any attempts to be technically factual moot anyway.
[S48] Here are just a few examples of Billy telling the boardroom story over the years, prior to the 2015 Pixels panel.
Interview with The Kurt and Corey Show, recorded some time around the release of King of Kong (at 5:00):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdd3uS-7NOE
G4TV interview, published May 2009 (at the start of the video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys1mUiQu0Ks
Interview with On Gaming, published January 2012 (at 5:30):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eiH2jWYgTA
November 2012 chat alongside Robert Childs and Steven Kleisath (published in 2015, at 4:30):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fzwTGDJoEE
The Five Count, published 2012 (at 14:30):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlLQdRwis1Q
And on a panel at Free Play Florida in November, 2014 (at 33:00):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US35ZSUPXv8
[S49] The Twin Galaxies recap opens with the date “May 22, 2015” (Friday) while showing a photo from the white suit, leading one to maybe believe the white suit panel seen was on Friday:
However, a provided quote from Billy does reference the existence of both the Friday and Saturday panels, and the origin of the white suit panel is never specified. Alternatively, in 2020, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel included a photo of the black suit panel, and attributed that photo to the Friday panel:
[S50] Billy makes a similar attempt to attribute the Pixels panel telling of his boardroom story to Toru Iwatani in Exhibit E, at 9:50:
But what was unique about that, that was in an enclosed conference room in the offices of the CEO. But recently, at 257, there on a panel discussion with the designer of Pac-Man, Professor [Iwatani], people began to fire questions at him, and this time in a public manner, he just shrugged his shoulders, he says “I don’t know those answers, you’d have to ask Billy.” And they’d ask a question and he’d say… “Billy’s the one that knows these answers, none of us do.” And so the story that I told about what happened in Japan behind those closed doors, all these years… How do you know I’m tellin’ the truth? I mean, how do you know it’s not just something I’m makin’ up? And so it was kind of refreshing to hear the Professor say that in such a public setting.
One could argue that maybe this thing Professor Iwatani said at Pixels was strictly the “Billy knows more about Pac-Man” line, and not the whole story in general. However, Billy does tell the story as though the Professor told the entirety of the boardroom story, thus allowing Billy to tell it in its entirety.
[S51] Billy tells the same story in Exhibit A, at 30:10:
Then last year, we’re in… we’re in… Chicago, and the designer, who I’ve met for the second time, a different guy, he’s there in Chicago. And as we’re fielding… questions, there’s a whole panel of us, people are asking questions of me, and questions of him. They ask him a few questions, and he goes “I have no idea, you gotta ask Billy this question.” You know, he said it… again, through a translator.
And in his late night interview with Triforce, at 24:30:
You were there in Chicago, when I sat with Professor [Iwatani], okay, and it didn’t matter what question you asked him about Pac-Man, when it came to game play, he said “Oh, I don’t know, you have to ask Billy. Oh, I don’t know, you have to ask Billy. He knows more than I do.”
Whatever Triforce’s word is worth, he “confirmed” Billy’s story. Nice of Billy’s friends to vouch for him, as usual. However, again, this interaction is never seen in the filmed panel we have publicly available.
[S52] Billy’s mic cuts out in the middle of this quote, but I believe this to be if not his exact quote, then a fair approximation.
[S53] There are a few such broken English lines in Billy’s stories. One that’s kind of borderline comes up in this Free Play Florida panel from 2014, at 34:20:
They said “We have no idea how the… We just run program. We have no idea how it falls together.
Note that Billy is not doing the corny accent with this line. In that light, perhaps this could be argued to be a case of Billy’s own poor English coming through, treating the word “program” as a kind of mass noun or noncountable plural… perhaps.
There’s another very memorable line from Dwayne’s documentary Perfect Fraudman, filmed in a hotel room at the 2007 Pac-Man World Championships. However if you listen carefully, this line is not actually being attributed to Namco or anyone from Japan, at least not directly, but rather to some unidentified media producer. The passage starts at 23:30:
It was crazy, I’m drivin’ down the road, my cell phone rings, I answer it, it’s the BBC. “Uh, Mr. Mitchell, you’re on the air.” So anyway, I said to ’em, I go “So, I can understand you heard the story.” I said “But so what, there’s stories all over the place.” “It’s a big story.” “How’d you know it was true? How’d you know? I mean, you decided to call me. You had to have… wanted to know if it was true before you called me.”
Billy goes into another, different racial caricature, apparently representing someone from the BBC?
”Yes.” He says “We called Namco USA.”
The clip is made more awkward for the presence of Dwayne Richard (a friend of Billy’s at the time) laughing right along with Billy’s impersonation. Continuing:
”We asked Namco ‘Can we trust Mr. Walter Day?’” They say “Walter Day only speak troot.” I says “troot”? He says “Yes, troot.”
[S54] Truthfully, the supposed number of English speakers seems to fluctuate in Billy’s stories as well. In Exhibit A, at 26:30, Billy identifies only the receptionist at the hotel:
And don’t kid yourself, no matter what you see on TV, nobody in Japan speaks English. The girl at the hotel desk, she spoke English, that was about it.
And yet, as seen in provided quotes today, two Namco people who Billy met in the hotel lobby also spoke English. Billy also attributes an English line to his chauffeur in Exhibit A in June 2016, at 26:10. Three months prior, that same line was also attributed to a “guy who was working there” at the Louisville Arcade Expo, this time with some more broken English mixed in (at 9:50):
And the guy who was working there was all scared and he left the room. And he goes “I thought you guys get ready to fight” or something like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5XGZXzkwhg
And of course there was the original female translator, before she was changed to Mr. Iki (if she ever existed in the first place).
[S55] Billy similarly impersonates Japanese speech, this time giving a “hoshoshosho” sound, on Kurt and Corey at around 7:10:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdd3uS-7NOE
[S56] Here are two obituaries for Haruko Iki, who passed away in 2001:
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/IKI-Haruko-2884323.php
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-obituaries-82801-2001aug28-story.html
Note the reference to Haruko living in Walnut Creek, California for 30 years as of 2001. Prior to his involvement with Namco, Shunji Iki was listed as an officer for a Nevada-based company called ASI International, incorporated in 1989:
https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_nv/C1182-1989
A search for “ASI INTERNATIONAL LTD” on this site lists “A. Shunji Iki”, with his given address being in Walnut Creek, California, providing another point of comparison for the Shunji Iki of Namco being the same one listed in documents with Haruko:
https://esos.nv.gov/EntitySearch/OnlineEntitySearch
In the previous corporate info links for Shunji Iki, he is also listed as a company director for Brent Leisure Limited, a Namco subsidiary in Europe, starting in 1992:
https://www.mobygames.com/company/namco-limited/history
[S57] With regard to any offense anyone may take at our attempts to establish Shunji Iki, a born American, as a native English speaker, or to the way I framed the question and the answer, I accept such criticism for what it is. As I stated, there was the one item in Shunji’s background which gave us pause, leading myself and my research colleagues to believe a deeper examination of Shunji’s history was necessary for the purposes of establishing the fact of his English fluency. It was never my wish to reinforce negative stereotypes or “othering” of Japanese- or other Asian-Americans. I hope I handled the matter as responsibly as was called for.
[S58] This reference site lists the Iki family (Haruko, Shunji, and Teisuke) as having reported to the internment center in Puyallup, Washington, before being transferred to the internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho:
https://sortedbyname.com/letter_i/i101237.html
The August 28, 1943 issue of the Minidoka Irrigator lists the three of them as destined for expulsion to Japan, as part of a planned exchange with American civilians held there:
https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84024049/1943-08-28/ed-1/
To be clear, we can’t even say for certain that the Iki family was indeed sent to Japan at this time (although Shunji is cited with Japanese nationality in several corporate records sites). We can only report that they were on the given list.
A passenger manifest from 1950 listed Haruko, Shunji, and Teisuke as arriving in Honolulu on their way to Seattle (with the young brothers both listed as “U.S. Citizens”). However, it does not specify the context of this travel.
Note: The young Shunji of record was consistently identified as having been born in 1939 (specifically on October 1), which matches the elder Shunji of corporate records, providing another point of comparison identifying the two as the same person. However, while Teisuke’s birthdate is consistently listed as May 15, conflicting sources put that date in either 1938 or 1942, meaning it’s not clear whether Teisuke is Shunji’s older or younger brother. Without delving into Teisuke’s personal details, there are reasons why someone may otherwise-innocently falsify their birth year. This particular thread is way beyond the scope of this project, except insofar as one may view it necessary to address such questions to resolve any possible questions about the veracity of these records as they relate to Mr. Shunji Iki, should such questions arise.
[S59] The August 2, 1952 issue of the Northwest Times (an English language newspaper marketed toward Japanese-Americans in the Seattle area) included two pieces referencing local players for the “International League All-Star” team under coach Roy Sakamoto. The team vied for the Seattle Little League championship at future Major League venue Sick’s Stadium, which would qualify them for regionals in southeast Washington:
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86071999/1952-08-02/ed-1/seq-2/
The paper features some… “colorful” language of the era. While the team is referred to as the “International League All-Stars”, their young catcher Shunji Iki was listed among “Japanese Americans” playing for the team, which (as noted) were playing in the local Little League circuit. Indeed, the coach himself was an American, previously detained at the same Minidoka internment center as the Iki family, organizing baseball among the imprisoned residents during his time there:
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20000322&slug=4011389
[S60] Interestingly, we find a very different line included in Joshuah Bearman’s profile of Billy Mitchell published in Harper’s Magazine in 2008:
When Billy was in Japan, he asked the programmers detailed questions about the far reaches of Pac-Man, to which they responded, “We should really be asking you the questions. You have been where we never will.”
Of course, this particular answer doesn’t appear anywhere else in Billy’s stories, nor do we hear it in his own voice. Perhaps Billy delivered his usual exaggerated lines, with Mr. Bearman choosing to paraphrase them into something more palatable for print (while ignoring any apparent red flags around this story which, at that point, he had committed to writing). Such a paraphrase framed as a direct quote would be an odd choice, but hey, we can consider the possibility. Alternatively, it could be that Billy was on his best behavior for such a high profile print interview, conducted before the film King of Kong made such media appearances for him a given. (While the profile was not published until 2008, the context of this portion of the interview places it in either late 2003 or early 2004.) Another possibility, given the observed evolution of Billy’s Japan stories, is that the broken English lines simply did not become a part of his storytelling vernacular until after this encounter.
[S61] To the point of supposed authenticity, there are a couple times Billy flubs his own broken English lines, compared to how they are typically delivered. First in Exhibit E, at 9:10:
They sat there and they explained to me, it didn’t matter what question I fired at them, they just shrugged their shoulders and said “We have no idea!” They said “You know far more about Pac-Man than we know!” And I’d ask ’em more questions, and they says… “We never thought anybody’d get scores like this were possible!”
And then on Autofire Power Hour, at 51:40:
I asked a couple questions. They just shrugged their shoulders. It was crazy. I asked questions about Pac-Man, about the end of the game. They had never seen it before. I showed it to ’em. And they said “Mr. Mitchell, you know far more about Pac-Man than we know. We never thought scores were like this possible.
https://autofirepowerhour.com/2018/02/10/episode-23-interview-with-billy-mitchell/
Everyone misspeaks once in a while, even professionals. It’s normally not a problem, unless one is hiding behind “authenticity” as a justification for what in nearly any other context would be racially offensive caricatures. Are these, in fact, supposed to be the actual lines as they were originally delivered? If so, why is there seemingly no effort to repeat these remarks verbatim? And if not, or if Billy is not able to quote them accurately and consistently, then why is he tacking the racial caricatures onto his approximations?
Note also that in the Exhibit E example, the two standard answers are given in the opposite order compared to how Billy usually delivers them. Again, the same arguments apply.
[S62] Another instance of Billy attributing the caricature accent to unnamed people at Nintendo comes from the Kurt and Corey Show, at about 8:40:
Back when I originally contacted Nintendo, back in 1983… they knew me, they knew of me, because of the news stories and the kill screen that went around. And they… When I spoke to ’em on the phone, again, the language being a barrier, they referred to me… they referred to me as “The Level Two-Two guy”.
As Billy goes into that last line, which is a reference to DK’s kill screen being on level 22, Billy switches over to the same exaggerated accent he uses for other Japanese lines. It just wouldn’t have been authentic if Billy didn’t get his caricature in on those five words, and we all know how much Billy loves authenticity in his stories. (That was sarcasm, of course.)
This story is also a bit odd in how Billy claims to have called Nintendo in Japan in 1982. Couldn’t he have just called Nintendo of America? Would that not have been a much easier way of conversing with someone from the company? How on Earth did a young Billy navigate the Japanese switchboard on such a phone call? And how much did this call cost him? Or was this a call to Nintendo of America after all, and do the people at NoA also speak in Billy’s exaggerated accent? So many questions!
[S63] Here are some other CESA pages from TGS Autumn ’99 unrelated to the Billy story:
https://web.archive.org/web/19991006001251/http://www.cesa.or.jp:80/cesa/tgs/topics/top00056.html
https://web.archive.org/web/19991109224559/http://www.cesa.or.jp:80/cesa/info/index.html
[S64] The fact that there is video from TGS Autumn ’99 on YouTube was appreciated by one of my colleagues, who noted:
Of course, it all went down years before digital video became ubiquitous or video sharing platforms became a thing. Anything that we’re finding from TGS 1999 is really because someone went through the extra trouble of transferring and uploading to YouTube years later.
[S65] There’s a crisper upload of the Pac-Man World ad in the middle of this longer video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5G7xoe4xDg
I used this version for my screencaps.
[S66] One does not need a translation to get the gist of the Pac-Man World billboard:
Thanks to Arabic numerals, it’s not hard to figure out that the game recognizes Pac-Man’s “20th anniversary”, that it comes out in Japan on 11/2, and that the price is 4,800 yen.
[S67] Judging by the gold ribbons on the floor of Billy’s big photo, it looks like his appearance was after the main festivities (something which will be elaborated on more in “Dot Seven”).
Billy often loves to talk about how there are nine dancers flanking him in this photo, one for each hidden dot on Pac-Man’s split screen. This is sometimes brought up in the context of Billy’s “nine dots” taunts of Rick Fothergill. However, at 9:50 in this panel, Billy oddly claims it was actually Rick who pointed that out to him:
I would send him a message. Some of you guys, you’ll see me sign your stuff in the booth, and… you know, your name’s Mike, and I’ll say “Thanks Mike.” And I don’t put dot-dot-dot. Like I send him an email, I put dot-dot-dot, dot-dot-dot, dot-dot-dot. Nine dots. I dig it into him every chance I get. And… he notices it too. I was at Japan, and I got the player of the century award, and I was standing on stage with Masaya Nakamura, the godfather of video games, and there were Japanese cheerleaders up there. There were nine cheerleaders. As soon as he got the photo, he goes “Oh my God, nine cheerleaders.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Vc4ZBTSNMo
Billy continues joking that he arranged for that, subsequently clarifying “It just happens.”
While it is true that there were nine dancers in the photo, if you watch this video (around the 6:30 mark), there were at least eleven Namco dancers total:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy-7tyB5oWY
But if you think eleven dancers is a lot, check out how many Sega had:
https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File%3ADCM_JP_19991008_1999-31.pdf&page=16
[S68] While the “G@me’s” coverage doesn’t specify which date it was, on their main page, the author says they attended TGS on Friday “Business Day”:
http://www.a-one-office.co.jp/game’s/gameshow/gameshow99/TGS99.html
[S69] FWIW, the actual dancing Pac-Man animation (in a file titled “pacman2.mov”) seems to have been lost to time. The site “First Church of Pac-Man” mentions it, but they linked right to the dead GameSpot link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200221022617/http://www.flamingmayo.com/firstchurchofpacman/index2.htm
[S70] At the 2004 New York Video Festival, Billy told the same story about shaking thousands of people’s hands in Japan:
[S71] As corroboration, another site lists the main stage itinerary for Saturday and Sunday, which agrees with the other site aside from a half-hour difference for one presentation [GT]:
https://nlab.itmedia.co.jp/games/news/9908/30/news01.html
[S72] Here’s another reference to the 17th as “Business Day” [GT]:
http://www.a-one-office.co.jp/game’s/gameshow/gameshow99/TGS99.html
And again here, on this official recap page [GT]:
http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/99autumn/press/rep0919.html
[S73] In this YouTube video, showing Namco’s Spring 2000 main stage video (starting at 10:40), you see peeks at Tales of Eternia and Oh! Bakyuuun (released as Ghoul Panic in Europe), with again no mention of Pac-Man or his birthday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byDxgNbsuwA
[S74] Here are some sources citing October 10, 1979, as Pac-Man’s birthday:
https://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/news/pac-man-birthday-28/330747/
https://ask.funtrivia.com/askft/Question47979.html
https://blog.lionspride.org/tag/pac-man-arcade-game/
https://everything2.com/title/Puckman
https://www.wired.com/2007/10/oct-10-1979-brings-gaming-into-pleistocene-era/
And here are some sources citing May 22, 1980:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190712174728/https://www.wired.com/2010/05/pac-man-30-years/
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/may/22/pac-man-video-game-40-years-old
Most of the 1979 sources appear to be more casual trivia sites. Wired, a more well-regarded tech news site, was contacted by Namco with a correction, leading to subsequent acknowledgment of the 1980 date. In his book The Ultimate History of Video Games, Steven L. Kent quotes Toru Iwatani’s recollection that May of 1980 was the date of “location testing”, prior to a private showing in June and actual sale of the game in July:
https://books.google.com/books?id=PTrcTeAqeaEC&q=1980#v=snippet&q=1980&f=false
Wikipedia has mostly stuck with 1980, but has occasionally cited 1979 for lengths of time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pac-Man&diff=next&oldid=2828605
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pac-Man&diff=prev&oldid=4221191
Also, Namco celebrated Pac-Man’s 25th anniversary on May 22, 2005:
https://web.archive.org/web/20051023084002/http://www.namco.co.jp/nours/hotnews/index.php?id=21
The New York Times, in 2005, published a piece on Pac-Man’s 25th year, citing the month of June (not May) as the milestone’s month. It seems they also struggled with this question, before apparently giving up:
Namco, which cannot offer an exact date for Pac-Man’s birth, sold 293,822 of the arcade machines from 1980 to 1987.
As for the silly bit about Namco celebrating the 25th anniversary in 2008, I checked to see if this was simply a matter of Wired putting an incorrect publication date on their article. A link was posted to Fark on October 10, 2007 (the same listed date of publication), where user “Lunatik” promptly remarked:
For a company that put out a massively successful game such as Pacman, you’d think they’d be able to afford someone who could count to 25.
https://www.fark.com/comments/3126050/34354817#c34354817
[S75] To delve a bit deeper into the question of how direct the connection was between Billy’s appearance and Namco’s promotion of Pac-Man World, as said in today’s installment, the working relationship between Billy and Namco in 1999 seems to have ended with his Tokyo Game Show appearance. There were no Pac-Man World advertisements in television or print featuring him. (It’s not as if anyone outside the aging arcade community would have had any idea who he was, but they could still label him “first perfect Pac-Man player” or similar.) Surely Billy Mitchell, who loves screen time, and who already seemed to enjoy doing all those photo shoots wearing the same outfit over and over, would have been cheaper than either Mr. T or Verne Troyer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_uQxHAaM1Q
So one might ask, was Billy’s appearance really about boosting this specific new game (which is usually the point of entertainment expos), or was it about boosting the brand in general? Namco doesn’t have to care about serious score adjudication to appreciate some fun bit of news involving their big icon, whose once-unquestioned dominance had since been threatened among the pantheon of gaming mascots, overrun by the likes of Mario, Link and Zelda, Mega Man, Sonic, and more recently Pikachu.
To this end, one might ask whether such a commemoration would have happened at a point in time when Pac-Man promotion was not on the itinerary. Would Namco have honored the widely-advertised “first perfect score on Pac-Man” following their Tekken demo? And truthfully, I can’t say it’s impossible. But at the same time, it seems incongruent and unlikely. Yes, Nintendo could stop what they’re doing to recognize a Mario milestone at a presentation where their actual focus was on a new Zelda or Metroid, but it seems much more likely to happen when such a recognition can tie directly into their main event.
Thus, the answer to the question of whether Billy’s appearance at TGS was specifically intended as promotion for the new Playstation game might best be answered as “Yes and no”. There are things that point to that conclusion, such as a direct reference to the Playstation game in the text on Billy’s little plaque. (More on that next time.) And there are things that point away from that conclusion, such as the one-time nature of Billy’s appearance. And yet, even if one wanted to argue that this wasn’t directly about the new game, it was still only a single step removed, with Billy’s appearance being at the very least adjacent to Namco’s “20th birthday of Pac-Man” festivities, which themselves were tied to the new game. Ultimately, video of the entire presentation might better answer this question, but we have no reason to think there was any distinction between the two themes. In fact, the same dancers from the “Happy birthday” show (the uniformed ones, as opposed to the street clothes dancers) hung around for Billy’s appearance, suggesting little to no separation at all.