What follows are the supplemental notes for the “Dot Two” 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] Both the example of the split screen and the six fruits were taken from Jamey Pittman’s perfect score on YouTube. (Jamey was not involved with this project.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuoH0vz3Mqk
[S2] You don’t suppose Billy gave that answer – “there’s enough memory left in the game for the left half of the board and not the right half” – a few times early on, and is now married to it, lest he ever have to admit he was wrong about something? Even though of course no one would have blamed him for being wrong about this, as he’s not a technical expert.
[S3] Astute readers may have picked up on the fact that this book by Jim Sykora and John Birkner was the book Steve Sanders contacted Bantam about potentially writing, before instead going on to write The Video Master’s Guide to Donkey Kong.
[S4] The same Kevin Fischer story appeared again a month later in The Capital Times from Madison, Wisconsin:
https://www.newspapers.com/image/521003752
[S5] Schwibs’ score was also covered in the Daily News from Lebanon, Pennsylvania, as well as the Fall 1982 issue of Video Game Player magazine:
http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1982/fall/vgp/arcade-parade/
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/518972571/
Schwibs’ score got a nod in the UPI soon after that, as they reported on two wildly divergent scores by another Pac master, Mitch Klappa as seen in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/140735527/
The wording there is a bit weird. From the sound of it, Mitch’s 3,183,440 score was ended due to his own exhaustion, and not that of the machine (which was how the split screen was often characterized early on). As for 1.7 million, that can be a split screen score, if you skip almost all the 5,000 point keys. But it doesn’t really give us any description to confirm that it was the split screen that caused it to “[blow] up”, and that the power didn’t go out, or the game didn’t genuinely malfunction, or the cabinet didn’t explode from a stray grenade or something.
[S6] You can read more about Ricky Mori’s appearance on Just Kidding, along with his younger friend and protégé Jeffrey Yee, here:
https://www.twingalaxies.com/feed_details.php/6143/the-ballad-of-the-pac-man-king
[S7] Following Ken French’s split screen score of 3,270,850 in March of 1982, he claimed a score of 4,186,400 in May. Here it is reported in his local paper, complete with a not quite accurate description of the split screen:
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/699002253/
It’s possible Ken simply counted one too many million point rollovers (unintentionally or otherwise). This seems like a silly thing to do in retrospect, but again, the split screen phenomenon wasn’t entirely understood at the time. It wasn’t yet widely known that it always appears on board 256, thus it wasn’t yet known that split screen scores will always fall within a certain range. (Split screen scores can wildly diverge based on whether you collect the 5,000 point keys on each of 235 “ninth key” boards, but generally players are using patterns which consistently collect those.) That said, even if we assume good faith, he probably should have thought “Huh, this four million score took me just as many hours as that three million score.”
Of course, by June of 1982, his score was up to nearly six million, with no reference at all to the split screen or any other technical difficulties:
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/64805986/
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/64805997/
Notable in that profile is that, on the next page, it contains a quote from Twin Galaxies co-founder Jon Bloch, and not Walter Day.
This Ken French score was printed in the March 1983 issue of Blip, which also included a story by Steve Sanders of beating the split screen (which the magazine incorrectly identified as the “243rd key”, making it board 255), and getting to the next board where the prize was allegedly a broken key:
http://www.classicarcadegaming.com/forums/index.php?topic=2402.0
[S8] You can read about Ronald Reagan’s letter to Jeffrey Yee in this June 1983 issue of the San Francisco Examiner:
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/460526590/
As part of this profile, Jeffy gives a rather unconvincing explanation of how he was able to get past the split screen:
[S9] Here’s more context from the newspaper clip on Les Martin, from March 1983:
Lest you think there was any misinterpretation of the reference to “a token”:
Previously, in December 1982, Les and his friend Jim Dickerson were featured in the Daily Times for much more reasonable scores of around three million:
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/281478244/
[S10] In addition to stitched scores, some scores around this time were also mangled by typos. In 2008, player Chris Ochsenkiel posted to the TG forum a clip from his local newspaper from 1982, attributing to him a score of 3,340,030:
https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/120898-Pacman-1982
Chris clarified that his actual score was 3,240,030, and that he doesn’t know whether the typo was from the arcade owner or the newspaper itself.
We assumed a typo was also involved in an alleged score of 3,333,420, attributed to a Dale Burton, as reported by Cat DeSpira on her Twitter page:
https://twitter.com/CatDeSpira/status/1273797074387996672
At first, we found this score curious, as the bogus and/or stitched scores of that era tended to go well beyond the game’s maximum. One might think perhaps there was some long lost method of squeezing out that few extra points on the original cabinet, if not for the fact that the game has been so thoroughly analyzed in the years since.
However, in our subsequent research, we were stunned to discover that the original issue of the Arizona Daily Sun (as seen on newspapers.com) actually cited the score as 3,999,420. Even more shocking, rather than simply being a case of different editions of the same paper introducing typos, a closer inspection shows the version posted to Twitter was quite blatantly photoshopped to show a different score, both in the main article text and again in the photo caption:
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/516674241/
Obviously, we cannot speak to where Cat DeSpira got her illegitimate copy from.
Also, in the interest of limiting confusion, we found no records corroborating the existence of “early Pac-Man boards” which either play slower or score differently than others. However, this is not to say such an alternative version or bootleg did not exist (although any such official board scoring higher than 3,333,360 would surely have been found by now).
[S11] Note that stitched scores were still a conditional Twin Galaxies practice at the Iron Man contest in 1985. Here, at 3:40, Jim Vollandt recalls a special provision where he could restart his marathon attempt in the event a hardware malfunction reset his game:
What happened was, the joystick broke, so it’d only go in one direction. And they scrambled to try and fix the game, and what happened was, when they opened up the top, the game shut off. So by the stipulations of the rules, I was allowed a restart within five minutes once the machine was fixed.
[S12] Note that Doug Nelson’s TG score of 9,980,420 was curiously close to three maxouts stitched together, though there’s no way of telling exactly how many stitched games his play may have entailed.
[S13] You can see a demonstration of rack advance in one of Dwayne Richard’s documentaries, at 8:00 here:
https://archive.org/details/DwayneRichardVideoGameVideos/25.ThePerfectFraudmanPart1EyeCandyCut.webm
Another known way to pass the split screen, exclusive to emulators like MAME, is to grant the player infinite lives. Basically, the game is waiting for the player to eat 244 dots before it runs the routine to end the board. (In this regard, the 240 little dots and the four power pellets are treated equally.) On every other board, there are exactly 244 dots, none of which regenerate. But on the split screen, there are those nine dots that regenerate on each death. Thus, with infinite lives, eating those few regenerating dots over and over and over across a sufficient number of lives will eventually bring your tally to 244, to complete the board. Mark Longridge describes this in this MARP thread:
http://forums.marpirc.net/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=992
[S14] Regarding the story of Les Martin claiming to know a secret trick past the split screen (which was actually just using the rack advance switch), there are references to this story on many forums. Though it gives the appearance of an urban legend, it is generally considered to be true.
http://www.ukvac.com/forum/pacman-kill-screen_topic335844.html
Starting at 6:20 in the “Eye Candy Cut” of Dwayne’s documentary The Perfect Fraudman, Rick Carter, Rick Fothergill, and Dwayne all recall Les Martin being the one behind this story:
https://archive.org/details/DwayneRichardVideoGameVideos/25.ThePerfectFraudmanPart1EyeCandyCut.webm
Apparently there’s also a legend that Les trained a mouse to run into the machine and hit rack advance on command:
http://www.classicarcadegaming.com/forums/index.php?topic=4449.0
[S15] This editor remark in the January 1983 issue of Joystik is a reply to a letter from Pac-Man player Richard Chau. Chau referred to his score of 3,180,000, achieved the previous July. This score was reported on in the Edmonton Journal (with the usual humorous early observations of the split screen), although the newspaper did not report the specific score:
https://www.newspapers.com/image/472174161
The Buffalo, New York player with a score of 2,935,590 who Chau referred to in his letter is Eric Schwibs. Still looking for that Albertan who can score 3.6 million, though!
[S16] The idea of a “perfect game” being a perfect score through the end of the blue time boards is something Twin Galaxies would later adopt, at least with respect to Ms. Pac-Man. In the 1998 TG record book, Day wrote about Spencer Ouren of the Bozeman Think Tank mastering Ms. Pac-Man:
During their research, Spencer became the first Ms Pac-Man player to ever achieve a perfect game. To accomplish a perfect game means you have to “eat” every monster that turns blue until you reach the advanced boards where they no longer change to blue.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050221212947/http://www.twingalaxies.com/index.aspx?c=17&id=625
[S17] This wasn’t the only example of a magazine around this time printing erroneous claims about passing the split screen. On page 46 of the March 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, a small blurb was printed claiming that someone had found a mysterious method past the split screen, and that the next board was the cherry board, with two broken keys displayed in the bottom corners. The segment went on to claim there was another split screen on board 378, and yet another somewhere in the late 400s:
[S18] There is a typo in Randy’s letter. The actual score after the sixth key should be 340,400. This particular typo was hashed out on the December ’83 letters page:
http://www.digitpress.com/library/magazines/joystik/joystik_dec83.pdf
[S19] In a recent interview with… two random kids, I guess… the kids ask Billy about Pac-Man’s split screen. Billy gives a long answer about the mystery behind the screen, how he first encountered it, and (so he says) his opportunity to introduce Namco to the screen in 1999 (at 13:40):
There was only a select few people that had ever seen it. Nobody had ever done a perfect game. It was so unbelievable to me, that when I did the perfect score, and then I sent all the evidence, and I sent it to Namco, Namco USA who sent it to Namco Japan, none of them had ever seen it before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7eKVQxYORo
Billy tells a similar story about being the person to tell the programmers about the split screen in the second segment of the Kurt and Corey Show (linked in today’s installment). He seems to be trying to say the Namco programmers had confirmed his story, in “interviews” which of course cannot be found (at 4:30):
I had read, where they had done interviews, and… to confirm the story that I’m going to tell you in a minute… They had no knowledge… of the split screen, they had no knowledge of the end of the game, and they had no knowledge of what a perfect score was until they met Billy Mitchell.
However, one could argue the “story that I’m going to tell you in a minute” he is referring to is his general story of his meeting in the Namco boardroom in Japan, the one where Billy brags about understanding the game better than the programmers, and not specifically this bit about the split screen. (And ooooh boy, we will be getting to that boardroom story. But that will be another day.)
[S20] There isn’t a huge amount of information in English on the original All About Namco publication, but multiple sources report the first edition being printed in 1985 and including Pac-Man among the featured games.
https://twitter.com/dailypacman/status/1285404522697850880
The screenshot used in today’s installment is the clearer one seen on page 29 of the reprint edition from 1996, as uploaded to Internet Archive. That 1996 reprint edition includes volumes 1 and 2, but the Pac-Man page is from the original edition from 1985. Searching the printed Japanese title brings up many sources in Japanese, including this helpful page, which gives us a photo of the 1985 cover and of the original 1985 page with the split screen (which is featured on the left page instead of the right):
https://plaza.rakuten.co.jp/sannriku/diary/201701310000/
[S21] Here are links for those images:
https://twitter.com/merapitech/status/1082897998730817536
https://www.homearcadesystems.com/sending_review/
https://twitter.com/didyouknowgamin/status/1278410545524346881
[S22] You can find archived issues of Joystik magazine here:
https://archive.org/details/joystik_magazine
https://www.retromags.com/publications/united-states/joystik/
From the collage, the top left portion with Ben Gold and Todd Walker is from the December ’83 issue on page 31, the top right portion with Scott Bohnenkamp is from the November ’82 issue on page 13, the bottom left portion with Mike Robinson is from September ’83 on page 5, the bottom middle portion with Robert Springer is from November ’83 on page 6, and the bottom right portion with Todd Rogers is from the December ’82 issue on page 39. (Those are the printed page numbers, not the pdf page numbers.) Note also in various issues there are multi-page strategy guides by Eric Ginner for games like Ms. Pac-Man, Centipede, and Tempest.
Also note that Todd’s comments about hoarding extra lives to assist with later levels is in reference to the home version of Pac-Man on Atari 2600. (Yes, that one.) Original arcade Pac-Man only grants at most one extra life throughout a single playthrough.
[S23] Note that Billy’s comments to Retro Gaming Radio predate the release of the film Chasing Ghosts, but who knows how much earlier Billy had heard his friend Steve Sanders tell that story (which, if Steve’s story is to be believed, dates back to the ’80s).
[S24] The June 1984 issue of Computer Games included a feature on the Bozeman Think Tank, and in particular their work in conquering the added unpredictability of Ms. Pac-Man. In short, the team were given the mistaken impression that someone else had conquered Ms. Pac’s impossible fourth maze, which inspired them to solve it themselves:
[S25] While I would prefer to share the relevant clip from Billy’s stream, he has recently resumed issuing copyright strikes for uploading such segments from his streams. Billy Mitchell hates evidence. A reupload was not available in time for our publication schedule.
[S26] Note that many of these patterns are platform-specific. Any tweak to game speed, or ghost AI, or “Cruise Elroy” timing, or any number of things can make the whole pattern fall apart. One very early Twin Galaxies forumgoer lamented that their known patterns did not work on their Namco compilation for Playstation:
https://web.archive.org/web/19991111225949/http://www.twingalaxies.com:80/wwwboard/messages/75.html
[S27] Some of these 1982 Pac-Man guides can be found here:
https://www.digitpress.com/library/books/book_mastering_pac-man.pdf
https://www.digitpress.com/library/books/book_how_to_win_at_pac-man.pdf
http://www.digitpress.com/library/books/book_break_a_million_at_pac-man.pdf
https://www.mocagh.org/vgstrategy/pacmanultimatekey.pdf
We were not able to find an online copy of the Craig Kubey book, however his later book The Winners’ Book of Video Games included a chapter lifted from his Pac-Man book (as noted on the legal page up front):
https://www.digitpress.com/library/books/book_winners_book_of_video_games.pdf
Given Billy’s story of giving tips to the people who wrote the books, I would point out the lengthy list of named acknowledgments in that last link, and the lack of Billy’s name on that list, however as we’ve established, Billy did not begin playing Pac-Man competitively until after this book was published.
[S28] A recent Twin Galaxies stream included an old tape featuring perfect Pac-Man patterns of Billy’s friend Chris Ayra, with all the one-second boards removed from the recording. Those were his big secret he wished to keep.
Today, these perfect patterns can all be found on the website of Canadian Pac-Man champion Neil Chapman:
Another set of Pac-Man patterns is available in Tim Balderramos’ book The Perfect Game: Confessions of a Pac-Man Junkie. Google will also bring up a few more.
One might ask, as I initially did, why one can’t simply use a “one second” pattern on every board, even the ones where you have longer to eat the ghosts. But the duration of “blue time” is only one factor at play in devising a pattern for a given board. Other factors include sprite speed, the timing of the ghost reversals, and the timing at which Blinky (the red ghost) turns into “Cruise Elroy” (where he goes faster and stays on Pac-Man as a target). Some patterns do work on multiple boards, while other patterns can share beginning sequences before being forced to diverge later.
[S29] These ghost-pass-through patterns can make for a nice parlor trick, for anyone interested in passing off the memorization of a single pattern as elite gaming skill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jDA5dq7GuI
[S30] The Pac-Man sequels weren’t the only attempt to push out the Pac-Man pattern players. In 1982, a Bally-Midway flyer advertised an official Pac-Man conversion kit, aimed at increasing the original game’s difficulty, promising “an exciting New challenge for players… and more earnings for operators”:
https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=flyer&db=videodb&id=769&image=1
[S31] This bit about Ms. Pac-Man being designed to foil pattern-players was also expressed in the October ’83 issue of Joystik magazine, which had the following remark on page 38:
To prevent players from using patterns, two of the monsters in Ms. Pac-Man – the red and pink monsters – follow random paths when they first come out. The blue and orange monsters, however, always follow the same path up until the first reverse. Because of this, patterns will work for either of those monsters, although the red or pink monster may randomly move in your way.
https://archive.org/details/joystik_magazine-1983-10/page/n37/mode/2up
This wasn’t the only new bit of randomization added to Pac-Man’s sequel. Like in the original, you collect a series of fruits, which become more valuable as you go along, maxing out with the 5,000 point bananas. But rather than continuing indefinitely with the top fruit as the original does, on Ms. Pac-Man, following the banana board, the fruits are chosen at random, resulting in wide swings of available points.
We’ll get into Rick Fothergill’s story in our next installment, but he recalled Randy Tufts not being a big fan of Ms. Pac-Man for this reason, at least at first (at 1:50):
Randy’s opinion of Ms. Pac-Man is interesting. At first, he said he hated the fact that there was a random fruit. He said the random ghosts is a good challenge. But he hated the random fruit. You know, he could have perfection and some other idiot could get a whole bunch of bananas and beat him. He didn’t like that. But eventually, he got coaxed in, I guess, figuring… it’s going to all basically… you’re within a certain range by the end of the game and… If you can get to the end of the game, it’s amazing.
[S32] Here’s an extended clip from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram article from March 13, 1982. This clip includes a reference to there being 100,000 Pac-Man cabinets, which is a number we’ll discuss in a later installment:
[S33] Alternatively, at the beginning of this video on Pac-Man, Billy seems to be saying he started playing it in 1981:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYAsbljHCGk
However, without the lead-up to that statement, it’s difficult to establish that he’s referring to Pac-Man specifically and not video games in general.
[S34] Billy’s appearance with the Kurt and Corey Show had been uploaded to YouTube in five installments, which were later set to unlisted. However, during the timeframe in which we were working on this project, YouTube announced that all unlisted videos from before 2017 would be set to private. Each of these videos is no longer publicly accessible, though we have uploaded part 2 (the one relevant to this project) for reference purposes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdd3uS-7NOE
https://www.twingalaxies.com/ersatzcats/wall/9534/upcoming-change-to-unlisted-youtube-videos
[S35] The NGenres interview seems to be poorly transcribed at times, such as misspelling Darren Olsen’s name. However, the account given of Billy meeting Darren and subsequently getting into Pac-Man competition is sufficiently detailed. Billy reiterated this basic story in his 2006 profile in Oxford American:
https://main.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/622-the-perfect-man
[S36] This Kevin Allen piece in the Fort Lauderdale News was later adapted into an Associated Press piece, which was picked up in the Fort Myers News-Press days later:
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/222226785/
[S37] Note: There are two URLs linking to the Oxford American profile, both of which print the date as July 1, 2015. However, one URL makes clear this interview was published Spring 2006. Note the lack of references to King of Kong, which had not yet been released in 2006:
https://main.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/622-the-perfect-man
https://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-53-spring-2006/the-perfect-man
[S38] In Exhibit A, at about 54:30, Billy tells the same story of leaving his machine running on the split screen for a month, with Pac-Man in motion passing over the visible dots over and over and never eating them. During this failed perfect score attempt, Billy tells the story again at 5:59:40, specifying that the machine was in his bedroom:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrwhcConqs
In Exhibit E, Billy discusses a park spot on the split screen, where Pac-Man stays parked near the letters “B” and “C”. (We’ll discuss that spot more later on.) When asked by the hosts how long Pac-Man can stay there, Billy says (at 8:30):
Oh, you can sit there indefinitely. I mean, I’ve left the game on for more than a month sittin’ there.
And then, in the Minnesota Lottery presentation discussed at the end of “Dot One”, Billy demonstrates a park spot on a normal board (or at least attempts to). He then tells the audience, at 9:40:
The question is, “Billy, how long can you leave it there?” I’ve left it there for more than one month.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbacFcdqw5k
Again, Billy’s not just saying “I left my machine running for a month one time”. These are three distinct circumstances relating to different questions (whether these dots can be eaten, whether this or that hiding spot is indefinite), which Billy is claiming he demonstrated by running his machine continuously for a month each time.
[S39] To be clear, despite Billy’s odd characterization, we did not find any magazine specifically identifying all nine hidden dots, although as noted in today’s installment there was discussion of the existence of dots among the computer nonsense on the right half of the split screen.
[S40] The same paragraph appears in the rules for the 1986 Video Game Masters Tournament. However, by that time Twin Galaxies was no longer affiliated with that tournament series:
[S41] As for Billy’s 3,312,100 score in 1986, there’s one other odd thing about it: It’s not really clear who he ever submitted that score to. We’ll get into more details in our next installment, but in 1986, Billy was now the owner of the re-opened Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa. And TG was no longer tracking scores by that point, anyway.
Page 122 of the July 1988 issue of Zzap!64 magazine gives us a look at the Amusement Players Association high score list, which had Tim Balderramos as the top scorer on Pac-Man with 3,197,360.
https://archive.org/details/zzapp_64_issue_039_600dpi/page/n121/mode/2up
[S42] So here’s the math on that Ayra score of 3,324,730.
First, if you play at a perfect pace, you arrive at the split screen with a score of 3,326,600.
Now, let’s subtract the 5,000 point key Ayra said he missed. That takes us down to 3,321,600.
He also said he screwed up an energizer. It doesn’t matter how many ghosts he missed, but let’s say he missed all four, for a lost 3,000 points. Now we’re down to 3,318,600.
That means he had to score 6,130 points on the split screen. Right away, the key is worth 5,000, leaving 1,130 unaccounted for.
There are also two power pellets, for 50 each. That’s 1,030 still left unaccounted for.
Each small dot is 10 points. So that means he ate 103 of those dots. But that’s the problem. The normal side of the split screen has 112 dots. Therefore, he had to have left nine regular dots on the table.
No amount of shifting points around will change that. Remember, you are required to collect every power pellet and every dot on every board to advance, and those are the only items that increment your score by less than 100. You could trade out a split screen power pellet for five regular dots, but that would just mean Ayra missed a power pellet and four dots. You could say (per his text message to David Race) that Ayra got two ghosts on his botched board for 600 points, but that means sixty fewer dots collected on the final screen. If Ayra collected any split screen hidden dots, that’s just that many regular dots he didn’t get.
Now, if Ayra misremembered, if he had in fact not missed a key, and only missed one ghost, he would’ve been exactly 1,600 points behind perfect score pace. Perfect pace at the end of board 255 is 3,326,600, which is 1,870 points higher than Ayra’s score of 3,324,730. Thus, if he missed that one ghost, and died on board 255 with only 27 dots left on the board, he would have ended with that funny score without ever reaching the split screen. But of course, playing so far and then randomly dying right before the split screen would be odd in itself.
The last thing to point out about Ayra’s score is that it gives no indication that Ayra knew about or collected any of the hidden dots during this playthrough (although his interactions with Bastable show he did know about those dots around this time).
Billy’s 3,312,100 score from the TG book is similarly odd, ending in “00”, but since his score is lower, there’s more room to possibly explain away the discrepancy. Normally, on a perfect pace, the player will start board 255 with a score of 3,314,000. But let’s say, way back on a blue time key board, he screwed up the energizer, lost three of those ghosts (worth 400, 800, and 1600) and missed the key (worth 5,000). That brings his score down to 3,306,200 at the start of board 255. He starts the board by eating 70 little dots, putting his score up to 3,306,900, and making the first key appear. After eating the key for 5,000, and putting his score up to 3,311,900, he eats 20 more dots, for 200 points, before he dies at 3,312,100. That’s just a hypothetical, although again, it would be odd to get so far and just randomly die right before the split screen, where you could have at least shown your ability to get every dot.
[S43] David Race’s recollections about Chris Ayra’s claims of doing a perfect score in the ’80s are here, in the Donkey Kong dispute post-verdict thread:
[S44] The rest of Chris’ signed statement, testifying to his involvement in Billy’s 1999 stunt, similarly dances around the issue of whether he believed the 1999 score to be the first perfect score on Pac-Man or not. Instead, Ayra states that Billy “began an all out push to achieve the perfect score”, referring to it as a “Historic spectacle display of gameplay” (his capitalization). Interestingly, Billy did not include Chris’ testimony in his actual lawsuit filings to court, even though he did include other Pac-Man related statements from Funspot staff Thomas Fisher, Ken Sweet, and Randy Lawton.
[S45] One other interesting note about Bill Bastable’s perfect score letter from Bally-Midway is that it mentions “one other person accomplishing this feat”. It’s unknown who exactly this other player is, though some historians have attempted to find them.
One name that has come up is Jose Gonzales:
http://www.classicarcadegaming.com/forums/index.php/topic,7333.msg79444.html#msg79444
David Race discusses the search for this mystery player at 30:30 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bZbs7Ma9QE
In addition to the letter, Bill Bastable also got a Pac-Man t-shirt, which you can see in Perfect Fraudman at about 48:10:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSFtDVuGxL8
[S46] The 2017 controversy over the Bill Bastable letter started when Cat DeSpira posted the letter to Facebook (in a now locked post):
https://www.facebook.com/CatherineDeSpira/posts/697066400491906
The post in its original context can be seen in this video from Triforce, at the 1:00 mark:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Wd4rR2K8k
This inspired the following video by a YouTuber named Tipster, originally titled “Does a new leak prove Billy Mitchell is a fraud!?!?”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AULXi1SEl6U
Triforce ended up publishing two other videos as part of this damage control campaign:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd9ikzfbBDM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Wd4rR2K8k
[S47] When asked about this Bally-Midway letter, Billy was insistent that it was a forgery manufactured by the Tooth Fairy or someone. However, subsequent discussions between Triforce and David Race (in the above linked video) hashed out the facts that Bastable’s 1982 score would have been without the hidden dots, and that his 1988 perfect score would be disqualified competitively. Amazingly, all this talk of manufactured evidence was now gone. Since there was no longer any need to discredit the Bally-Midway letter, it was allowed to be real after all. (Or at least Triforce finally acknowledged the letter as real. Billy has yet to weigh in on it himself following his aforementioned remarks.)
[S48] If you’re bored, you can peruse eBay for old Pac-Man memorabilia. If it was from North America, you’ll find “Midway” on there somewhere.
In 1982, the company behind CornNuts attempted to sue Bally-Midway, and various licensing partners (including Fleer and Gold Bond Ice Cream), over the belief that the Pac-Man image was an infringement of their logo:
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/03/11/Pacman-snack-battle-settled-out-of-court/2491416206800/
Again, no mention in the UPI piece of involvement by Namco.
[S49] That particular image, originating from the Kansas City area TV Guide from October 30, 1982, was taken from an eBay listing located here:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/114807561153
A similar ad, from a different television market, can be seen on the Halloween Specials Wiki, which you now know is a thing:
https://halloweenspecials.fandom.com/wiki/Pac-Man_Halloween_Special?file=4489089268_9cd6ddd69e_z.jpg
[S50] The Daily Register article (which discussed the sixth perfect score by Bill Bastable) has an interesting paragraph:
The highest previously recorded score is about 3,330,000, the player said.
Not only does it list the highest known score being below a perfect score, it even attributes that factoid to the player, Bill Bastable!
So what’s going on? Was Bastable lying about getting a perfect score in 1982?
Well, no. Most likely, this is a case of the reporter inadvertently changing the meaning of Bastable’s words. The article goes on to describe how Bastable’s friend took a photo of the final score as proof to send to Electronic Games Magazine, who were the ones that recognized the 3.33 million score. Thus, Bastable wasn’t saying “Nobody has scored more than 3.33 million on this game”, he was saying “The top score in EGM is 3.33 million, and that’s the score I’m going to beat.”
[S51] This Asbury Park Press piece suffers from a number of issues, including attributing the author’s third party reporting of Bastable as quotes from Bastable himself. It also cites Bastable as claiming Ms. Pac-Man’s kill screen is on the 256th board, which as Bastable would obviously know is incorrect. While it’s possible Bastable misspoke, tossing out the correct number for original Pac-Man’s kill screen while speaking of its sequel, it’s also possible this was another error on the part of the author.
[S52] At 24:40 in the interview with David Race, Bastable clarifies that the only one of these six perfect scores in which he went for the extra dots was on November 5, 1982:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bZbs7Ma9QE
In a since deleted interview with the Houslander and Ferretti Hour, Bastable specified that this top score was 3,332,850, collecting three of the extra dots on his last life, after what he considered to be the perfect score had been completed. You can hear him list his early perfect scores on Pac-Man at 8:00 in this re-upload here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0WkJqyNeRI
The whole episode of Houslander and Ferretti Hour was deleted after Rudy Ferretti’s murder-suicide in 2020. Little evidence of the existence of this interview remains, aside from a TG wall post by Rudy:
While Bastable declined to do a recorded interview for this project, in conversation he confirmed that his highest Pac-Man score in the early ’80s was this score of 3,332,850, on November 5, 1982. On November 4, he attempted a perfect score, but missed one key, so he returned on November 5 and played again, this time without the mistake.
It seems Bill Bastable was not the only Pac-Man master of the early ’80s to go for hidden dots once the rest of the game had been dominated. In this 2017 interview with David Race (at about 1:10), Rick Fothergill relayed that the great Randy Tufts had a perfect score to the split screen in February 1983, on which Randy continued to eat extra dots to bump the score up to 3,332,890:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KhIq8akUrQ
[S53] Bastable’s Ms. Pac-Man score of 881,360 was reported in the Asbury Park Press, on January 20, 1985:
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/14602810/jan-20-1985-asbury-park-press/
And here was the record on Ms. Pac-Man, as seen in TG’s first printed record book in 1998:
[S54] Jamey Pittman’s Pac-Man Dossier has a section explaining the board differences between standard Pac-Man and the jumper revision, in Table A.2:
https://pacman.holenet.info/#DiffSpecs
In short, the fruits still go in order (cherry, then strawberry, then peaches), but the sprite speeds of those boards are equivalent to later boards. The modified cherry board plays like the original strawberry board, then the modified strawberry board plays like the original second peach board, etc. Five original boards are eliminated entirely, with the player reaching the typical “ninth key” stretch by the fourth key. Of the skipped boards, three had “blue time”, and two did not. Each board’s blue time nets the player 12,000 points (four sessions of 3,000 points each), so these skipped boards deduct 36,000 from the original maximum of 3,333,360, leaving the player with a maximum possible score of 3,297,360.
[S55] Later Pac-Man champion Rick Fothergill was skeptical upon hearing Bastable’s claim. But the game’s experts always know what to look for (as quoted from Perfect Fraudman, at about 2:11:33):
Okay, so he has a photograph. And, like all the information was correct, when I looked at it. And one of the things… I was very skeptical, and I told Dwayne here, like I said “I want you to look at the high score on the photograph.” And then you told me “999,910.” And I said “Okay, that checks out.” If that had been, like less, like 999,500 or something, I would’ve said “Bullshit.” Right away. Because there’s like a mathematic thing that happens, and if you’re in a perfect score run, like your high score has to end up being at least 999,700, and like depending on the pattern you’re using it actually could be 999,990, which it was in my game.
Rick went on to describe what it would’ve taken to fake the photograph. First, it would be possible to register a high score just shy of one million (if one knew enough about a perfect score to anticipate that), and then one could use rack advance to skip two or three million points, and then eat the visible dots on the right side of the split screen (as they are eaten in Bastable’s photo) to produce exactly that photograph. And thus one could have faked evidence for a perfect score of Pac-Man, even in the ’80s. However, as goes the classic argument to torpedo many wild conspiracy theories, Fothergill adds “I think it would be easier just to do it.”
[S56] Speaking of perfect scores in the ’80s, we found this odd bit of reporting by the BBC, tucked in a 2008 profile of British Pac-Man player Jon Stoodley:
In 1986, another American, Chris Ayra, did the impossible, beating Jon’s score with the first ever 100% perfect Pac-Man game.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_7516000/7516627.stm
We’re guessing this is just an error on the BBC’s part.
[S57] Note how the description of Bastable’s perfect score is consistent with the view that the hidden split screen dots are superfluous, referring to it as “a Perfect Game, plus 540 points obtained on the blown-up half of board 257”. (Obviously, this person was under the impression it was 256 normal boards followed by the split screen, rather than the split screen being board 256.) And since the post was from 1998, we can rule out the remark being some kind of retroactive redefinition in relation to Billy’s claimed “first perfect score”, which would not happen until the following year (if it happened at all).
Word of Bill Bastable’s prowess had apparently gotten around on the early Internet. One Usenet user sought his help in defining the Pac-Man ghost algorithms for use in a Pac-Man clone:
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.video.arcade/c/e0meOGAyl7c/m/3t2RsA9Z0e0J
[S58] Heck, even Billy’s King of Kong friend Steve Sanders claims to have gotten nearly three million on Pac-Man in October of 1981 (or at least, so he says), at 9:30 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfb_SBUh08o
[S59] While it is typically Billy’s custom to not mention his competitors by name – he will often refer to his 1999 rival as “the Canadian”, or his co-star from King of Kong as “the other guy” – he does occasionally grant exceptions, and refer to Rick Fothergill or Steve Wiebe by name. So perhaps it’s worth noting that this is a much rarer occurrence with respect to either Bill Bastable or Randy Tufts. Here Billy is, in Exhibit A, starting at about 13:20:
Of the people that have played, the friends that we… the circle we share, that have gotten perfect scores, not one of those people – if this is egotistical, it is – not one of those people could have done it without help or knowledge that I gave, except Rick. He could have done it if he never met me. I always say there’s these people in the perfect Pac-Man world, there’s say half a dozen of us, and there’s two of us up here.
In the quoted Triforce video, in an appearance dedicated to addressing Bastable’s letter from 1982, Billy concedes Bastable was “a great player”, as if through gritted teeth, while also effectively calling Bastable a liar and accusing him of participating in a high score fraud. But we did not find any examples of Billy mentioning Bastable’s name in a more neutral setting, or of Billy listing all-time great Pac-Man players and including either Bastable or Tufts (alongside players Billy will name like Fothergill, Ayra, and occasionally Abdner Ashman). Perhaps Bastable’s and Tufts’ documented “perfect scores” from the ’80s have something to do with that?
[S60] Some Billy defenders will inevitably try to invoke a double-standard when we accept score claims of Randy Tufts and Bill Bastable in the ’80s with only photographic evidence, lacking the sort of video proof we would require for gaming achievements today, while casting Billy’s claims into doubt under lack of such proof. But of course, Tufts and Bastable aren’t proven serial liars. Shockingly, lying over and over about other scores and falsifying evidence puts all your claims into doubt, even the ones you may have done legitimately. If other Pac-Man players had lied the way Billy does, I would not be inclined to believe them, either.