In December 2020, I got a chance to catch up with “rayfinkel”, aka Justin Elliott. In the summer of 2018, rayfinkel began grinding original Donkey Kong, breaking into the Donkey Kong Forum high score list with a score of 246,900 (193rd place), which became 888,000 by the end of the year. By the end of …
Previously, in my research into the Billy Mitchell case, I had reached out to Steve Kleisath, one-time member of Billy’s defense team. Steve assisted Billy and Carlos Pineiro in their attempts to refute the allegations in the score dispute. Steve was the one to relay Carlos’ technical conclusion that Billy’s game play could not have …
Holy smokes! Where do I begin? Late October, two major rulings came down in the ongoing Billy Mitchell versus Twin Galaxies lawsuit over his fraudulent Donkey Kong scores. The judge has allowed the lawsuit to proceed past the anti-SLAPP stage, citing a “prima facie” case from Mitchell. (“Prima facie” is legalese for “on the face …
Howdy! So it’s been a frustrating week so far, covering this Billy Mitchell case. Not because of the court rulings; those have actually been GREAT, for the most part (as I’ll explain). What’s been frustrating has been the abundance of misinformation, and in some cases (as often happens in matters pertaining to Billy) outright misrepresentation. …
Oh boy, have we got some fun stuff for you all today! Before we get to the real fireworks, very quickly I want to give a quick update to the lawsuit between Billy “Always Has a Plan” Mitchell and video gaming scorekeeper Twin Galaxies, which is still in progress. TG has publicly provided some but …
For many years, Guinness World Records exclusively partnered with Twin Galaxies as its authority on video gaming achievements. For all its flaws, at one time TG was the sole major scorekeeping organization. In 2017, Guinness broadened their scorekeeping affiliations, adding material from speedrunning hub Speedrun.com to their annual “Gamer’s Edition” of the Guinness World Records book. More …
(When disgraced video game cheater Billy Mitchell issued his legal threats to Twin Galaxies and to Guinness in September 2019, along with his flop of an evidence packet which he claimed would exonerate him, I wrote the following series of observations on how the Robert Mruczek MTV interview related to this new “evidence”. Originally posted …
(In July 2019, while researching other matters, I incidentally stumbled upon the fact that Phantasy Star speedrun cheater Kevin Durden had quietly gone back and filed DMCA notices in attempt to strike the evidence against him. This included a DMCA notice against a speedrun discussion show which, among other segments featuring other players, brought Kevin …
(When I began researching the Billy Mitchell score dispute, I did so with the idea I might be interested in writing about it one day. Thus, I wished to not make myself part of the story. When I first posted this discovery in February 2019, I actually believed the story was wrapping up, lol. I …
(As with my look at Magic: The Gathering scheduling the previous year, I just about jumped out of my chair when I realized I’d seen something important in the finer details of MTG set releases. What especially tickled me was that I’d used exclusively mechanical circumstances to make a story-relevant observation, even though admittedly I …