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Regardless of how breaks were handled in future marathon attempts (such as the high profile Nibbler attempts by Tim McVey seen in the film Man vs Snake), and regardless of any logic behind treating games with temporary hiding spots differently than games with permanent spots, it’s hard to deny that these rules were changed right around the time Billy made his unannounced trip to Funspot.

It surely can’t be a coincidence that multiple arcade competitors were all on the same page that these rules applied to TG-sanctioned high score attempts, marathon or not. It seems clear this policy was written with the 1999 Pac-Man scores in mind, as it specifically cites “Pac-Man type” games, acknowledging the use of these temporary respites: This policy made a clear distinction between the policies for home console games (most of which use a pause function) and arcade games, expressly allowing at-will breaks on many arcade games. Subsequent to that 2002 conversation, a new official marathoning policy for Twin Galaxies was posted by Robert Mruczek in 2003. It would surely be the standard if one wished to set the record for “Most consecutive hours playing Galaga”, but that’s different from “Highest marathon score on Galaga”, just as much as a high score record is different from a speedrun record. One should keep in mind, the reason this was a Guinness rule was because they adjudicated things that were measured by time spent and not by score, such as “Most consecutive hours balancing a book on your head”. Recall how Pac-Man has safe spots which, when entered properly, allow the player to effectively put the game on hold, as the ghosts circle in a predictable pattern due to poor AI.Īs we discussed back in “Dot One”, Billy typically speaks of these hiding spots as if they’re temporary : One of the most discussed controversies around Billy’s score is his allegedly exorbitant number of breaks. This basically means, “Even if we assume that Billy played a complete game on an actual Pac-Man cabinet and hit a score of 3,333,360, his game might still not be official.” There are many reasons why a given historical game performance might not be considered “official”, such as not being fully recorded on video in an era when that was an expectation, or (depending on the game) an inability to verify the settings used. The first category of things to discuss are potential grounds for disqualification. I am here to tell you the truth, which you may like or not. Remember that I am not here to tell you what you want to hear. Today, we’ll discuss the evidence and arguments we and others have accumulated both for and against Billy’s claimed Pac-Man score of 3,333,360 on July 3, 1999.

The supplemental material for “Dot Nine” can be found here: The first post in this series can be found here: This post is part of a series, examining various myths and stories around Billy Mitchell’s claimed performance of Pac-Man in 1999 and his subsequent trip to the Tokyo Game Show.