Over $686,000 in legal fees to defend high scores on 1980s arcade games. This episode traces the life of William James Mitchell Jr., known as Billy Mitchell, from a Massachusetts-born pinball kid who wanted the arcade crowd’s attention to the Twin Galaxies Player of the Year, the first perfect Pac-Man score of 3,333,360 points in 1999, and a decade of litigation over whether his Donkey Kong tapes were recorded on original hardware.

We explain the 8-bit math behind the Donkey Kong level 22 kill screen and the Pac-Man level 256 split screen, the 1982 Life Magazine showdown with Steve Sanders, the rivalry with Steve Wiebe captured in The King of Kong, and the 2017 to 2018 frame-by-frame analysis alleging MAME emulator artifacts and a modified joystick. Then we follow the fallout: Twin Galaxies and Guinness stripping his records in 2018, Guinness restoring them in 2020, the January 2024 settlement moving his scores to a historical database, the defamation suits against Apollo Legend and Carl Jobst, and the Australian verdict that cost far more than it recovered.

• Why an 8-bit processor cannot count past 255 and what that means for a bonus timer
• The golf-course analogy Mitchell used for live witnesses, and the VHS score that contradicted it
• How girder rendering differences became the key evidence in the emulator allegations
• Why a USC professor testified that degraded VHS tape cannot reliably prove cheating
• How a $350,000 defamation award turned into a net loss of over half a million dollars