Quick Facts

Billy Mitchell is a renowned American video game player. Gaining popularity in the 1980s, Billy Mitchell was awarded the title of “Video Game Players of the Year” by Twin Galaxies in 1983.

Billy Mitchell became the first person to claim a perfect score of 3,333,360 points on Pac-Man in 1999. A holder of several records on different classic games, Billy Mitchell is also a restaurateur whose family owns the Rickey’s restaurants chain located in Hollywood, Florida, and Pembroke Pines, Florida.

How much is the Net worth of Billy Mitchell?

Billy Mitchell is expected to have a net worth of USD 1 million as of 2023. Although the renowned video game player has amassed sizable revenues from his career in video games, the majority of his wealth comes from his stakes in the Rickey’s restaurant chain.

Early Life and Childhood: Where was Billy Mitchell born?

July 16, 1965 saw the birth of Billy Mitchell. He was born in the US city of Holyoke, Massachusetts. Billy Mitchell will be 57 years old in 2023. Billy Mitchell was raised in South Florida but was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The well-known Rickey’s eateries in Hollywood and Pembroke Pines, Florida, are owned by his family.

Billy started playing pinball when he was in elementary school. Billy began playing video games as a teenager after developing a passion for pinball. Although he was first uninterested in video games, he started playing video games since he “needed that attention”. His interest in video games increased as a result of his classmate’s friendly competition.

With Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, Billy and his classmate would frequently attempt to outperform one another. Mitchell eventually started to wonder if there was a world record high score on Donkey Kong. Therefore, he contacted Walter Day at Twin Galaxies, who informed him that just one arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, kept track of such data. He learned that Steve Sanders had 1.4 million records.

Billy Mitchell challenged Sanders to a game of Donkey Kong when they met in Ottumwa, Iowa, in November 1982 for a Life-sponsored picture shoot. He defeated Sanders, posting a top score of 874,300, and demonstrated to Sanders that the game included a “death screen” that was impossible to get through after level 22.

Later, Sanders admitted that he had exaggerated his prior Donkey Kong achievements. Billy Mitchell then received the record from Twin Galaxies. For more than 18 years, he kept it. Robert Childs and Billy Mitchell grew close. Childs operated a company that bought and set up arcade cabinets in various locations across the nation.

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Billy Mitchell, a student at Chaminade-Madonna College Preparatory School, and a few other players were requested by Walter Day in 1983 to take part in the “Electronic Circus” and a picture shoot. During the 40-city “Electronic Circus” tour, players showcased their arcade gaming prowess at each venue.

Mitchell and the other players spent their time camping out at Twin Galaxies and vying for the highest scores on various video games even if the plan was unsuccessful. Walter Day founded the US National Video Game Team in the summer of 1983. The US National Video Game Team was established to make a pit stop at a significant US city and participate in numerous games.

It was hailed as a smaller version of the Electronic Circus. William Mitchell accompanied Day on a number of excursions and was tasked with verifying high scores that players had reported. Billy Mitchell, the player of the year in 1984, was given the designation Twin Galaxies.

Unfortunately, Twin Galaxies had to close its storefront a year earlier as a result of the 1983 video game crash. It nevertheless maintained score tracking. After setting a record for BurgerTime in 1985, Mitchell took a ten-year hiatus from video games. He made the decision to concentrate on his family’s restaurant company instead.

Pac-Man Challenge

Pac-Man is a well-known maze action video game that was released in 1980. The popular video game’s users discovered that it featured a specific kind of kill screen. As you got to level 256, half the screen would be taken up by illogical glyphs, making it difficult to finish the level and go on to the next one.

A player who claimed to have collected more than 6 million points in the game in 1982 was eight years old. President Ronald Reagan even complimented the athlete in a letter when this assertion received widespread media attention.

The greatest score on Pac-Man, however, was 3,333,360, which could only be obtained after a flawless no-death run and by collecting all available points on the gibberish side of level 256’s split-screen, as Billy Mitchell and his buddy Chris Ayra discovered in 1983 after investigating the claims.

In 1999, there were rumors that certain Canadian players were on the verge of breaking the record. Mitchell decided to pick up video games again in an effort to defeat this group as a result. On May 8, 1999, Rick Fothergill set the record, falling only 90 points short of a perfect score.

Billy Mitchell was able to get the highest score possible on July 3 of that year in an arcade in Laconia. He was named “Video Game Player of the Century” by Twin Galaxies for accomplishing this impossibly difficult task. The same year, Mitchell also went to Japan for the Tokyo Game Show.

Gaming Return

Billy Mitchell set a new personal record for Donkey Kong in 2004 at the Midwest Gaming Classic with a score of 933,900. Mitchell, who David Ramsey II called “perhaps the best arcade video game player of all time,” took a break from gaming.

He was invited to events where Steve Wiebe was trying to break the world record in Donkey Kong in 2004 and 2005. Mitchell, however, declined to attend Wiebe’s activities, claiming that he needed to retrain and prepare for the competition as a result of his sabbatical from video games.

On an arcade machine at his house, Wiebe managed to collect more than a million points. Twin Galaxies acknowledged this achievement and documented it on camera. Later on, it was discovered that Wiebe’s device had utilized an unlicensed “Double Donkey Board” that had circuitry for both Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.

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Billy Mitchell turned in his footage to Twin Galaxies just hours after Weibe received a high score at a New Hampshire Funspot in front of numerous witnesses. He finally broke Wiebe’s score and set a new official world record by recording a new high score of 1,047,200.

As Mitchell’s high score was captured on tape, it was finally ruled that it was invalid, and Wiebe was awarded the record once more. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters from 2007 made this entire narrative its main subject. Mitchell got a lot of resentment and hatred from fans as a result of his bad portrayal in the movie.

He made cameos in a number of other documentaries, including Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Story of Nibbler, The King of Arcades, and Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade. Mitchell set a Donkey Kong world record on July 26, 2007, while playing at the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers’ annual convention, scoring 1,050,200.

Hank Chien broke the record on February 26, 2010, but Mitchell recaptured it a few months later with a score of 1,062,800. Mitchell finished ninth in the Microsoft Xbox 360 Pac-Man World Championships on June 4, 2007. He created history by being the first video game player to appear on a Topps Allen & Ginter trading card a year later.

Controversies

In August 2017, Jeremy Young, a moderator of the Donkey Kong Forums, voiced his skepticism regarding the scores following Childs’ online posting of a video showing Mitchell’s High score. Young claimed that Mitchell played both versions of Donkey Kong that day and set records for each.

Childs switched out the circuit board between runs, although he used the same cabinet to establish the records. Young raised questions about the board swap, and Mitchell and Childs responded by clarifying that while some of the board-switching was staged, the recording of that particular segment was done long after the recordings had been put on reliable hardware.

Young conducted research and discovered that Mitchell used MAME rather than actual hardware to create his compositions for the Boomers video, King of Kong, and Mortgage Brokers. Mitchell’s data were taken down from the Donkey Kong Forums website as a result of the investigation.

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Young’s comments were supported by Wes Copeland, who noted that Mitchell’s run displayed a statistically improbable pace of scoring. Subsequently, it came to light that Todd Rogers, a former referee for Twin Galaxies who had been suspended for submitting phony results, was the validator for the Boomers and Mortgage Brokers scores.

Twin Galaxies began looking at Mitchell’s submitted scores on April 12, 2018. They learned that Mitchell had produced the video of his two top scores using an emulator. Twin Galaxies consequently deleted all of Mitchell’s accomplishments from their archives. The famed gamer was also barred from submitting any more scores in the future.

Mitchell’s status as the player with the greatest Donkey Kong score has been removed as a result of this incident, according to a statement from Guinness World Records. Mitchell’s name was also dropped off the list of Pac-highest Man’s scorers and the owner of the game’s first perfect game.

Mitchell therefore threatened legal action against both Twin Galaxies and Guinness. Mitchell brought legal actions against Jeremy Young and Twin Galaxies in 2019. On the other hand, Twin Galaxies asserted in a counterclaim that Mitchell and Walter Day had deceived the company’s current owners. A U.S. appeals court let Mitchell’s lawsuit against Twin Galaxies to proceed in October 2021.

The Donkey Kong and Pac-Man records of Billy Mitchell were reinstated by Guinness World Records in June 2020. Afterwards, Mitchell admitted that Guinness had not reinstated his records as a result of his legal threats against them but rather as a result of the company’s research.

Is Billy Mitchell married or not?

Billy Mitchell is a husband and father. He has three kids with his wife. In Florida’s Weston, they reside.

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