They accused Mitchell and others of faking the tape he sent to the New Hampshire gaming tournament using unofficial hardware.Īlthough Mitchell denies these accusations and had his high-score titles reinstated by the Guinness Book of World Records, Twin Galaxies still dethroned him. Wiebe and Mitchell had faded into the background until Twin Galaxies came out with an announcement in 2018. “I couldn't sustain what I was doing forever and so at some point I was thinking ‘It can't just be me and Billy that can do this,’” Wiebe says. But as time went on, new players threw their hats in the ring and beat those records. It showed that he had successfully scored the million record, and Twin Galaxies declared Mitchell as the Donkey Kong record holder.īoth Wiebe and Mitchell continued to fight for new high scores a few years later. “I didn't break the million live that I had done on tape, but I thought I was close enough that they could see my gameplay was valid and I could achieve a million.”Īlthough a record-breaking score of a million points was in his grasp, a tape from Mitchell, Wiebe’s rival, later arrived at the gaming tournament. He attended a tournament in New Hampshire where he hit the game’s kill screen after playing for two and a half hours. In 2005, Wiebe decided to go for the million point record once again, but this time in person. Nevertheless, Twin Galaxies pulled his million score record from the books and put the prized title back up for grabs. Wiebe was accused of playing with an unofficial circuit board, but he denies it gave him an advantage. And then you do it all over again.Īnd just as the game plays out, Wiebe’s victory was short-lived. “And then Donkey Kong whisks her away up the ladder again. “When you reach the top you save the girl momentarily,” Wiebe says. The video showed him hitting the first-ever score of one million points on the popular arcade game. Twin Galaxies, an organization that keeps track of world records for video games, received a VHS tape from Wiebe. So Wiebe decided to start vying for a million points again, and the race was on.īoth Wiebe and Mitchell trained for about five years perfecting their strategies until 2004. that's what competitive gaming has done for me.”Īll along, when Wiebe hit the kill screen in 1991, it meant he had beaten Mitchell’s long standing score without even realizing it. "It's actually carved a part of my personality that benefits me every day,” Mitchell, who had been playing for years, says in the documentary “King of Kong.” “I mean, a burning passion never to settle for what I have. Legendary arcade gamer and restauranter Billy Mitchell had set it in 1982. Then, Wiebe looked up the current world record for the game. It wasn’t a “bug,” as he originally thought, but a kill screen signifying he had reached the end of the game. “I think my score was in the 960,000s, so I just sold my machine.”Ī couple of years after he sold the arcade machine, Wiebe discovered the truth behind the mysterious screen at level 22. “At that point I was like, ‘OK, I guess I'm not going to be able to get a million,’” Wiebe says. To his knowledge, no one had achieved the record before. But he still could not figure out how to get past the level.Īt the time, Wiebe was attempting to reach a personal goal: to score a million points. So, he took the game home with him that summer. “I didn't know what was going on … does my machine have a bug?” “I just died within about seven or so seconds,” Wiebe says. But one day in 1991, the game stumped Wiebe when he hit level 22. The game leads players to dodge barrels and fireballs on the top of a tower in order to save Pauline, the damsel in distress, from the clutches of the great gorilla Donkey Kong. He bought one for himself, put the machine in his fraternity’s house and started beating his friend’s high-score records. He says it all started when he noticed that his fraternity brother had his own Donkey Kong machine. Wiebe first began to play the game while in college in the early ‘90s. Wiebe, Kong fanatics recognize him as a legend. Wiebe is a math teacher at Redmond High School in Washington. Steve Wiebe was the first Donkey Kong player to hit a million points. It also created a competitive scene, with gamers all vying for high scores and world records. The beloved arcade game Donkey Kong turns 40 years old this month.įirst released by Nintendo in July 1981 to Japanese audiences, it became a mainstream hit in the U.S., surging a golden age of arcades for a decade. Walker/Getty Images) This article is more than 1 year old. Steve Wiebe plays Donkey Kong after the screening of Picturehouse's "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" at the Museum of the Moving Image on Augin New York City.
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