Billy Mitchell

William James Mitchell Jr. (born July 16, 1965) is an American video game player.

Mitchell was born on July 16, 1965, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and he spent his childhood in South Florida.

In grade school, Mitchell became an avid pinball player.

He was initially uninterested in video games, but as they became more popular, according to Mitchell, "[e]veryone was standing around the Donkey Kong machine and I wanted that attention".

He began playing video games around age 16.

His interest was also spurred by a friendly rivalry with a classmate, the two trying to outscore each other on both Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.

Mitchell became curious whether Donkey Kong had a recorded world-record high score, and reached out to Walter Day at Twin Galaxies, at the time a single arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, that had started tracking such records.

Day told him of a record of 1.4 million claimed by Steve Sanders.

He achieved fame throughout the 1980s and 1990s through claiming numerous records on classic video games, including a perfect score on Pac-Man.

Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records recognized Mitchell as the holder of several records on classic games, and he has appeared in several documentaries on competitive gaming and retrogaming.

Mitchell rose to national prominence in the 1980s when Life included him in a photo spread of game champions during the height of the golden age of arcade video games.

Pac-Man was released in 1980.

Players had discovered that it too had a type of kill screen: on reaching level 256, half the screen would be filled with nonsense glyphs that made it impossible to complete the level and continue.

In November 1982, Life brought several notable arcade players, including Mitchell and Sanders, to Ottumwa for a photoshoot.

Mitchell challenged Sanders to Donkey Kong and demonstrated that the game had an impassable "kill screen" when he reached level 22, while subsequently beating Sanders and setting a high score of 874,300.

Later, Sanders admitted that he had lied about his previous Donkey Kong scores, and Twin Galaxies gave the record to Billy Mitchell who held it for more than 18 years.

Around this time, Mitchell established a friendship with Robert Childs, who had a business buying and installing arcade cabinets in places like laundromats.

Following a 1982 claim made by an eight-year-old player of reaching more than 6 million points, which gained national coverage after President Ronald Reagan wrote to congratulate the player, Mitchell worked with his friend Chris Ayra in 1983 to determine that the highest possible score on Pac-Man was 3,333,360, which would require a perfect no-death run and collecting all possible points on the nonsense side of level 256's split-screen, requiring knowledge of where the edible dots were.

He attended Chaminade-Madonna College Preparatory School in 1983.

In 1983, Day invited Mitchell along with several other players from the photoshoot to participate in the "Electronic Circus", a 40-city tour where the players would demonstrate their skill at the arcade games at each stop.

But the idea fell through, and Mitchell and others spent the summer months camping out at Twin Galaxies and competing for high scores on video games, with Mitchell focusing on only a few selected titles.

Later that summer, Day founded the US National Video Game Team, a slimmer version of the Electronic Circus that aimed to make a stop in a major city in each US state, but the inaugural event had many snags.

Day continued to bring Mitchell on various trips to confirm high scores reported by players, with Mitchell frequently calling out bluffs.

By 1984, Day named Mitchell the Twin Galaxies' player of the year, but due to the 1983 video game crash, Twin Galaxies had to close down its storefront in March 1984, though it still tracked scores.

After submitting a record score for BurgerTime in 1985, Mitchell moved away from video games for the next ten years, spending more time at his family's restaurant, Rickey's Restaurant, and eventually taking ownership of it.

In 1999, Mitchell was the first person to claim a perfect score of 3,333,360 points on the arcade game Pac-Man.

In 1999, a group of Canadian players, including Rick Fothergill, were reportedly close to reaching the theoretical high score, leading Mitchell to return to video gaming to try to beat this group to the achievement.

On May 8, 1999, Fothergill set the world record, just 90 points short of a perfect score.

In response, on July 3, Mitchell achieved the perfect score at an arcade in Laconia, New Hampshire, and set the game's world record as recorded by Funspot and Twin Galaxies.

For this, Twin Galaxies named him "Video Game Player of the Century", and Namco, the makers of Pac-Man, brought Mitchell to Japan for the Tokyo Game Show that year.

After returning in November 1999, Mitchell offered $100,000 to the first person who could pass the split-screen level.

The prize was not claimed by the January 1, 2000 deadline.

A 2007 documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, follows his attempts to maintain the highest score on Donkey Kong after being challenged by newcomer Steve Wiebe.

However, in 2017, the legitimacy of a number of his records was called into question, leading to Twin Galaxies stripping Mitchell of his records.

In 2018, Mitchell's high scores on Donkey Kong were contested after members of the Twin Galaxies forums found discrepancies in the videos Mitchell had provided for The King of Kong, suggesting he had used emulation software to falsify his score.

Twin Galaxies and Guinness removed Mitchell scores, leading Mitchell to threaten legal action against both for defamation.

While Guinness restored Mitchell's scores, Twin Galaxies countersued Mitchell.

Both Mitchell and Twin Galaxies settled in 2024, and Twin Galaxies restored Mitchell's score in their historical leaderboard.

Mitchell remains banned from the current Twin Galaxies leaderboards.

Mitchell's family owns the Rickey's restaurants in Hollywood, Florida, and Pembroke Pines, Florida, and he sells Rickey's World Famous Hot Sauce.