the king of kong
anyone check this out? i guess it's not in a lot of theaters right now. it's this documentary about this guy billy mitchell, the guy who did the first perfect game of pac man. he got this incredible donkey kong high score back in the 80's and he's been bragging about it ever since basically. the documentary follows this guy steve from cali who is trying to break his high score. .it's pretty good. you end up rooting for this steve guy more than you've rooted for anyone in your life. it's ends up being like a real good vs. evil thing.
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That was awesome. I had no idea NES Tetris was still such a huge thing.
I had to quit playing Tetris way back in the day because I couldn't stop seeing blocks in my dreams and anytime I closed my eyes. I can't imagine what these kids go through.
I saw that on the YouTube or something and wasn't sure if it was legit or not. Man, that's ****ing awesome. What a great accomplishment and memory for that little dude.
Wouldn't it be hilarious of Big Bad Bill Mitchell uploaded an obviously fraudulent MAME version of him setting this record already with poorly spliced together footage from different games. He always has a plan.
He sells his hot sauce, he sells himself.
I knew about the rolling technique getting popular. Are there any other late developments on technique that changed gameplay like this?
Thought this bump would have been about Billy's ongoing comedy legal issues rather than about Tetris lol
Combination of Joseph winning the CTWC + boom tetris for jeff meme causing lots of younger, newer players to get involved and tap (pretty much the only tapper prior to him was Koryan, who's older than I am), pandemic giving lots of people lots of time to practice and then Cheez breaking the game with rolling caused things to explode. It's probably already peaked and most of the competitive scene's modded the game to either stop it after level 39 or to double the speed again, so it's actually fairly rare to see someone like BS actually go for score/level records
If Karl Jobst is to be believed (and I think he probably is), Billy Mitchell and/or his attorney may end up eating sanctions for what they've been pulling in depositions and in filings.
So it turns out one of Twin Galaxies' lawyers caused some issues, so TG settled with Mitchell.
TG created a separate historical archive of scores, and threw Mitchell on that. Mitchell naturally is claiming he won, and got back on the leaderboards, which he didn't.
But the Mitchell/Jobst lawsuit is still ongoing, apparently.
The Donkey Kong kill screen has been beaten.
After 44 years, Donkey Kong player disco...
For the better part of 44 years, Nintendo's 1981 arcade classic Donkey Kong was understood to have a single, definitive endpoint: a "kill screen" where a bug ensures that Mario will inevitably die before you can complete the level. But now speedrunner Kosmic has figured out that this supposed kill screen doesn't have to be the end.
The original arcade version of Donkey Kong takes place across four stages that loop in various configurations of increasing difficulty. Those loops are displayed in-game as levels, and once you reach level five the difficulty has essentially peaked - you just keep repeating the same loop over and over again.
Excellent Donkey Kong players register their high scores in level 22, which is where the kill screen occurs. The bonus score timer overflows - Kosmic's video below goes into much more detail on how this bug works - leaving you with just a few seconds to clear the stage. That's not nearly enough time to get Mario to the top of the screen, so you simply die here over and over until you run out of lives.
The kill screen occurs on the barrel stage, which requires you to climb up a bunch of ladders and run across several slanted girders to reach the end. But there's actually another path to the end - an absurdly precise trick that lets you take advantage of a glitch to climb up a broken ladder all the way to the top of the stage.
Players theorized that this ladder glitch could be used to beat the kill screen stage before the timer runs out as far back as 2013, but the timer still wasn't quite long enough to let you beat the stage, even when creating what amounted to a tool-assisted speedrun. But Kosmic wasn't aware of that fact when he started testing the theory, and his own TAS worked. He climbed up the glitched ladder and beat the kill screen.
What changed between 2013 and 2025? Nothing more than simple chance. Donkey Kong's timer isn't actually a consistent clock, as it instead ticks down each time the titular gorilla rolls a barrel at you. These barrel tosses happen at essentially random intervals, and if you happen to get really, really lucky, the delay between the throws will slow down the timer long enough for you to execute the glitch and climb to the top of the stage.
"In order to have time to beat the kill screen," Kosmic explains in the video, "you need [Donkey Kong] to do a pretty good initial delay, which he'll do about a third of the time. Then you need to roll a 1 in 32 chance that he does an additional long delay. And that's assuming you play perfectly."
Hitting those odds at the end of a grueling, multi-hour high score attempt would be troubling enough, but successfully executing the ladder glitch under those conditions would effectively be impossible. The ladder glitch requires you to hold down for four frames, then tap up on the next frame. A human speedrunner can certainly do that trick once, but executing it over and over again fast enough to climb this broken ladder before the timer runs out would be functionally impossible.
"Let me be clear," Kosmic asserts. "This will not happen for real. To make it to the top you need to do the broken ladder climb trick 90 times, and that's not just getting the inputs 90 times in a row. You have to do them as fast as possible, back to back, perfectly. If this is still sounding even remotely possible to you let's just consider the sheer speed of it: you need to do 12 of these climbs per second."
The only way to do that would be precisely programming your inputs into an emulator, which is essentially what Kosmic did to finally get past the kill screen. There are a few more stages past there, before the timer once again becomes too short. This time, however, time runs out on the rivets stage, which has now equivalent glitch to bypass. For now, this is the "true kill screen" of Donkey Kong.
There is, in theory, one way you could get past the old kill screen without making a TAS of your own. Those delays between Donkey Kong's barrel tosses could, in theory, continue indefinitely, giving you enough time to beat the level normally without even needing to do the ladder glitch. Kosmic estimates that the odds of this happening are around 1 in 40 octillion.
Incredible update.
Surprised people haven't set AI onto it. They learn games, and with emulators can play them extremely sped up.
The Tetris players are crazy. They just keep setting more extreme goals for themselves.
As a result, the first perfect game of Tetris has been played.
The First Perfect Game of Tetris Just Happened
long ago you all said it was a great doc to watch and I always wanted to watch it but never did
is it still worth watching or beucase of the cheatig and whatnot thee are better ones?
"King of Kong" is still worth watching.
If you enjoy it, you can find some YouTube videos which will break down the creative narratives used by the director.
^ agreed...
The thing is, Mitchell's "cheating" was more misrepresenting a run on an emulator as a run on real hardware. It's not so much cheating as just PR move.
The thing is, Mitchell's "cheating" was more misrepresenting a run on an emulator as a run on real hardware. It's not so much cheating as just PR move.
They proved he was using an emulator because his score (the way his points were accumulating) wasn't achievable without using save states (which you could only do using an emulator). He also lied about using a modified joystick I think.
Weird video game accomplishments pop up on my YouTube recommendations regularly.
Here are a couple of interesting videos from games I've never played.
In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (2000), there's a side quest in which you bet on a dog race. One of the dogs is blue and is infamous for never winning the race for twenty-five years... until he did.
Why Majora's Mask's Blue Dog Took 25 Years to Win the Race
It seems a new sub-genre of gaming is to join a dead (or near dead) online game. There was an online virtual world that opened in 2003 and eventually had over one million registered users. But, it's been dead for more than a decade.
I Spent 30 Days in a Dead Game (There.com)
That video went places I didn't expect. From the comments:
The guy that hosts the trivia on tuesdays posted on their Facebook community that the seating is limited to 18 players and that you have to get there early to get a spot. He probably hasn't had enough people to do the trivia for years, but now it's the opposite, there is too many people that would like to join but he can't accept them all. It's so amazing what this video did for his little minigame.
The video seems to have brought the game back to life.
It was so weird how the host just plowed ahead with the trivia for 2 people like it was totally normal, one of them being a newbie when who knows the last time they had a newbie.
And this from Babs herself:
@BABSavatar
1 month ago (edited)
Hi @moviecentrul Oh no, we are all excited. We were not always this small of a community. We’ve missed the packed events and chaos. Francis is having a blast. It’s a dream come true for him, me and many others.
"King of Kong" is still worth watching.
If you enjoy it, you can find some YouTube videos which will break down the creative narratives used by the director.
has there been a sequel i remember a few years ago something coming up about how the doc was fake or something scandelous anbout it?
or is that spoilers for me
A new Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! record was achieved in February of 2025.
A nearly hour and a half video was uploaded to You Tube a few days ago detailing "Summoning Salt's" nine-year effort. His goal was not just to knock out Mike Tyson in record breaking time. He also wanted to knock Tyson out in under two minutes.
It took about 75,000 attempts, perfecting his technique along the way, to get there.
There's this clip floating around the net by this Golden Eye speedrunner (who's also a 2p2er, IIRC... something goose something), in which he is talking about how speedrunners are nothing but degenerates.
Sounds about right.
RWhiteGoose? I've never watched his videos because I don't really care about Goldeneye but maybe I should?
He's a good creator but the vids get a little repetitive.
