RTM's Documents

[gstrain]

On a sidebar an old TG discussion on another title with commensurate random impact, "Ms Pacman", took place in which the gamer was absolutely adamant that until a gamer gets all banana fruits awarded that in their eyes no gamer has ever had a "perfect game". We did the math and calculated that if a million kill-screen capable gamers each played the game 24/7 for around a 100 trillion years then MAYBE one of them would get all bananas (each game lasts around 5 hours). Of course they would all die long before that happened, but that was beside the point

A perfect Ms Pac-Man is actually even a LOT less likely than that.  Even with just 126 random fruit boards (no extra boards), 2 fruits a board, and a 12.6% chance of each one as a banana, the chance of all 252 being bananas is about 1.97*10^-227.  That's roughly the odds of winning the Mega Millions lottery every day in a row for 27 days.  A million gamers playing 24/7 for 100 trillion years is only 1.752*10^23 game attempts.  You'd need way more gamers and way more years to have a shot.

[hooch66]

Thank you for posting all of this, man. This history stuff really should be compiled and archived somewhere. You just dropped a ton of knowledge on us, and that is awesome.

I recently watched King of Kong again and I have to say I came away with a respect of what you did at Twin Galaxies at the time, all the time you volunteered to watch all those tapes, and your clear love for classic gaming and just gaming itself.

[RTM]

Thanks, George !! I could not remember the specifics of the original calculation on the Ms Pacman odds, but clearly it was understated based on what you pointed out below.

As for what "Hooch66" said, my posted comments were from memory which is why the data content of my saved files and also from that interview are worth archiving, as you said...once the "story" is gone, it's gone. Memories become cloudy over time, and in the here and now I most certainly could not have put together from memory alone what specific t-shirts I was wearing at each day of that ACAM event so as to identify the exact sequence of the KoK footage.