Author Topic: Wiebe's 885k  (Read 10129 times)

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Offline ersatz_cats

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Re: Wiebe's 885k
« Reply #15 on: May 26, 2020, 08:00:32 am »
Great finds, Coleco!

For posterity, when you Google "Steve Wiebe" "885,900" as Coleco suggested, you get three iterations of the same block of text, two from active links and one still in Google cache from another site:

https://github.com/libretro/mame2003-plus-libretro/issues/759

https://www.bountysource.com/issues/83915339-updating-catver-ini-and-other-metadata

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kas6qjwG0CMJ:https://www.gitmemory.com/Wilstorm+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

It looks to be some sort of MAME metadata or something?  It's a long block of text pertaining to arcade DK.  Buried in the larger text is a "Trivia" section as follows:

Quote
- TRIVIA -

Donkey Kong was to be Nintendo's first big breakthrough into the western - and particularly American - arcade scene. Before Donkey Kong, Nintendo was having difficulty establishing itself in these markets. After the game's massive success Nintendo quickly established their headquarters of Nintendo of America to ensure that the game was being distributed properly. After winning a couple of lawsuits, Nintendo licensed out Donkey Kong to other manufacturers who created the table top games.

Donkey Kong introduced a number of wholly original gameplay ideas to the platform genre. It was the first ever game to feature multiple playfields, for example. It was also the first game that allowed players to jump over objects. Its creation came about due to the commercial failure of another game called "Radarscope". A consequence of which was an excess of redundant arcade cabinets. In an attempt to limit their losses, Nintendo commissioned Donkey Kong and history was made.

The Jumpman character was renamed Mario after Mario Segali, the landlord of Nintendo of America's first warehouse location in Seattle (thought it was debated whether this occurred before or well after the game was released). Accounts differ as to how Nintendo of America felt about the game before its release. Many sources claim that they all felt sure it would be an absolute disaster while others say they were more optimistic. Although Mario is a plumber in later games, his career in Donkey Kong is that of a carpenter. Mario's appearance (and consequently his career) was dictated by the primitive graphics hardware of the time - the only way to have his arms appear 'seperate' to his torso was to have them as a different colour - hence he wears 'dungarees'. The moustache is present merely to indicate where Mario's mouth is, again due to the low graphics resolution imposed by hardware limitations. Mario wears a hat so his head is distinguishable from the game's black backgrounds.

The game was originally going to be called 'Monkey Kong' but, as with "Continental Circus", a mistake during the translation process from Japanese to English resulted in the now legendary name. The game's creator, the equally-legendary Shigiru Miyamoto denies this story to this day - claiming that the naming is deliberate as he wanted an animal name that would capture the 'stubborn' nature of the Kong character (as in 'stubborn as a mule'). Few within the industry believe this explanation, however.

About 60,000 units were sold in the U.S. Oddly, despite it being one of the ten best selling games of the golden age of video games, it never reached #1 on Replay's popularity charts. Instead, it was stuck at #2 behind mega hits "Pac-Man" and "Ms. Pac-Man" - the two best selling games ever.

Steve Wiebe holds the official record for this game with 885,900 points on March 2, 2002.

Donkey Kong inspired a catchy hit song by Buckner and Garcia called 'Do The Donkey Kong' released on the 'Pac-Man Fever' album.

A Donkey Kong unit appears in the 1983 movie 'WarGames', in the 1984 movie 'Gremlins' and in the 1985 movie 'The Heavenly Kid'.

A Donkey Kong machine was shown at the 2003 classic arcade games show 'California Extreme' in San Jose, California.

MB (Milton Bradley) released a board game based on this video game (same name) in 1982. Save the girl and avoid the barrels and fireballs as in the video game. The gameboard is laid out like the video game's ramp stage. 'Can You Battle Donkey Kong And Save the Fair Maiden?'.

I appreciate FBX coming here to clarify about the Wiebe tape, although truthfully, he's already talked about it a few times, and I guess it never clicked for us that this was a previously unmentioned Wiebe tape (not the 2003 one that got publicized).  FBX mentioned it in the DK dispute on page 019 (below the MAME evidence) and again on page 356.  FBX even names the score in his page 019 comment:

Quote
It did exist, and I actually owned the tape for a short while and watched it myself. My memory is a bit hazy as this was 15 years ago, but I remember getting the tape in a box of various tapes to pull video clips from and make online video snips from as per Walter's request. I remember watching the 885k and being very impressed, and I specifically read the name on the tape and was surprised to not see Billy's name on it, but instead Steve Wiebe's! I asked Walter about it, and he seem both concerned and shocked that such a tape fell into my hands. I got the sense that it was 'mis-filed' and purely by accident. I was asked to send it back (I forget whether to him or another referee). What happened to the tape after that I honestly don't know.

I'm willing to swear in court that it existed and I had the tape in my possession (for a time anyway). In fact, I've often told this story that I was technically the first referee to verify a Steve Wiebe DK tape, albeit accidentally. So rest assured, Steve is telling the truth about that.

And with all the other corroboration people have found, there's no doubting this was definitely a real score active on the scoreboard, though there's still a few mysterious loose ends to the story.  Biggest among them is, how on earth did this score go unnoticed publicly all this time?

Here's scans I took of Seattle Times coverage in 2003 of Wiebe's score.  It appears all the other coverage around the country and the world (including what RTM cites above) originates from this Seattle Times story.  Most are direct copies, though CNN and a couple other outlets trimmed it way down.





Very conspicuously no mention of the fact that Wiebe was already the record-holder.  Of course, Seattle Times was just getting all their info from TG (i.e. Walter and Billy).  If I wanted to be charitable, I could imagine Walter Day just having a bad memory and forgetting that Sczerby's score was already broken (perhaps while someone else operated the scoreboard on the website).  It's possible he remembered that Wiebe did have some big score a year ago, but thought it was the 1mil on DK Jr.  But it also would not be unlike him to knowingly take the opportunity for self-promotion available truth-be-damned, promotion which is much more potent with a story of "New player shatters long-standing DK record" than "Guy who already holds DK record beats his own score."  (And of course, Billy is Billy, as we all know.)

Last thing I want to point out, as Coleco was saying, FBX collected these clips of the Wiebe 885k score, and they were long ago available on the TG website.  They're not on Internet Archive, but the link to them is still there.  Remember, this was a few years before YouTube.  For videos like this, you had to download zip files on your old dialup Internet.  Thanks to Internet Archive, what we  do have is the name of the specific zip file, found on this page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20021004033833/http://www.twingalaxies.com:80/cgi-perl/twingalaxies_television.pl

So rather than ask TG old-timers to manually sift through tons of data looking for these clips, one could do a file search for a specific file name: "tgdk.zip"  If anyone has a bunch of old TG downloads or maintenance data on an old hard drive, a quick file search could give us the only remaining artifacts of this piece of DK history.

Anyway, all this doesn't have much to do with the original post here (the Billy evidence), but it's fascinating stuff.
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Offline RTM

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Re: Wiebe's 885k
« Reply #16 on: May 26, 2020, 11:12:03 am »
RTM, I wanted to say at the outset that I may be misinterpreting your arguments, so I wanted to take a moment to clarify my understanding by walking through some of the points your raise.

It strikes me as incongruous to argue that "there is absolutely zero proof...that shows the existence of 885k on the TG scoreboard/database" and then cite the very evidence that was uncovered to confirm the score's existence - Walter's announcement and Rick's post, which was based on his review of the scoreboard in January 2003.

https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/109558-Anyone-get-a-Million-pts.on-Donkey-Kong-&-questions?p=557734#post557734

To highlight the latter point, JJT begins that thread by asking if Mitchell achieved a million point DK game. In response, Rick writes, "Not sure if Billy ever did that or not. If he did it wasn't official cuz viewing the TG records Steve Wiebe has the record at 885,900. I really thought Billy had scored in the 920k range though...but perhaps wasn't verifiable."

Further proof of the score's existence can be found in your thread announcing Steve's 947k achievement.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031203042530/http://www.twingalaxies.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1253

In post #8, mandm785@juno writes "dumb question, but did Steve just do this? [the 947k score] The reason I ask is I looked at the score details, on the online scoreboard, and it says it was submitted on March 2, 02. Was this performance of over a year ago? Just made me curious when I saw this."

You remark in post #12 that due to a system bug with the original program, the dates can be a little screwy. However in actual fact this was the date that Steve's 885k score was confirmed in the database. If you google "Steve Wiebe" "885,900" you'll get a hit where there is a discussion about updating MAME related files. One individual uses the history.dat file associated with a DK distro - the information is clearly dated as it cites Steve Wiebe as the DK record holder with a score of 885,900 achieved on March 2, 2002.

You included a post from Walter ("Billy Mitchell scored 874,300 points at Twin Galaxies on November 7, 1982...") and indicate it makes no mention of Steve's 885k score as potential proof that the 885k score either didn't exist as an official or wasn't entered. The context of Walter's discussion concerns how Mitchell was portrayed in the King of Kong. Walter's argument is that - contrary to the opinion of the movie-going public, I guess - Mitchell was not obsessing over retaining the top DK score, and a pro-Billy TG administration was not running interference on his behalf. With this in mind, Walter's announcement of Steve's 885k score, which is accompanied by an announcement of Mitchell's forthcoming video tape submission of a higher score, would clearly undermine the core of his argument, and would provide a plausible rationale for its exclusion from his historical account.

I do think that the lack of fanfare or promotion around Wiebe's 885k score is noteworthy, but my conclusion is that the lack of promotion wasn't rooted in the score's absence from the leaderboard.

RTM REPLY - I'm not the best art multi-quoting so please bear with me...

Point (1) - "It strikes me as incongruous to argue that "there is absolutely zero proof...that shows the existence of 885k on the TG scoreboard/database" and then cite the very evidence that was uncovered to confirm the score's existence - Walter's announcement and Rick's post, which was based on his review of the scoreboard in January 2003. "

REPLY (1) - I should have been more clear in what I wrote...there was Walter's wall post blurb, and Rick Carter's forum response, but no proof of snapshot from the database itself showing the score as being entered.

     When I wrote the article I checked the database and there was no earlier 885,900 score present at the time...not sure what happened to it but I also never saw it in the database in the first place. As for Walter's wall post, back in that era of TG one wall post came down to make room for another so there is no easy way to determine just how long it remained on the TG front page short of clicking subsequent archive.org pages one at a time until it disappears. No matter, I am maintaining that I did not see it...can't forget something I never saw as I would not have remembered it to begin with, and a new DK WR would have been well-remembered by me back then.

Issue (2) - Further proof of the score's existence can be found in your thread announcing Steve's 947k achievement.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031203042530/http://www.twingalaxies.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1253

REPLY (2) - thanks for locating the original TG forum post of the WR !! A Google search could not turn it up. But I did read the original article as well as the subsequent replies...where within the article or the 8 replies was mention of the 885,900 made ?

My article notes that was the first kill screen that I had witnessed, confirming I never saw the 885,900 performance, as well as mentioning that the WR had not changed hands much over the past few years, as well as only Billy being the dual-holder...technically Steve would have been but again, I never knew that at the time.

That post number 8...it does not specifically reference a score of 885,900 and no subsequent post confirms this.  Not playing dumb here, but there is no way to be sure of just what that post is alluding to. It might very well have been an earlier score, I just do not know for sure. And again, not one of the key people...Walter, Billy or Wiebe himself, ever corrected me as to the article failing to mention an earlier score validated by TG.

A point I'd like to make is that in July of 2003, I did not see the score within the TG database under the arcade platform. I would not have checked MAME as there was no need to. Not sure what happened to it, but I'll end by saying I maintain no such score was present when I wrote the article.

I am not disputing accounts that show at one point it was there...I'm simply stating that while that score may have been originally present, I was completely unaware of it. Makes me wonder if the goal was to bury the score so as to generate more "pop" for what was yet to come. It's been too many years and the database has changed hands and iterations several times...I doubt we will ever know for sure.

I'll accept the fact that anecdotal evidence suggests the 885,900 existed...but it would have been nice for Walter, who gave a thumbs-up to my article, to inform me that I was missing the fact of the earlier performance. Or Wiebe himself, once the article posted. Bill never told me, that's for sure.

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Offline Snowflake

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Re: Wiebe's 885k
« Reply #17 on: May 26, 2020, 01:53:07 pm »
there is now way to be 100% sure of the score in that post its true.  Its more of just the unlikeliness of coincidence and how computers work.  To have just the right date, for the person and game just different score seems to much of a coincidence to be attributed to some random bug.  It seems to indicate the prior scores existence.  I dont know if the score was hidden from RTM when he entered the new score, and so the hidden but not expunged old score somehow had its date merged with the new score, i dont know if when you entered the new score you overwrote the old score leaving the date, theres any number of explanations. but of all the explanations i dont see it being some random coincidence, its a real indicator the score existed in the database, certainly among the possibliteis is the score was invisble to you and then some later bug caused the dates to get crossed between the hidden score you didnt know about and the score you did enter.
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Offline NightRider

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Re: Wiebe's 885k
« Reply #18 on: May 26, 2020, 06:19:09 pm »
Robert has said this before multiple times:

Quote from: RTM
My recollection of dealing with Steve for the first time is when he contacted me at my office immediately prior to the DK WR of 947K...he said he set a new WR but was playing at the wrong settings as I realized from the discussion (he had extra lives at start set to them max) so he said he would try again at 3+1 which he did.

It strikes me as likely that the 885k score was done on the 6-man setting and was quietly removed once this was known. TG was not particularly transparent when it came to correcting errors. Do you remember if the 885k was done with 6-lives Wolff?
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Offline RTM

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Re: Wiebe's 885k
« Reply #19 on: May 26, 2020, 09:58:17 pm »
there is now way to be 100% sure of the score in that post its true.  Its more of just the unlikeliness of coincidence and how computers work.  To have just the right date, for the person and game just different score seems to much of a coincidence to be attributed to some random bug.  It seems to indicate the prior scores existence.  I dont know if the score was hidden from RTM when he entered the new score, and so the hidden but not expunged old score somehow had its date merged with the new score, i dont know if when you entered the new score you overwrote the old score leaving the date, theres any number of explanations. but of all the explanations i dont see it being some random coincidence, its a real indicator the score existed in the database, certainly among the possibliteis is the score was invisble to you and then some later bug caused the dates to get crossed between the hidden score you didnt know about and the score you did enter.



RTM REPLY - in the old TG database whenever a new score was entered it did indeed over-write any previous score for that variation/person, but again the score was not present at the time I crafted the article. It could have been "expunged" at some point prior to that by Walter, without "fanfare", and such an action would have been invisible to myself or my fellow referees of that era.

There was no capacity with that incarnation of the database (the old "PERL" based system, as Corcoran referred to it) to mark a score as being in "hiatus" status...not until Brien King rolled out the new post-lawsuit system after he joined the group.
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Offline RTM

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Re: Wiebe's 885k
« Reply #20 on: May 26, 2020, 10:02:19 pm »
Robert has said this before multiple times:

Quote from: RTM
My recollection of dealing with Steve for the first time is when he contacted me at my office immediately prior to the DK WR of 947K...he said he set a new WR but was playing at the wrong settings as I realized from the discussion (he had extra lives at start set to them max) so he said he would try again at 3+1 which he did.

It strikes me as likely that the 885k score was done on the 6-man setting and was quietly removed once this was known. TG was not particularly transparent when it came to correcting errors. Do you remember if the 885k was done with 6-lives Wolff?



RTM REPLY - when Wiebe first contacted me about a score that he did at the wrong settings he mentioned he was playing at 6+1 and I told him it s/h/b 3+1. That was the very first time I ever spoke with Steve and he did not mention having sent in any performance under those settings...he definitely did not send any to me until the 947.2K.

If the tape was sent to Walter then he would have been the one to authenticate it. I'm curious to know what Wolff will respond with as his role (and that of his brother) were different than mine at the time due to their technical skillset...they did more than typical referee-level work for TG
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Offline Snowflake

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Re: Wiebe's 885k
« Reply #21 on: May 28, 2020, 03:43:54 pm »
https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/214252-More-Shenanigans-with-Respect-to-DK-Billy-and-Possibly-Walter-as-Well-these-from-1983-!!?p=1081831#post1081831

the missing scores in the link are of very reminiscent of this of steves pretty much unknown 885,900. i cant help but to notice 886,00 is just 885,900 rounded up. i wonder if walter talking about the 80s actually had his years wrong, and if both these questions answer each other. perhaps the mystery 886,000 score from 1983 was actually the 885,900 and walter was just confusing different events.
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Offline colecomeister

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Re: Wiebe's 885k
« Reply #22 on: June 11, 2020, 01:51:00 pm »
https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/214252-More-Shenanigans-with-Respect-to-DK-Billy-and-Possibly-Walter-as-Well-these-from-1983-!!?p=1081831#post1081831

the missing scores in the link are of very reminiscent of this of steves pretty much unknown 885,900. i cant help but to notice 886,00 is just 885,900 rounded up. i wonder if walter talking about the 80s actually had his years wrong, and if both these questions answer each other. perhaps the mystery 886,000 score from 1983 was actually the 885,900 and walter was just confusing different events.

Just a few updates.

Snowflake, I'm not entirely following the thread here - the 885,900 DK announcement was posted to the TG website in 2002; the reference to the 886,000 score was from the TG Rules circa 1983, which was higher than the verified TG score. It could have been Mitchell's personal best, in the same way he cited a PB of 909,000 in 1984:

885,900 - 2002 TG announcement on the Day Report (see Feb 13): https://web.archive.org/web/20020408172037/https://www.twingalaxies.com/cgi-perl/dayrep_Feb_2002.pl

886,000 - 1983 TG rules reference (see Section 17): http://www.videoparadise-sanjose.com/tg-rules.htm

To address the query about whether Wiebe's DK 885k score was done on 5 + 1 settings and thus quietly dropped after some time on the leaderboard, I spoke to Steve a while back and he stated that the 885k score was done on 3 + 1 settings. He also said that he dealt exclusively with Walter on the score, which is born out by RTM's experience and FirebrandX. Not to get in a battle over 20 year old recollections, but Steve recalled that the conversation about confirming settings pertained to DK Junior only, as the rules for that game when he checked briefly stated 5 plus 1. The discussion over DK Jr is born out by your announcement RTM of the DK Jr 1 million record on 10 September 2002:

https://web.archive.org/web/20021206223655/http://www.twingalaxies.com/cgi-perl/breaking_news.pl

Additionally, I think that the headline for Wiebe's TG announcement of his 947k score acknowledges the 885k score "between the lines":

"Donkey Kong Record Passes 900K" - "Steve Wiebe of Redmond, Washington is the first player to pass the 900,000 mark on Donkey Kong" with a link to RTM's forum post of Wiebe's game.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030730135517/http://www.twingalaxies.com:80/

I find it interesting that it talks about cross the 900k threshold instead of "Steve's first DK WR," for example.

Finally, there was an article reference in the TG archive - Walter often compiled article citations featuring TG members, and there was a list concerning Steve, I think most were related to his 947k DK score, but this one was related to his DK Jr million point game:

The game of his life: Richmond's Wiebe sets new world record in Donkey Kong Jr. (17 July 2002 - Eastside Journal, Bellevue, WA)

In outlining the process that Steve followed to achieve recognition of his DK Jr score, the writer mentions his existing DK record:

"Wiebe video-taped his record-setting performance and mailed it TwinGalaxies.com, a web site devoted to video game news, statistics and player rankings. His new score has yet to be published, but you can still find him on the site. He also holds the world record in Donkey Kong, the arcade version, with 885,900 points."

And this point as well when he bought a second cabinet to go for the WR (after selling the first one he used in his fraternity):

"Soon he felt the urge to buy another one. He purchased a classic arcade machine off Ebay and had it upgraded so it would play both Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. The final cost with shipping set him back more than $1,000."
« Last Edit: June 11, 2020, 05:08:21 pm by colecomeister »
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Offline davidbix

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Re: Wiebe's 885k
« Reply #23 on: January 04, 2021, 02:36:18 pm »
Hi all, thanks for approving my registration. I'm no expert, but I've become more interested in all of the updates to the Mitchell saga, was digging around, found this thread, and then found something interesting that may shed light on this thread, even months after the recording surfaced. So between that and not being able to find a direct contact for RTM elsewhere, I figured I'd register and add it, since it looks like it wasn't showing up it last year's Google searches for "Steve Wiebe" with  "885,900."

I don't know if this wasn't properly crawled when this thread was first active last year, or if TG added new archives, or what, but there IS a January 14, 2003 post from "permafrostick" in an archived thread on the TG forum that mentions Wiebe's 885k as the then-current record in TG standings:

https://www.twingalaxies.com/archive/index.php/t-109558.html

permafrostrick
01-14-2003, 10:44 AM
1.Is it true that Billy Mitchael got a million points on Donkey Kong?

1a.Has anyone gotten a million points on Donkey Kong?
Not sure if Billy ever did that or not. If he did it wasn't official cuz viewing the TG records Steve Wiebe has the record at 885,900. I really thought Billy had scored in the 920k range though...but perhaps wasn't verifiable.

1b.Who was the 1 player that got 1.6 million pts.in the 80's & wrote a how to book on Donkey Kong, I think I saw it in a video game magazine as the world record is there any validy to this record?
There was a thread on this....might be in the old tg forums forum here.

The 1.6 million was a hoax...I think technically the guy predicted what he would have had for score or started a new game after the kill screen giving himself however many men he had left entering the kill screen in the previous game. Either way his score was bogus.

2.What is the current World record that was set by Steve Wiebe at 968,+ pts. if I'm correct?
If the TG online scores are current, it's 885,900 by Steve.

10.What are the top 7 scores for Donkey Kong & what are there names?
A simple search of the TG scores database at this web site will show you the top scores. I have no idea if new ones are going into the 2nd edition.


I have no idea what this means in the grand scheme of things. But right there in black and white is contemporaneous post from January 2003 saying TG had 885 as the record at that time.

Any thoughts? Is this just a whole lot of nothing or does this help illuminate certain things to people who know much more about this than I do?
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