As I think about it there have been quite a few arcade games that have had some kind of controversy.
They being
Donkey Kong (Steve Sanders 3.1 mill(Steve Wiebe's gummy substance/Roy Schildt)
Donkey Kong Junior (The Steve Wiebe Double board)
Ms. Pac-man (Something about the board, and Abdner Ashman's high score)
Pac-man (Les Martin claiming he passed the split screen)
Missile Command (Track ball settings of Roy Schildt, and Tony Temple)
Joust (James Vollandt and the freon can)
The top Robotron Marathon scores
Track N' Field (The Vibe Technique)
There are others of course, but it's amazing how much controversy has happened over the years on these Arcade games
RTM REPLY - I can shed some additional light on a few of these...
Donkey Kong - the "gummy substance" has a 2-part background story. For starters, when Brian Kuh and Perry Rodgers visited Steve Wiebe at his home in Washington, it was Kuh who noticed this "substance" on the boardset and reported it to Walter/Billy/TG. The theory back then...and mind you the TG knowledge-based is much different now...was that the purpose of this "gummy substance" (Kuh's description of it) was to cool down the clock timer thus allowing additional time per stage, and more. No physical way to prove this assertion, no technical way, and yet the decision was made to hold up on validations of boards with this "substance" pending a time when we would understand more. That time never came, but the KoK segment where I described this was film footage from a completely different film project which Seth/Ed bought and incorporated it into KoK as it bolstered their conspiracy theory slant against TG. Check the credits and see a name of Josh-something, I forget his last name. That was the original filmographer who filmed me in my workplace, something Seth/Ed never did, I can guarantee that.
Donkey Kong Junior - If I remember correctly, Steve first submitted a WR on DKJr and then about a year later on DK. But an online forum other than TG/CAG/Funspot had a discussion spotted by Darren Harris in which the person who actually sold the boardset stated as a matter of fact that it was not an original boardset. At that point Steve's 1.006M submission...as well as his previous DKJr submission, were regarded as non-original boardsets. At some point Walter decided to list them as such but it's been too long and I cannot remember when or why.
Ms. Pac-man - this is another Billy-issue. Abdner submitted a score that just beat out Chris Ayra, but the problem was that he was on record as having an even more massive score accomplished and not yet submitted, and the key element was that Abdner played three (3) consecutive games with a full compliment of eight ( 8 ) kill screens. Billy and Chris (Ayra) protested this and maintained that over the 20 years that they and Rick (Forthergill) had been playing they cumulatively only encountered eight ( 8 ) games with a full compliment of kill screens.
As such I was forced to ask Abdner to subject his boardset to the technical scrutiny of a then-recognized-expert, "Spike" from Lupine Systems. At my own personal expense...which is annoying because it was Billy and Chris who launched the protest and should have coughed up the cash...I sent Abdner's boardset out for review. I also sent out Darren Harris' boardset at an extra expense at no charge to Darren. Spike gave the boards the thumbs-up from a technical PoV. However there was one more consideration.
Abdner was using this boardset, if I can explain it correctly (I am not a techie) in a DC environment with an adapter to play on AC current, something like that. Darren can explain it best but is hard to find nowadays. Maybe Abdner if found can explain.
Anyway, I was forced to accept Abdner's score even though both Billy and Chris kept on protesting...one of the follies of having a TG Board member who was also a record holder on a title with a new record submission.
Pac-man - Les claimed he got past the split screen and that he would never show anyone how. According to Les, when playing on 3+1 settings he could clear 1 kill screen, and on 5+1 settings he could clear 3. What he was actually doing, according to what I found out, was this.
Les was playing with a second credit, disallowed as per TG policy. He was somehow using the second player to change the "dot counter" which flagged the incrementation of the subsequent kill screen. I really do not know more than this because I have never seen it myself. This would explain why, as I was told, Les refused to allow anyone to SEE him do this or even HEAR him do this, as they would have heard the sound of two coins dropping as well as seeing two coins in the change box inside.
Unrelated - Mark Longridge, former worldwide TG MAME editor and "Keeper of the Rules", once shared with me that there was a rumour of a Japanese boardset which allowed players to get past the split screen which might have explained the Jeffrey Yee debacle. I never heard further confirmation of these rumours.
Missile Command - this is perhaps the most physically aggravating controversy in TG history. Her goes, and I am stating for a fact that ANYONE who says something to the contrary has no clue what they are talking about.
For starters, Roy's original scores were established in 1985 and prior, his "TGTS" score and the MC score. Walter's original "TG Bible" of settings had NO mention of the specific dip-switch settings for a very specific switch that Roy later made such a big deal over. No one from that era was aware of the "fast-vs-slow" trackball impact from TG.
Fast forward 15+ years and Roy re-surfaced bothering then-TG officials including myself on a regular basis. Walter's 1st book was published and Roy was challenging specific details of the account because evidence would suggest that he lied about his score. The issue of the trackball setting had not even manifested yet. For example, Roy said that he had met both Darren Harris AND Chris Ayra there, yet Darren, who for some reason saved his transportation receipts from that event, confirmed that as one of them left (Chris/Darren) the other arrived afterwards. That was the first "hole" in Roy's claim.
The second major hole was that he said he played 15 games that day, 6 of which were 1M+ games, the LAST of which he called over Walter to verify as 1.695M. And this is the problem with that. There is no way to prove you are at 1M+ as the game rolls at 6-digits, for starters, and second, if you think about it, why would you NOT call over a TG official on the previous 5 games seeing how incredibly high your score already is, especially seeing how the game ultimately becomes one where you must protect the final city. And the third most glaring issue with his claim...he said that at the 1M break he had four (4) cities on screen, and that is the biggest bunch of bunk of all. Anyone who has expertise at the game knows how difficult it is at TGTS. Even world record holder Tony Temple NEVER had four cities at that point...I think he carried four thru 600K or so. Plus if you had the skillset to protect four thru 1M, why would you lost them over the next 700K ? Makes no sense !!
That was the score argument itself. Fast forward a few years to when Walter asked (without my knowledge and I was TG chief referee back then) fellow staffer Kelly Flewin to populate the arcade variation rules in the TG database with dip switch settings. Kelly pulled a PDF file from online, and when the settings were listed...and Tony was by that time the recognized TG WR holder...Roy launched a new argument claiming that the settings were incorrect. Mind you, from 1985 thru 2005 this had never come up even once that there was a special dip switch consideration. THis was effectively a last-ditch effort to preserve his WR status.
Truth be told no one at TG, especially not Walter, knew of these settings considerations. There were, in fact, several versions of the operators manual depending on which game it was from and when it was issued. There was ALSO a series of 1984-1987 Guinness contest manuals which had MANUALLY written comments...no idea when or by whom...that had varying information on these settings depending on the year of the manual. Lastly they did not match what was in Walter's original "TG Bible" of settings.
The issue of the settings is an aggravating one. Back in the day TG never knew there was a difference so all of the marathon scores accumulated in the database could not be cross-verified against the setting that governed track ball speed.
It gets worse when certain online videos recently posted by Roy over the past several years purport to be at the slower trackball setting yet you can clearly see from his hand movements that this would be impossible thus he was playing at the faster setting.
I doubt this issue will ever be fully resolved
