My goal is to make it as accurate as possible, to lay to rest many of the rumors created after The King of Kong.
Do you plan on looking at combined arcade and emulator scores, or just arcade? Even if you're not going to use the whole history of emulated scores, you should note that there were two periods of time where the highest DK score was actually the emulated score:
1) September 12, 1999 - June 30, 2003During this time Ben Jos Walbeehm posted MAME scores of 893,400 (9/12/99) and 904,100 (11/30/01). These are the first verified scores to top Billy Mitchell's scores from the 80s, and the first verified score over 900,000. Tim Sczerby beat the arcade record during this period but was short of Walbeehm's scores. Steve Wiebe scored 947,200 on a DDK board on 6/30/03.
2) July 8, 2009 - May 5, 2016Dean Saglio took the overall lead with a MAME score of 1,051,500 on 7/8/09. While Mitchell, Wiebe, and Hank Chien (and later Robbie Lakeman and Wes Copeland) went back and forth with the arcade record, Dean stayed in front of all them until 5/5/16, when Wes scored 1,218,000. Dean was the first player to score 1.1 million (1,136,400 on 4/19/10) and 1.2 million (1,206,800 on 10/4/13).
All of this means that arcade record holders Tim Sczerby, Hank Chien, and Robbie Lakeman never actually had the highest verified DK score.
