Hi guys,
New to the forum and a bit of a silent archivst and amateur DK enthusiast (not to brag, but I can get past the springes about 1 in 5 tries). Thanks for having me. I was recently digging up the bones of ancient DK history when I came across a bit of a mystery that I was hoping someone could shed some light on (and who better to ask than all the experts here in DK scores).
I'm trying to construct an accurate timeline of DK high scores but I keep running into some discrepencies regarding Billy Mitchell's 933,900 score. After the dispute over his video submissions, this score was often cited as Billy's latest live verified arcade high score [and let me just get out of the way that I'm not trying to dispute the score] and often given a date of May 2004.
Twin Galaxies, I'm sure many of you know, doesn't do a great job of keeping a historic log of scores; they just delete a player's previous high scores to overwrite new ones. So I was looking for some historic references to the score. One thing I found was an old forum post (
http://www.classicarcadegaming.com/forums/index.php?topic=277.0 ) on classicarcadegaming from 2007, where Paul Dean (reply #7) lists some DK Scores of notes and he gives this score a date of June 9, 2003.
It'd be easy to just chalk that up as a mistake, but Robert Mruczek immediately replies with some corrections to his timeline and doesn't seem to find error with that date. More curiously, when Walter Day released his "King of Kong - Official Statement" in 2008, he had this to say:
"The Donkey Kong Standings looked like this in July, 2003:
1. 947,200 Steve J Wiebe 07/06/2003
2. 933,900 Billy L Mitchell 05/27/2004
3. 879,200 Timothy Sczerby 8/17/00"
https://www.twingalaxies.com/archive/index.php/t-118669.htmlObviously it's impossible for a 2004 score to show up on the July 2003 standings, so maybe Walter also made a mistake, but if the score had truly occured in June 2003 it would have indeed been in the standings at that time.
What neither source seems to acknowledge is that Steve Wiebe apparently had set an earlier record score of 885,900 in August 2001, presumably becoming the first to beat Tim Szcerby's 2000 score (video here:
). It's unclear why this became a "lost score" (which may be a mystery for another day) but could be attributed to TG's record overwriting. Either way, you can see people referencing it in archived TG forum conversations from January 2003 ( "viewing the TG records Steve Wiebe has the record at 885,900"
https://www.twingalaxies.com/archive/index.php/t-109558.html ), showing that it was not only verified by TG at this time, but still the the world record. [and although it was eventually revealed that Wiebe was playing on DDK, that wouldn't become a disqualifying factor until mid 2004]
So cut to June 2003... if Billy Mitchell had set a score of 933k on the 9th, it would be a new world record.
Then on June 30, Steve Wiebe sets a new score of 947,200, which would reclaim his record from Billy.
If Billy didn't set his score on the 9th, Steve Wiebe was simply beating his own previous record.
In early July, Robert wrote a congratulatory post to Wiebe for his 947k score with meticulous notes (archived here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20031203042530/www.twingalaxies.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1253 ). In that post, he says that Wiebe is now the first player since Billy Mitchell to hold both the DK and DKJ records simultaneously. That wouldn't be true if Wiebe were simply beating his own 2001 score. It doesn't say so specifically, but I believe this post implies that Wiebe was beating another person's record.
And if there were an error with the date of Billy Mitchell's 933k score, it would fit nicely here at June 9, 2003. If not, Billy set that score over a year later and it was not a record when it was submitted. Doesn't seem like Billy's style, but nothing to say it didn't happen that way. I'm wondering if anyone has any corroborating historic evidence of when the 933k score happened, or why the discrepencies?
Not necessarily a contradiction, but certainly a curiosity, at least to me.
Thanks in advance!
