Donkey Kong Statistics Database

[WCopeland]

http://kongtrackr.herokuapp.com

Many will recall the tournament almost a year ago from today where I broke the world record, followed by Robbie breaking it after 6 hours, followed by Dean taking 1st place with a score of 1.177m. Shortly after the tournament, it occurred to me that it was very likely that even though Dean's 1.177m game was one of the greatest of all time, it was bound to be lost to history.

Knowing this, I set out to build Kongtrac.kr, a Donkey Kong high scores database. My goal was to capture every recorded game, player, and event in history. Jeremy Young over the last year has meticulously helped me with this, and as of this writing we're currently sitting on a database of 1570 games from 399 players.

Not only are we able to store all this data, we're able to analyze it in ways that before now simply weren't possible or took an incredible amount of manual effort. Here's a quick highlight of all the features that are being publicly released:

• Automatic HSL. Every day the scoreboard regenerates itself automatically based on what is in the DB.
• Essential Game Stats. Pace charts, board scores, life durations, and more.
• Top Games HSL. Disregard the "player" element and see what the highest scoring games in the DB are.
• Player Profiles. A player's PB history is built automatically, along with all other known information about that player.
• Event Data. View a histogram over any event's scores, and quickly see all standings (including bracket standings).
• Timelines. Automatically generated for 1st KS, 1st Million, 1st 1.1, 1st 1.2, and multiplatform WRs.
• "Days Since". We can identify certain interesting historical elements in the database and track how long it has been since it has happened (eg -- days since the MAME WR was broken, days since a new 1st million, etc).
• Database Export. There is no ownership of any of this data -- the entire database can be freely exported by anyone.
• Calculated Games. The system can generate an "Average Game", which is the average of all KS games in the database. Likewise, a "Perfect Game" can be generated which is essentially a "Sum of Best" for every game in the database.
• Detailed Comparisons. Any like data can be compared. Compare players, games, and events.
• Open-source. The entire app's source code can be found on a Github repository.

Automatic HSL


Easy Compare


Game Comparison


Timelines


Auto-generated Game Stats


Easy Player Comparisons
Red dots are arcade scores. Blue dots are MAME scores.


Interesting URLs to Check Out:
Top Games List
World Record Timelines
The "Average Game"
Comparison of the Big Three
Robbie Lakeman 1,206,900 vs Dean Saglio 1,206,800
The Legendary DKO
Hank Chien's Player Profile

Lots of features are planned, including support for every DK, DKJr, and CK variant... and then support for games outside of the DK franchise altogether. Feature requests are welcome. Enjoy.

[VON]

Wow!  Great work guys.

Question: How do you plan to keep the database up to date?  Do you have some way of polling DKF/TG/MARP submissions, or do you expect players to also submit their scores to KongTrackr?

[YesAffinity]

Really cool!  Great work, guys!

Interesting to note (if I read the KS timeline correctly) that the 7 most recent kill screens have all been achieved on arcade, and there has never previously been a trend of 7 arcade kill screens, in the history of the game.

[Barra]

I like this. I like this a lot. Stats

Is it worthwhile us submitting a bunch of our own games if we have record of them? I learned DK when I was still using Retro Uprising and so any time I got a PB I'd submit there.

Or is the goal to only track worthwhile games? I notice the "average" game is 1,003,200 and so I'm thinking that mostly only first-time killscreens and PBs over 1m have been stored so far

Great stuff anyway. Bloody amazing. You guys deserve a fkn badge



Edit: an awesome piece of information that I just noticed: The top 50 all-time games are 1.1m. Wes' 1,100,000 is 50th. Much  very 

[marinomitch13]

Incredible. I had a dream of something like this back in 2011 but have never had the time and skills to pull it off. Well done, gents!

[muscleandfitness]

Omfg im in here lit this is amazing. This should be recomended for the Archobald peace prise lit ..we <Billy>ll done. 

[xelnia]

Wow!  Great work guys.

Question: How do you plan to keep the database up to date?  Do you have some way of polling DKF/TG/MARP submissions, or do you expect players to also submit their scores to KongTrackr?

Wes can answer the player submission thing better than I can, but I believe there will be a sort of of moderating system set up where people could potentially submit scores and then they'd be approved by an admin/mod/whatever.

My plan is to always update it when a new score comes into the DKF/TG/MARP, which is what I do for the DKF HSL anyway. I'm obviously always hanging around DKF, but I check TG and MARP almost daily for new scores and add them to the DKF HSL if appropriate.

KT has actually been around for quite awhile, in secret, and I've been working on and off in compiling stats for games. I had a hard drive failure this summer, but I believe my records are still accurate. At last count, there should be roughly 250 games on KT with full stats, about 500 games on my computer left to analyze (inp and video), about 750 games on KT that will probably never have stats, and maybe 75 or so more that I need to do some more research on. I have a spreadsheet (lol) that indicates I have info on 1,644 games and that I could potentially have complete data on 827 of them (most positive outlook).

Anyway, the long and short of it is: I will keep the database as up-to-date as possible while slowly adding backlog data.

[TheSunshineFund]

Very impressive work guys.   

[LMDAVE]

Amazing work! I haven't got into looking at all the things this does, but just seeing what I saw is awesome.

[WCopeland]

Wow!  Great work guys.

Question: How do you plan to keep the database up to date?  Do you have some way of polling DKF/TG/MARP submissions, or do you expect players to also submit their scores to KongTrackr?

There's a larger feature being worked on that will let people submit their own data and then let a mod approve it. This can be full-game data or just "I got X score on X date". Editing is also WIP, which would turn the DB into a wiki-style system.

[Barra]

^Answered my question too. I saw the "submit" and automatically assumed anyone could. Lit

 

[JCHarrist]

Amazing work, guys.

[homerwannabee]

This is really cool.  Great job!

[QAOP Spaceman]

Tremendous work, Wes & Jry - well done.

[Shamrock]

Wow. I am absolutely beyond impressed. I am blown away. This is an incredible tool and I plan to use it. Well done gentlemen