Well done, guys. I guess it's finally out there and no longer open to dispute. The smoking gun was long in coming, and most of us never thought it would come.
I've been aware of the truth since the Kong Off 2 in November 2012 after a lot of private discussions, but aside from some heavy insinuation on my blog about the suspiciousness of Billy's submissions, I left it alone, because the bearer of troubling information generally accomplishes nothing except to paint a target on his back, have his motives scrutinized, and be vilified as a "conspiracy theorist." That is, unless you have proof (well, people will deny proof too if the truth is painful enough, but cognitive dissonance is a topic unto itself).
There are other reasons why I've tended to look the other way when it comes to Billy, one of them being the bizarre truth that his first illegitimate submission ("The Tape") was one of the key sparks that lit the King of Kong film, which in turn, became the spark that lit the entire DK competitive scene. Jeremy mentioned not wanting to live in a "house built on lies," but as awkward as it is, that's kinda what we're dealing with here, whether we like it or not.
If you dig into the making of the King of Kong, it turns out that Seth Gordon and Ed Cunningham chose to develop their footage into a Donkey Kong documentary only after the shoot was well underway, and only because the dramatic interplay between Billy and Steve was so strong. Billy's antics - of which The Tape was THE critical lynchpin - were key to that strength.
If The Tape never gets made, the King of Kong never gets made. And if the King of Kong never gets made... well... none of this ever happens. No heat develops around DK in the wake of the movie (which would have ended up being about Doris or Abdner or something), there's no multi-way world record competition, there are no Kong Offs, no DKF, and most of us never meet each other.
The Tape is our father.
It's a real mindfuck, and I've been grappling with this strange quandary for years, but Billy being Billy pretty much created the DK thing that we were all pulled into. And I am very, very grateful that I was pulled into it.
As for the other two, while The Tape was clearly a response to Wiebe entering the fray and "upsetting Billy's master plan for what he wanted to do" (ie, be the first player to break 1 million at DK), if you look at the timing of the latter two doctored scores, they were obviously timed in such a way as to (in Tape #2's case) hype continued competition and interest in classic gaming/DK as the movie was rolling out, and (in Tape #3's case) garner publicity for the opening of the International Video Game Hall of Fame. The scores were designed to be beaten, and he knew they'd be beaten.
In other words, I don't think Billy did those latter two scores for personal glory. I think, in his mind, he saw them as favors to the community, for which it's very obvious he has a deep fondness and generosity.
Sure, it's a weird, backwards, morally-questionable, and extremely Billy-ish way of operating, but there's something more multidimensional in his actions than just "cheating to be on top." I don't think he much cared about that anymore, at least when he faked the latter two scores. He was just trying to keep the heat on, for everybody's benefit. For all we know, somebody else was calling in favors, and he just went along with it. (In fact, there necessarily HAD to be numerous individuals involved for those scores to go up.)
So I'm just gonna stick with "misguided sense of the greater good," and not hate Billy for it.
All that said, this is a serious scoreboard here.
Take 'em down!
