I'm definitely more inclined to believe Calvin's score now than when that thread first started. Reading back through I spotted numerous incorrect assumptions (some made by me) as to what constitutes a perfect game of DKJr.
Yeah, I read some of the thread yet again, and I go back and forth. It's maddening actually, in that there are way too many things to support the pro-Frampton case to cry "bogus", yet there's so much that doesn't add up, and no smoking gun either way!
The best piece of evidence in his favor is the newspaper clipping that includes the score and the assertion that the game was 3 and a half hours long. The time is really key there, because 3 and a half hours is just about right for a game that big, and the simple fact that such a specific detail is not-wrong strongly supports the claim. Good on Cat for finding that clipping from an actual local non-video gamey news source because it's impossible to discount, whereas a score in a video game magazine would automatically be monstrously suspicious.
The major problem with his side is that everything except the basic rudiments of the game seems to have been wiped from his memory. Human memory is shit though, especially after the passage of decades, and especially
especially when what you're remembering is something you were into during your youth/teenage years. A lot of who we were and what we did during those years is alien to us when we look back from adulthood. It's like another life. So I can't say "no way" just because of his lack of memory either.
I have to think, how many NES games did I defeat 25 years ago whose finer points I can't recall? Of course, absolutely crushing DK Junior would require a much deeper relationship with the game than anyone ever needed to have with an NES title, but memory of time spent plugging away at something can be shockingly feeble, no matter how intense an experience it was.
I'd forgotten totally about the underwater bomb-defusing level in the NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game until reading about it a few months ago in an article, and it instantly jogged my memory about that shit and how suicidally agonizing it was (though not many specifics came back).
For all any of us, including Calvin, knows, Calvin DID bump into the kill screen multiple times on the way to that big game, and even worked that into his strategy, but simply has no memory of any of it. Or he might have been close enough to objects on his other kill screens to incorrectly conclude that they're what killed him. Hard to say.
The score also might be some sort of "honest mistake," in the sense that he's not lying, he believes that he did it, but he's misremembering some critical detail, or perhaps several.
Specifically, I am extremely partial to Dean's "the score was written down incorrectly" theory. That is, 1,059,300 (or 1,025,900, or some such) was accidentally written down as 1,259,300. He rolled it, but the latter digits got misprinted somehow by the reporter. Anybody who has ever written these 7-digit scores down knows exactly how our brains like to screw with them, *especially when the number after a comma is a zero*.
Without detailing it specifically (this post is too long) that theory would explain and resolve virtually every issue. Calvin (and the arcade owner who showed up in the thread) could and would remember a big 1M+ game while easily forgetting whether it was 1.0 or 1.2.
They were really only adamant about the million. Not necessarily the digits after it. (And how could they be? How could Calvin remember the exact digits in the score of a specific game while not remembering how many points fruit-smashes are worth?)
The digit-fudging theory works for me: Calvin scored 1,0xx,x00 (with some mixture of a 2, 5, 9 and/or 3 in the "x" spots), and the real number got lost on the way to the paper. Simple. An innocent, and very common, mistake, everyone's memory is accurate to the extent of what they remember (and none of them have to be a liar), and the point-pressing is feasible. This theory just makes a whole lot of sense, more than any other.
Nobody has any right to be sure either way, though, and especially not because they (in Cat's words) "just know that something feels right." Intuiting that Calvin is honest, even if the intuition is correct, doesn't mean he wasn't mistaken about the exact score. I'm with Voltaire: "doubt is an unpleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
